News 1.1M views since yesterday

Former Texas chief justice breaks with Paxton to back Talarico

Erin Burnett's CNN segment adds Republican former governors crossing party lines in South Carolina and Kansas, then turns to the Justice Department's 1,000 election monitors.

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CNN Story of October 28, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? One of CNN's most watched videos since yesterday, with 1,145,552 views.

Another prominent Texas Republican backs Democrat James Talarico

Things we can learn from the video

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0:00Former Texas chief justice Thomas Phillips endorses Democrat James Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton.
1:14Dade Phelan describes voters splitting their tickets more than in earlier cycles since 2018.
2:32Former South Carolina governor David Beasley, a Republican, endorses Democrat Annie Andrews, joined by Democrat Jim Hodges.
3:30Former Kansas governor Bill Graves explains his endorsement of Democrat Adam Hamilton.
4:54The Justice Department plans 1,000 election monitors, and Todd Blanche defends the plan as proper.
5:50Phelan questions the monitors' reach across Texas, while Graves expects them to see orderly voting.

Thomas Phillips led the Texas Supreme Court for 16 years, longer than any chief justice in the state's history, after a Republican governor, Bill Clements, appointed him. Now he is backing the Democrat in the state's Senate race. On Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN opens with his endorsement of James Talarico over Republican nominee Ken Paxton, and Burnett reads a line from his statement in the Beaumont Enterprise: "Sometimes party loyalty demands too much."

The segment, which drew about 1.1 million views since yesterday, asks how far that sentiment reaches. Burnett's first guest is Dade Phelan, the Republican state representative from southeast Texas who served as speaker of the Texas House from 2021 to 2025. "I think that people are splitting their tickets this cycle more than ever," he says.

The crossovers are not confined to Texas. Burnett shows former South Carolina Governor David Beasley, a Republican, endorsing Democrat Annie Andrews in a closely watched Senate race. Beside him is Jim Hodges, the Democrat who unseated Beasley in 1998. Her second guest, former Kansas Governor Bill Graves, explains his own endorsement of Democrat Adam Hamilton. "We're still Republicans, and we want our party to be vibrant and strong," Graves says.

The second half turns to the Justice Department's plan to send 1,000 election monitors across the country, a figure CNN's on-screen graphic puts at 150 percent above 2022. In a clip, Attorney General Todd Blanche defends the initiative: "We are not doing anything improper, we're not doing anything we're not allowed to do."

Phelan questions what the number can accomplish across Texas's many polling places: "A thousand election monitors across the US is really not that many people." Graves expects observers to find professional election workers running an orderly vote. That, he argues, would make claims of fraud harder to sustain.