Crenshaw Discusses Conflict Between Getting Elected, Getting Results

11/11/26 – Outgoing Congressman Dan Crenshaw recently sat down with me for two hours to talk about his time in office. The Harvard-educated Navy Seal represented Texas’ Second Congressional District for eight years after Hurricane Harvey. In this second part of a three-part series, I’ll cover his observations about the conflict between getting elected and getting results in Washington. This interview was edited for brevity.

To Compromise or Not to Compromise?

Rehak: You achieved extraordinary results for your constituents as a young member of Congress. And yet you lost your primary earlier this year. What insights can you share into that? Are there cautionary tales for incoming office holders across the state and nation?

Crenshaw: To get things done in Washington with less than 60 votes in the Senate, you need to compromise. But voters in primary elections don’t want people who compromise. They want people who won’t compromise.

Rehak: And that limits choices for people in the middle during general elections. Let’s talk about that.

Telling It Like It Is

Crenshaw: I feel one of my achievements in Congress was speaking out against the crazy people in our party and actually having the guts to fight them. There’s a very toxic brand within the Republican Party right now. These people are agents of chaos and nothing else.

Rehak: You live up to your reputation for “Telling it like it is”!

Crenshaw: And those crazies, even though they’re small in numbers, can dominate primaries and determine choices for the majority in the general election.

But I was never good at pandering to such people. When somebody said something that was obviously wrong, I always had to correct it. A normal politician would just say, “You’re right. That’s exactly what we’re fighting for.” It’s SO easy to tell people what they want to hear!

Rehak: So what would you tell voters?

“Stop being easy to lie to.”

Congressman Dan Crenshaw

Changing Media Environment

Rehak: That’s where media enter the equation. Media used to sell objectivity and insight. They prided themselves on research, balance and accuracy. Now, many outlets sell outrage.

Crenshaw: Yes, and if you stand up for your principles and tell people what’s right, online influencers and podcasters pick fights with you because you’re clickbait. And that’s their incentive. They get paid for clicks.

Rehak: As media outlets have proliferated due to cable, satellites and the Internet, the competition for those clicks has gotten more intense. It sounds like you see a conflict between getting elected and getting things done after you’re elected.

No Compromises, No Results

Crenshaw: Yes. People don’t want to hear about compromise. But that’s what you need to do to get a bill through Congress.

Lawmaking is hard even if you have majorities. There’s this thing called the filibuster in the Senate. So, you truly need 60 votes there to pass anything. There has to be some compromise, especially on major issues. But you get elected in primaries by basically promising not to compromise.

If you say, “I’m going to go to Washington and work together with Democrats to get stuff done,” you’re not going to win your primary these days. You’re going to lose.

That didn’t used to be the case. When I first ran in 2018, I saw a very different Republican world. Very, very much different.

I felt like everyone I was running against was qualified in some way. It didn’t seem to me like anyone was going totally off the rails. It just felt “thoughtful,” like it was supposed to be. But that changed dramatically after 2020.

Incentivizing Anger

Crenshaw: Today, I feel like voters really want to incentivize the angriest person out there. And if you continue to incentivize that, that’s what you’re going to get. And then you’re going to continue to be disappointed because you’re literally electing people who won’t get anything done.

Rehak: Explain, please.

Crenshaw: That’s just not how Washington works. And then voters want to throw out all these Republicans because they didn’t get what you wanted done – even though they DID get a lot done. But it’s never good enough.

We had a two seat majority in the House. And we don’t have enough votes in the Senate to thwart a filibuster. So no one is getting difficult policy issues through.

This has forced a lot of people to just never believe anything. That’s also wrong. Just because somebody lied to you about something doesn’t mean everything is a lie. That’s a logical fallacy.

Dysfunctional Dynamics

Rehak: Let’s get back to the role media play in dysfunctional government.

Crenshaw: Most mainstream journalists have professional ethics. And there are a lot of good podcasts out there, too. It’s just that people aren’t listening to them the way they used to. The false narratives get most of the attention.

Rehak: Meaning they’re the ones that get shared and go viral on social media?

Crenshaw: Exactly. I don’t hear a lot of honest conversations about tradeoffs that illuminate policy issues on some of the high-rated podcasts. Instead we get clickbait. That’s contributed to a lot of the nastiness in politics these days.

Rehak: People retreat into media cocoons that reinforce their beliefs. They stop listening to the other side. Somebody reassuring your beliefs is more psychologically comforting than someone challenging them.

Crenshaw: That’s a huge part of why we have so few honest conversations about policy tradeoffs any more.

3361 Days since Hurricane Harvey

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