KSEV Mornings · October 28, 2026 · Hour 1
Wayne’s case that a Ken Paxton loss would be on Republicans, why James Talarico is no John Whitmire, a caller on courage and dinner at Antonio’s Flying Pizza.
If Ken Paxton loses the Texas Senate race, Wayne Dolcefino says Republicans will have themselves to blame. In Wednesday’s first hour of KSEV Mornings, Wayne and Craig Coglianese went through the impeachment fallout, why James Talarico is no John Whitmire, how angry politics has gotten online and a listener’s call on Paxton and courage.
“A Republican civil war”
Wayne traced it back to the impeachment and “this whole move by what I call center, left of center Republicans to go after Ken Paxton in the impeachment when they did not, in my view, have the goods.” He wasn’t excusing everything: “I’m not defending Ken Paxton in that regard. I’m just saying it was the splintering of the Republican Party.” That split, he said, fed the fights over open and closed primaries and “the Paxton-Cornyn thing.”
He pointed to former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, who now goes on CNN and “says nasty things about Ken Paxton,” and to the last speaker race between Dustin Burrows and David Cook, when anyone who voted for Burrows was called a traitor. “It’s a Republican civil war in this state that will be the cause of our defeat,” Wayne said. He drew the contrast with state Sen. Mayes Middleton, “I don’t think there’s a crooked bone in his body,” and said Paxton “doesn’t seem like a squeaky clean guy.” His bottom line: “I want the guy who’s going to vote with me.”
Blood on the canvas
Craig, who wasn’t living in Texas when the impeachment started, said that when the Senate trial ended in an acquittal, most people who watched came away thinking “he doesn’t seem guilty of anything.” He compared the attacks on Paxton to the ones on Wayne and President Donald Trump. “There’s a little bit of blood on the canvas,” he told Wayne. “The same is true for Paxton, but he’s one of those people who was fighting the thing that not many people fight, kind of like Trump.” Part of the reason people go so hard at them, Craig said, “is that they’re actually fighting the system for real.”
Wayne has his own complaints about the attorney general’s office. “I believe their open records division is like lost,” he said, and he wants more consumer fraud cases: “We need an attorney general that fights aggressively for consumers.” Still, “he’s done a lot of really good things as attorney general.”
“That’s not at all what Talarico is”
Wayne’s biggest problem with James Talarico and Beto O’Rourke is that they aren’t “conservative blue dog, East Texas” Democrats. “These are people with fundamentally different visions,” he said, and he couldn’t believe Texas might elect a senator who, as he put it, “doesn’t like oil and gas.”
Craig said Houston Mayor John Whitmire is the kind of Democrat a lot of local Republicans can live with. “They usually say some version of he’s the best we can do in a place like Houston,” he said. “And that’s not at all what Talarico is. That’s not at all what Beto O’Rourke was, they’re far leftists.” His verdict: “You can’t hate one party so much that you elect someone who so doesn’t represent you.”
Alan calls in on courage
Alan compared Paxton’s impeachment to what Trump went through. “The question is, do you have the courage to do it when you know that they’re going to come after you?” he asked. Craig picked up the thread: “I think the real courage is after you’ve been punched a lot and in some cases maybe taking some bruises to keep going.” Paxton took the hits and kept going, he said. Craig called it the Rocky Balboa way of winning a fight, one “that I do admire from a lot of people.”
Wayne said his vote is “not even a remotely close call for me,” but he thinks Paxton made a mistake by not dealing with the allegations early. “The failure of the campaign, if it fails, is in part messaging,” Wayne said. “You needed to own your response to that stuff, and he never did.”
Glass houses
Craig said he doesn’t pick candidates on personal character alone: “If I’m to judge the personal character of the people I want to send to Washington, there’s nobody I can send.” Putting it the Catholic way, “I can’t throw stones if I have a glass house.” The difference with politicians, he said, is that anything Paxton has done “has probably been heavily researched and put out there into the world.” What matters more to Craig is “what you do in the role you have in politics,” and Talarico “has continued to represent things I don’t believe in.”
Which party is more radical?
Craig read some of the angry comments that Paxton critics left on the show’s TikTok clips. “These people go home and think they’re nice,” he said, and then “go on social media and violently attack” the people they disagree with. “To me, you can see which party is more radical, just by the way that they communicate.”
Wayne opened the topic earlier: “It is incredibly ugly out there.” Craig’s theory, by way of Monty Python: people who are mad about something in their own lives, maybe “you didn’t get the raise you wanted at your job,” end up taking it out on politics. “Instead of being mad at the thing that’s hurting you, you go scream about the political party that’s opposite you.” Wayne’s answer to a “cult” jab from a commenter: “I’m a pragmatic voter… I get to the fork in the road, I know which way to go.”
Family court races
George from Tomball called to say family court races are among the most important in Harris County, and he put in a word for Rose Cardenas, the Republican candidate for the 280th Family District Court. Wayne agreed that voters skip the bottom of the ballot: “They say like, you know, who cares, right? I don’t even know these people. And they don’t, but they should.” Craig added that “the races that really make a difference come from the ground up.”
Wayne also said he’d been texting with Mayes Middleton after Trump’s rally in Lubbock, and that Middleton talked about the cars lining the road.
Antonio’s Flying Pizza
The hour opened with Craig and Wayne’s dinner at Antonio’s Flying Pizza on Hillcroft. Craig loved the food and had one complaint: “I didn’t see any pizzas fly and I feel like maybe the flying people were not working.”
A pioneer to Texas
Wayne has known Antonio for more than 60 years, back to his pizzeria in Brooklyn, and both families moved to Texas in 1968. “I was a pioneer to Texas,” Wayne joked. “And Texas really didn’t become a cultural mecca until my family moved here.” Craig’s family moved from New Jersey to Indiana when he was a kid, and “nobody came.”
Also in this hour
- The Rays beat the Brewers in 12 innings in Game 4 of the World Series, and Craig, a Yankees fan, remembered the Red Sox coming back from 3-0 in 2004: “It’s not impossible. It’s just incredibly unlikely.”
Hear Craig and Wayne live weekdays from 7–9 AM Central on AM 700 KSEV, The Voice of Texas. Visit the KSEV Mornings show page for live-listening controls and more episodes. Listen live weekdays 7-9 AM CT on the KSEV app.
Listen to the full show: Spreaker · Apple Podcasts · Spotify
Featured image: Ken Paxton photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
