Christopher Hooks is a politics writer for the Texas Observer based in Austin.

OK, Texas, what was all that about?

Steve Stockman, the Lone Star state’s weirdest lawmaker, crashed and burned spectacularly in the Republican Senate primary this week, losing to incumbent John Cornyn by 41 percentage points in one of the strangest campaigns I’ve ever covered. He’ll soon be gone for good, having given up his relatively safe East Texas seat under the state’s campaign rules.


And I couldn’t be happier. I hope to hell I’m done writing about Steve Stockman.

When I last wrote about him for Politico Magazine, the Texas congressman had just declared he would challenge Cornyn, and people here were struggling to figure out why. Stockman, who submitted his papers to run about 15 minutes before the filing deadline, was a known quantity in Texas for his below-the-belt politicking and his vituperative, paranoid political style. Now he was in the process of reintroducing himself to a national audience, which no doubt saw Stockman’s mere presence in Texas public life a sign of deep statewide dysfunction. Whether that’s true or not, he was crushed on Tuesday, winning only 19 percent of the vote to John Cornyn’s 60 percent. It was, in the end, a non-event.

A lot of people I talked to issued unvarnished opinions about Stockman’s chances (none) and his persona (nuts). But they’d hedge their words when it came to a much more difficult question: Does he really believe what he says? Is he serious?

“There’s a tendency among insiders [in Texas] to give Tea Party people credit for not really believing what they say,” Jason Stanford, an Austin-based Democratic political consultant, told me at the time. “Stockman’s candidacy will test the proposition.”

Some, like Stanford, saw an ideologue who was deranged but essentially earnest in the major points of his worldview. Others, like one senior political reporter in Austin, thought you couldn’t say much of anything about Stockman’s motivations.

He’d seen Stockman’s first term in Congress, from 1994 to 1996, and he’d watched how desperately Stockman had tried to get back into public office before he won a congressional seat again in 2012. He figured Stockman would stay in that seat as long as he could. But now he was essentially throwing it away. “You can’t talk about ‘reasons’ with a guy like that,” he said.

Republicans I talked to—none would take up for Stockman, even in private—struck a different tone when asked, given the certainty of his humiliation at the hands of Cornyn’s political machine, why he would run. The common assumption was that he had to something to gain—in other words, that he was, on some level, not a fool but a slick operator.

Some thought it was a simple debt retirement operation—his past campaigns had left him deep in the red—or that he was collecting statewide email addresses and voter information to sell or rent for his life after Congress. One congressional aide who got to know Stockman’s staff during his second term said they used to talk about how lucrative that particular line of business was. Stockman, after all, ran his first elections supported almost solely by a direct mail-order firm with a grudge against his opponent. He knows a good racket when he sees one.

Now that Stockman’s been predictably crushed, what can we say about that question—was Stockman serious? It’s a question worth asking in light of the other candidates who’ve invaded our airwaves recently—are they serious? Is Herman Cain serious? Is Donald Trump?

***

Stockman’s “seriousness” can be assessed in two stages. First, did he run a serious campaign? The answer, of course, is no. I don’t just mean that he spent his time hawking Obama barf bags. Stockman never made the slightest attempt to win. It couldn’t be called ineptitude or incompetence, because there was no effort. It was an un-campaign, an anti-campaign. It was the negative space where a campaign could have been. It may have been the worst political campaign ever conducted in the state of Texas.

Setting money aside, here’s the first thing to do if you want to run as a conservative in Texas: talk to Tea Party groups. Stockman, whose politics tend towards the idiosyncratic “liberty wing” fringe, never had any real connection to these groups, but that shouldn’t have been a problem. Tea Partiers in Texas value charmingly old-school retail politics. If you come correct, they’ll listen. It’s how Ted Cruz first gained traction. Stockman didn’t do this. I don’t just mean that he reached out to too few Tea Party groups—I mean he never went to any, as far as I’m aware. It’s possible that Stockman never attended a single public event in his three-month campaign. No one can really say for sure because his campaign would never talk about it—at all.

In January he was scheduled to address the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, a particularly feisty group—the kind that would love to see an establishment, inside-game political player like Cornyn challenged. They accommodated Stockman’s request to hold a special meeting before the regular meeting, closed to the press, so that he could talk freely. He didn’t show. He had just been in Cairo, a surrogate said—one of a number of strange international absences—and he had been delayed by traffic on the drive from Houston to Fort Worth. It was seemingly the last attempt Stockman made to show his face—anywhere.

Online, though, it was a different story. Stockman’s social media accounts told frequent and grandiose lies, including many, many variations of the refrain “Cornyn voted for Obamacare.” His Twitter account, long a bedrock of his appeal (to journalists, anyway) shifted into even-higher gear. Run by his spokesman Donny Ferguson, it became a constant stream of invective. Another constant feature: He would tout months-old tepid statements from activists as full-throated endorsements. His website featured a list of past or implied endorsements, many from groups that didn’t back his Senate run.

There were too many other oddities to go into: In February, he sued a Cornyn-affiliated group for libel over their mention of a past felony charge for drug possession that he, himself, had admitted. He spent New Year’s Eve in Manhattan helping to open a Bitcoin exchange. A fake newspaper sliming Cornyn, “The Conservative News,” was sent to mailboxes all over Texas with language taken verbatim from Stockman’s campaign website. Stockman said he’d had nothing to do with it—but it was issued by a group, Center for the American Future, whose website was registered by Jason Posey, a Stockman long-timer who was fired in 2013 in the wake of campaign finance violations. (The “group’s” website proclaims the newsletters’ independence from any candidate, telling visitors to check back for the “Alaska edition.” We’ll see.)

There’s another part to the question of “seriousness.” Did Stockman’s people believe earnestly in anything they were saying? Or were they, for lack of a better phrase, just fucking around?

We’re unlikely to hear from Stockman on that, but one clue comes from his spokesman, Ferguson. In the early part of the campaign, Ferguson’s Twitter account consisted of a mix of red-meat bumper-sticker slogans, plagiarized Twitter jokes and spin on behalf of his boss. As time went on, things started to go off the rails and the barest pretense that Stockman’s people were trying—or even trying to appear professional—dropped. The bad jokes multiplied. He’d tweet references to the cult British comic character, Alan Partridge, stills from the movie Idiocracy and which schlocky 60’s B-movie he was watching at the current moment. Ultimately it became difficult to tell how much work he was really capable of doing on behalf of his candidate.

For a brief period in February, for reasons known only to God and the Stockman campaign, Ferguson took the rhetorical mud cannon it was firing at Cornyn and directed it, instead, at Slate reporter Dave Weigel. Weigel had emailed Ferguson to ask where Stockman would be campaigning—Ferguson replied that the campaign was “not interested.” Weigel quoted Ferguson, and wrote, accurately, that the campaign wasn’t providing information to reporters. He later released correspondence that confirms his version of the interaction.

Ferguson accused Weigel of lying and misrepresenting his words. He wrote that Slate was less credible than a college newspaper, and accused Weigel of “intentionally faking a quote.” The campaign raised money off the incident, telling supporters Stockman was being mau-maued by the lamestream media, and that Weigel, a pro-Cornyn plant, had gone “berserk.”

Just a day later, I tweeted Ferguson about the incident. His demeanor had changed completely. “I still like Dave Weigel,” he wrote. “The man knows his Simpsons.”

In a way, it foreshadowed the end of Stockman’s pitiful campaign. Early on election night, March 4, media outlets called the race for Cornyn. He had avoided a runoff in an eight-way race.

For three months, Stockman had slimed Cornyn, from dawn till dusk. He lied about the senator’s record and intentions. He Photoshopped him into uncomfortable positions—into flannel pajamas, and into the arms of the president. He sought not just to defeat him but to destroy him and his reputation. When the race was called, it dissipated instantly. He tweeted: “We wish Senator Cornyn best of luck in November and urge everyone to vote for, volunteer for and support the whole Texas GOP ticket. #family”

So, Stockman wasn’t serious—in any way that a candidate could be serious. He wasn’t a serious contender, he wasn’t a serious campaigner and he wasn’t, it seems likely, honest about his intentions or the authenticity of his public persona. Now, having accumulated donations to his campaign purse (as of Feb. 21, he had more than $56,000 in cash on hand, and he couldn’t have spent much in the last two weeks) a few more FEC complaints to contend with and a few more enemies, he’ll be leaving Congress again in January—although, it should be said, the last time Stockman left public office he spent the next 16 years trying to get back. Not even being named an unindicted co-conspirator in a prescription pad fraud ring slowed his relentless drive back toward the limelight.

***

Was all of this entertaining? Absolutely. But why must we, as citizens, be constantly beset by figures like Steve Stockman? They seem to be a permanent feature of our elections now—figures like Alan Keyes, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain and Donald Trump, joke quasi-candidates whose mere presence sucks up precious oxygen from the democratic process, riding civic institutions to (relative) fortune and (relative) fame. Trump uses the presidential nominating process to feed his unconstrained ego and sense of relevance; Keyes, Gingrich and Cain have all used their failed runs to cash out, selling information about their supporters and trading renown for paid media gigs. Why are we giving these jokers airtime?

The Steve Stockman Show obscured much that was of real importance this cycle. His doomed race drew the lion’s share of national media attention of all the state’s primaries, despite the fact that Texas is in the middle of a critical shift with potentially enormous consequences. For all the talk about Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, the most intriguing dynamic is on the Republican side: State Sen. Dan Patrick, a radio talk show host from Houston, appears the favorite to win the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor. That office leads the Senate, and Patrick has promised to destroy a number of important Senate conventions that foster bipartisanship if he wins.

AP Photo

With that, plus a number of pivotal state Senate elections won by the Tea Party, the whole chamber, once a check on the legislature’s most stridently conservative measures, appears set to swerve far, far to the right. It would be a shift with consequences for the whole country. Yet much of the national media, on primary night, transfixed by Stockman the clown, wrote that moderates had beaten back their far-right challengers.

Candidates like Stockman are like crack cocaine for the media, which—and I’m certainly including myself here—love a colorful, easy story almost as much as they love eccentric antagonists. But they’re bad for voters too. They’re bad for their party. And they corrode trust and respect in the democratic system. (And we are by no means experiencing a surfeit of either right now.) I hope I never have to write about Steve Stockman again after his congressional term ends in January—God knows what he’ll get up to between now and then, as a lame duck representative with nothing to lose—but I know there’ll be others like him. For some, politics is a racket that’s too good to pass up.