Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will challenge John Cornyn in GOP primary

It’s official: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican primary, setting up what’s likely to be the priciest and messiest food fight in the upcoming election cycle.

Paxton, a social conservative and unyielding Trump ally, has long teased a run against Cornyn, who’s spent 22 years in the Senate and last fall lost a bid to become the chamber’s majority leader. The AG’s run tees up what’s like to be a bare-knuckle brawl between the MAGA wing of the party and the pro-business old guard, represented by Cornyn, a four-term incumbent.

Leaving no question where his allegiances lie, Paxton’s campaign website shows a photo of him posing with President Donald Trump. He also announced his candidacy during on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s show, likening himself to Texas’ other U.S. Senator, Ted Cruz, whom he added supports the president in a “very significant way.”

However, expect both candidates to scramble for Trump’s endorsement.

Cornyn touted his connections with Trump in a new campaign video, and he drew Internet mockery when he tweeted a pandering photo of himself reading the president’s Art of the Deal book. To be sure, the senator has bent over backwards to appease the MAGA crowd, voting with the president’s agenda 92% of the time, according to the Texas Tribune.

Even so, many in the MAGA-remade Republican Party have turned on Cornyn for taking a lead in negotiating limited gun-control legislation in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting. He’s also taken heat for publicly questioning Trump’s electability ahead of last year’s election.

But Paxton has baggage of his own — namely a series of close scrapes with the law.

The Justice Department late last year quietly chose not to prosecute Paxton, who’d been the subject of a lengthy federal investigation into allegations of bribery and abuse of office brought by former top aides. Last week, those same aides won a legal victory when a Travis County district court judge awarded them $6.6 million in a whistleblower suit against Paxton.

Paxton also narrowly survived a 2023 impeachment trial in the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature over the same corruption accusations, and last year he agreed to cough up $300,000 in restitution to close out a years-old felony securities fraud case.

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This article appears in Apr 2-15, 2025.