Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s decisive defeat in Texas on Tuesday is already being spun by the media as proof that the GOP is just a bloodthirsty Trump cult. This is an unhelpful narrative because what voters rejected in Crenshaw went much deeper.

A Daily Beast headline on Wednesday blared, “GOP Star Kicked Out of Congress Due to MAGA’s Desperate Midterm Push”.  MAGA, for its part, was happy to take credit for the loss, with pundits noting on X that Crenshaw was the only House GOP incumbent without a primary endorsement from Trump this cycle.

In Texas’s second congressional district, just north of Houston, Crenshaw got pummeled by Steve Toth, who ran to his Right. With most of the votes counted, Toth appears to have upset Crenshaw by a gargantuan and unexpected 15-point margin. After a decorated career as a Navy SEAL, voters first elected the congressman in 2018 — and he immediately became recognized as a rising star in the party.

As a candidate, Crenshaw responded to Saturday Night Live mockery of his eye patch, covering up a battle wound that left him partially blind, by joining the “Weekend Update” desk with Pete Davidson to smooth things over. An MSNOW story accurately recalled, “The question at the time wasn’t whether he’d climb the ranks in GOP politics, but rather how high he’d go.” So sky-high were the congressman’s ambitions that he actually started hosting “Crenshaw Youth Summits”.

Now he’s gone, unable even to clear a primary hurdle. So what changed? As a New York Times analysis reported, Crenshaw “has voted in lockstep with President Trump’s second-term agenda”. But his demise is not just about Trump. It’s about the congressman’s open hostility to voters’ anti-establishment bent. Unlike establishment Sen. John Cornyn, who overperformed expectations in his Texas primary on Tuesday, Crenshaw’s breaks with the base became extremely personal. And frankly, a bit odd.

Crenshaw memorably threatened to “fucking kill” Tucker Carlson on a GB News hot mic last year. And in recent months, the congressman has been engaged in a nasty feud with his fellow Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan, whose podcast is enormously popular on the Right. Crenshaw threatened to sue Ryan and posted their private communications.

Ryan took issue with Crenshaw’s defense of congressional stock trading, which is widely disliked by voters on both sides of the aisle. Defending himself, Crenshaw once dismissed $20,000 as a minor amount of money and griped about his pay check. He also accused anti-interventionist Republicans of “wanting Russia to win” the war against Ukraine, and called popular MAGA lawmakers “grifters”.

Crenshaw’s voting record suggests he isn’t merely out of step with Trump. He is out of step with Trump’s voters. Many Republican voters are willing to give the president latitude on foreign policy negotiations and bouts of intra-party drama. They see those as part of the job. What they are less willing to tolerate are repeated defections from other figures in the party. In that sense, Crenshaw’s problem is not opposition to Trump so much as a pattern of breaks that voters instinctively distrust.

Political Science professor Brandon Rottinghaus at the University of Houston put it this way, “The foreign policy stuff definitely is the biggest crack, but the beginning of that crack was because Crenshaw didn’t significantly support Trump in the election fight.” It’s true that after the 2020 election, Crenshaw described claims of a “stolen” election as “a lie meant to rile people up.” It’s also true that this likely soured some voters on him.

But Crenshaw’s problems weren’t just about foreign policy and the 2020 election. They were about his desire to seem pro-Trump while refusing to stop insulting Trump voters. That doesn’t make for a clean-cut narrative about fealty to Trump, but it’s a more accurate picture of what actually happened.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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