Everything’s Bigger in Texas, Including Primary Battles | The American Spectator

As of this writing, 2,166,509 Texas voters are known to have cast ballots in their state’s contentious Republican U.S. Senate primary. However, as the race goes to a runoff between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, both campaigns seem laser-focused on just one individual.

As has often been the case, President Donald Trump’s endorsement is understood to be the deciding factor. If Cornyn can get it, it seems possible he’ll be able to survive a very close brush with political death. However, Paxton is probably ahead right now, and absent a Trump-ex machina, he seems likely to stay ahead. Trump’s endorsement is viewed as so critical that Paxton’s campaign is advertising in Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence is located. The campaign has turned personal and bitter: after the first round of the primary, Cornyn slammed Paxton as “flawed, self-centered, and shameless”; for his part, Paxton accused Cornyn of “trying to buy this seat.”

The grudge match between Cornyn and Paxton is long in the making. The two men might both be Texas Republicans, but both would likely agree the similarities end there. National Republicans are pulling desperately for Cornyn, while grassroots conservatives vociferously back Paxton. Paxton supporters have charged Cornyn with being weak, a sellout, and no true conservative, while Cornyn’s camp has called Paxton scandalous, personally immoral, and a greater risk in the general election against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico.

Cornyn, who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2002 and previously served as a judge and as Texas attorney general, was runner-up to South Dakota Sen. John Thune to be Senate Majority Leader after the 2024 elections. While not exactly an institution, he’s never faced a particularly serious challenge: his closest race thus far was the 2020 general election, when he bested Democrat M.J. Hegar by about 10 percentage points. How did a sitting U.S. senator find himself in such dire straits?

The answer is that since 2020, Cornyn’s relationship with Texas’s GOP grassroots has frayed. Detractors have attacked him for backing aid to Ukraine and supporting a gun control bill after a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Cornyn’s reputation and affect is a familiar one: he’s a traditional, old-guard member of the Republican establishment.

Paxton’s record bears little similarity to Cornyn’s. Since first being elected as Texas’s attorney general in 2014, Paxton has been a polarizing and hard-right conservative. An aggressive supporter of Trump, Paxton has touted that he has sued the Biden administration 106 times.

Paxton, however, has also courted scandal. In 2015, he was indicted on securities fraud charges; he pleaded not guilty. After years of delay, he reached a deal with prosecutors that required him to pay restitution and perform community service, but not to admit guilt. The case was subsequently dismissed in 2025. Paxton was also impeached by the Texas House of Representatives in 2023 on allegations of misconduct. He denied wrongdoing and called the move “politically motivated.” He was later acquitted by the Texas Senate. Paxton’s wife, Angela, also publicly filed for divorce from the attorney general in 2025, alleging an extramarital affair. Consequently, one of the Cornyn camp’s main arguments against Paxton is that his baggage risks his ability to win the general election against Talarico.

Nevertheless, Paxton’s backers see him as a strong conservative. And on electability, they aren’t shy to note that despite facing high-profile allegations and serious primary and general election challenges, Paxton easily won reelection in 2022.

Cornyn was long assumed to be a dead man walking, so much so that the race attracted another serious candidate: U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt. Hunt, as he outlined in a piece written for The American Spectator, focused his campaign on generational change, a not-so-subtle dig at Cornyn’s longevity in office. In theory, Hunt was a more conservative candidate than Cornyn, who lacked Paxton’s personal baggage. However, he seemed to fade closer to the end of the race as it appeared that he had little chance of making the runoff, and finished with just 13.5 percent of the vote. (READ MORE: The Senate: Where Term Limits Go to Retire)

While polls agreed that Cornyn and Paxton would both fall short of the 50 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff in the first round, they generally indicated that Paxton would finish ahead of Cornyn. So when the senator won a 42 percent plurality versus Paxton’s 41 percent, it seemed a positive sign for his campaign. Rumors began to swirl that Trump was gearing up to endorse Cornyn, and the president indicated on March 4 that he would make an endorsement “soon,” adding that he wanted the candidate he declined to back to withdraw from the race. When Paxton refused to commit to doing so, Trump told Politico that that was “bad for him to say.” (RELATED: The Abysmal Quality of the GOP Senate Caucus Is the Real Issue, and the SAVE Act Mess Has Made That Clear)

However, Paxton had a savvy response: he stated that he would drop out of the race if the SAVE America Act was passed into law. The bill, which is a high priority for the White House, has already passed the House of Representatives and has been stalled in the Senate due to the filibuster. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Grand Senate Bargain?)

Trump seemed to initially entertain the proposal as a way to increase his leverage over Senate Republicans, who wanted him to back Cornyn but had been recalcitrant about attempting a “talking filibuster” to pass the SAVE Act. Cornyn himself recently announced that he now supported abolishing the filibuster outright in order to pass the legislation. Senate Majority Leader John Thune downplayed Cornyn’s shift, telling reporters, “Sen. Cornyn is one of 53 Republican senators, and the opposition to nuking the filibuster runs very, very deep in our conference,” according to Politico. Thune is planning to put the legislation on the floor of the Senate, but it’s uncertain how or if he will be able to overcome the 60-vote threshold needed to break the filibuster and actually send it to the president’s desk. In the meantime, MAGA-aligned voices online slammed Cornyn and rallied to Paxton. (RELATED: Paxton Makes Thune an Offer He Can’t Refuse)

Cornyn campaign senior advisor Matt Mackowiak told The American Spectator in a statement that “Senator Cornyn has voted with President Trump 99.3 percent of his time in office. Democrats have nominated their strongest candidate, so with the stakes of the mid-term elections, Republicans need to nominate Sen. Cornyn, who is unquestionably our strongest candidate. We have a plan to win the runoff election, and we are executing it.” The campaign declined to comment specifically on any potential endorsement by the president. The Paxton campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The deadline for a candidate to withdraw from the runoff was Tuesday, March 17. Since neither candidate did so, the election will be held on May 26. The White House did not respond to a request for comment when asked about the potential timing of the endorsement, but Trump subsequently told NBC News that he liked “both candidates very much,” that Talarico was “weak,” and that either Cornyn or Paxton would be able to win the general election. Trump also stated that he would decide whether he would weigh in “in the next week or so.”

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