WASHINGTON — Thirteen months, $135 million, hundreds of endorsements, numerous AI-generated ads and an uncountable number of ad hominem attacks later, the bruising primary battle between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton will finally come to an end Tuesday.
It’s a battle that nominally began last April, but whose contours were set long before — in 2023, when Cornyn cast doubt on President Donald Trump’s electability and Paxton faced an impeachment from members of his own party; in 2022, when Cornyn negotiated a bipartisan gun safety bill and Paxton was one of just two elected officials to show up at Trump’s presidential campaign launch; or perhaps in 2020, when the attorney general led the legal charge to overturn Trump’s presidential election loss.
At stake is the soul of the Texas Republican Party, which has been caught in a tug-of-war over the past several cycles as insurgents have worked to oust the old guard. The outcome will also shape what looks to be a competitive general election, deciding who will be the GOP’s standard-bearer against Democratic nominee James Talarico.
Tuesday’s runoff will be the biggest, most consequential test of whether Texas Republican voters are willing to support an elder statesman and self-described Reagan Republican over a “MAGA warrior,” in the words of Trump, whose ethical and legal baggage have made him simultaneously a hero and pariah to different segments of the GOP.
Trump made his highly-coveted endorsement earlier this week, when he threw his weight behind the attorney general, citing Paxton’s loyalty and Cornyn’s lack thereof “when times were tough.” The decision went against the advice of Senate Majority Leader John Thune and the Republican political machine in Washington, who have spent tens of millions of dollars boosting Cornyn.
The incumbent senator finished first in the March 3 primary, at 42% to Paxton’s 40.5%. But with U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt pulling 13.5% of the vote, no candidate clinched the nomination outright, sending Cornyn and Paxton to an overtime round.
Runoff electorates tend to be smaller and more hardline, a natural advantage for Paxton. But the Cornyn camp’s strategy has been to press its significant financial advantage to bring the senator’s supporters back out and bury Paxton under a deluge of negative ads.
Numerous GOP operatives said Cornyn still has a path to victory after the endorsement, but the realities of runoff electorates and the Trump endorsement have created a powerful advantage for Paxton.
“Runoff voters as a group — independent of demographics, of region, even to a certain extent of high or low levels of vote history in primaries — the primary runoff electorate is just skewing to the right, or towards Paxton anyway … in a way that just conforms pretty strongly to the conventional wisdom,” said Ross Hunt, a GOP operative and pollster who is uninvolved in the contest.
Throughout the race, Cornyn and Paxton have maintained consistent pitches to the voters.
Cornyn has leaned into the electability argument — that he’s the best candidate to extend the Texas GOP’s three-decade statewide winning streak in what’s expected to be a difficult cycle for Republicans. In the eyes of Cornyn and his establishment allies, he is a reliable pro-Trump vote, and if Republicans reject him, they would jeopardize the Senate majority needed to pass Trump’s priorities.
“I won in 2020 by 10 points, and President Trump won that same year [in] Texas by six points,” Cornyn said in an interview with The Texas Tribune Monday. “So I think I’ve demonstrated that I can help the ticket up and down the ballot, and Paxton would be an albatross — and also divert hundreds of millions of dollars that would be spent trying to salvage this Senate seat that could be used in places like Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and New Hampshire.”
But Paxton, whose brand has long been fighting the Republican establishment, frequently derides Cornyn and his fellow Republican senators for their deference to conventions like the legislative filibuster, while promising himself to take a “sledgehammer” to such customs. His stump speech typically begins by challenging voters to name an accomplishment of Cornyn’s, contrasting the senator’s record to his own history of suing the Biden administration and left-leaning organizations.
“The MAGA agenda is dead under John Cornyn,” Paxton said on Fox Wednesday. “He kills it every time, just like the Republican Senate that he’s part of.”
Trump’s decision to endorse Paxton Tuesday was ostensibly the most consequential moment yet in a contest between two well-known, longtime partisans.
“We don’t know for a fact what will happen on election day, but any observer will acknowledge that President Trump’s endorsement makes it significantly more likely that Ken Paxton wins,” Sen. Ted Cruz, who has stayed out of the contest, said on his podcast Tuesday. “How much more likely, I don’t know.”
To that end, in interviews and on the trail since the endorsement, Paxton has begun to pivot to the general election. His campaign and the main super PAC supporting him, Lone Star Liberty PAC, have switched to airing positive ads touting the president’s endorsement. The PAC went up with an anti-Talarico spot Friday, its first that has looked beyond the GOP primary.
At a rally in Dripping Springs Thursday, a few days after receiving the president’s endorsement, Paxton appeared to be in a good mood.
He first tested nicknames for Talarico to laughs from the crowd of about 30 people. He said an aide had come up with one she was proud of, “Low-T Talarico,” and asked her to share it. Paxton said it was like “Low Energy Jeb,” Trump’s moniker for Jeb Bush during the 2016 presidential primaries. He also tested “Tofu Talarico,” knocking the state representative for a baseless claim that he’s vegan. Meanwhile, former GOP state Rep. Rick Green shouted “Talafreacko.”
Paxton’s 20-minute stump speech largely focused on his political journey, from moving to Texas to deciding to run for U.S. Senate. He struck a confident tone and encouraged people to take their friends and family with them to vote because of anticipated low turnout.
“We can win this with people, people that care about what’s happening in Texas, people that care about sending a message to Washington that it’s time to have two senators fighting,” he said, standing in front of an American and Texas flag.
Cornyn, meanwhile, has staked his chances on expanding the electorate, posting a video Thursday in which he appealed to registered voters who did not vote in either primary to turn out in the Republican runoff.
At his final get-out-the-vote event in Corpus Christi Friday, Cornyn was resolute that he could win the runoff — if a broader group of voters than those who typically vote in runoffs showed up to the polls.
Still, he acknowledged that this contest “is kind of a strange position for me to be in,” noting that he’s been through plenty of contested elections, “but in many ways I feel like there’s never been more at stake in an election than this one.”
Cornyn said his campaign’s efforts to mobilize voters had surpassed that of any of his prior races, and he predicted the runoff would end in a “similar surprise” to the primary, when he finished first.
“I think the small fraction of people who actually vote [in runoffs] are not necessarily representative of the whole state and all voters, so that’s the reason why we’re working [as] hard as we can to try to get a broader base to the electorate to make that choice,” Cornyn said. “Because I believe that character does still matter, and it is on the ballot.”
How we got here
The seeds of Tuesday’s runoff were planted long ago, as Paxton’s profile grew and Cornyn cast doubts on Trump’s electability as he was weighing a 2024 bid.
Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas Republican strategist who managed Cornyn’s 2014 reelection, said Paxton was “emboldened and empowered” after defeating an impeachment push from his own party.
“It gave him some political momentum, and he felt like the feedback from a lot of the activists in the party was in support of him — even though the House had voted to impeach him by a pretty wide margin,” Steinhauser said. “I think that he felt emboldened, and it just set all this in motion.”
When Paxton announced last April that he was joining the race, he started from a position of strength, leading Cornyn by double-digit margins in early polling.
But Cornyn, an adept fundraiser with decades-long relationships in Texas and Washington, closed the gap by majorly outspending Paxton, much of it paying for ads touting that he voted with Trump’s stated position 99% of the time and that he was the choice of the Border Patrol union and other law enforcement groups.
After finishing first in the primary, Cornyn appeared to be on the precipice of earning Trump’s endorsement. But two critical things happened that first week of March. First, news of the potential Cornyn endorsement leaked, bringing a massive wave of backlash from Paxton supporters. And then, Paxton took a political gamble that changed the course of the runoff — he offered to consider dropping out of the race if the Senate passed the SAVE America Act, a voting restrictions bill at the top of Trump’s agenda that cannot advance because it lacks the requisite number of votes to overcome a filibuster. Paxton allies and unaligned observers alike see the episode as crucial to the attorney general’s success in securing the endorsement months later.
“By floating the idea of dropping out, and essentially making himself a martyr for the cause of voter integrity, with leverage that he did not have, he showed that he would go further for Trump than most other Republicans — and at the very least, probably further than Cornyn was willing to go,” said Joshua Blank, the research director at the Texas Politics Project. “I think Paxton’s move there was really adept.”
Later in March, Cornyn dropped his longstanding support of the filibuster, expressing his openness to reform in order to pass the SAVE America Act.
But that didn’t seem to be enough, in Trump’s eyes, to match Paxton’s resolve for smashing the system. Trump backed off his endorsement pledge until this week, when he specifically cited Paxton’s support for terminating the filibuster and his championing of the bill.
“What the people of Texas want is a senator who doesn’t have to be dragged to the right during the Republican primary just to get them to do their job,” said Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Flower Mound, who endorsed Paxton in April. “And I think the president recognized that.”
During the runoff, Cornyn’s camp hit Paxton from every direction. Some ads criticized his divorce over an alleged affair. Others attacked the wealth he’s accumulated in office. Numerous spots tackled allegedly soft plea deals the attorney general’s office made in sexual abuse cases.
Paxton’s negative ads capitalized on the anti-incumbent fervor in both parties, calling out the length of Cornyn’s political career and the senator’s old comments expressing skepticism about Trump’s plan for a border wall.
While over $135 million in advertising was spent throughout the primary, operatives said both candidates are so well-defined that the race became more like a general election — where it’s difficult to persuade voters to drop their beliefs about either.
“Republican primary voters are not gullible,” Hunt said. “They don’t think that John Cornyn is a huge moderate. They also don’t — even before the Trump endorsement — they didn’t think that he was President Trump’s best friend. And both of those things are true.”
Early voting tea leaves
Most of the runoff vote has already been cast, with a week of early voting in the books — making some inferences about the runoff possible.
With opinions about both candidates relatively calcified, turnout, rather than persuasion, will drive the runoff results. Two major factors are at play — where Wesley Hunt’s voters go, and which voters from March will come back to the polls for a second go-round.
The Trump endorsement may be most meaningful for Hunt voters, who make up a sizable chunk of the dwindling stable of undecided voters. Hunt himself endorsed Paxton in quick succession after Trump and urged his supporters to vote for the attorney general.
Steinhauser said the Trump endorsement is unquestionably a boost for Paxton, but noted that the attorney general still needs to ensure it’s communicated in advertising this week and over the weekend for election day voters.
“It’s going to make an impact, but it still takes time and money to get the message out about the endorsement,” he said.
Ross Hunt, the GOP data guru, said his analysis of the early voting electorate demonstrated that “there is no big headline” — no obvious advantage for either candidate.
“[If you’re] squinting, you can see a tiny advantage for Cornyn relative to his Round One early vote distribution, but you’ve got to squint pretty hard,” Hunt said. “It’s basically just a wash.”
If Cornyn were to pull it off, Hunt said, he would need high turnout in the Austin area, selective mobilization of the precincts where he overperformed in Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth areas, and for Paxton voters to stay home — the latter of which may be unlikely because primary turnout was robust for both candidates.
Hunt also said that in his analysis of the first two days of early voting, 85% of those who turned out were voters returning from the March primary. Only 3% were new voters who had not previously voted in any primary.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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