Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) will head to a runoff against Texas’s hard-right, scandal-ridden Attorney General Ken Paxton in a race that risks costing Republicans a Senate seat in a state where they haven’t lost one since 1988.
Neither candidate won a majority of the vote due to the late entrance of Houston Rep. Wesley Hunt, meaning the race will go to a runoff on May 26. As of Tuesday, Cornyn led the race in first place, while Paxton placed in second.
But the race has already become the most expensive Senate primary in history, topping out at $128 million. Cornyn and super PACs aligned with him have spent $71 million to save the four-term incumbent Republican. To boot, President Donald Trump has remained neutral in the race, making Cornyn’s race more difficult.
Cornyn delivered a defiant speech on Tuesday evening saying he would continue to fight Paxton given his history of corruption and baggage.
“I refuse to allow a flawed, self-centered and shameless candidate like Ken Paxton risk everything we’ve worked so hard to build over these many years.”
Republicans fear that Paxton’s numerous scandals could cost Republicans the Senate seat. That made Democrats think they had a shot at winning the race. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas went up against state opponent Rep. James Talarico of the Austin area in the Democratic primary, which has yet to be called.
Conservatives in Texas accuse Cornyn, a former attorney general, of being insufficiently supportive of the president. They point to his negotiating a gun control bill signed by former President Joe Biden after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 students and 2 teachers. In 2023, as Trump prepared to run for president again, Cornyn told reporters that Trump’s “time has passed him by.”
Cornyn also voted to certify the 2020 presidential election results, whereas Paxton sued battleground states in 2020 to challenge the election results, which the Supreme Court threw out.
Paxton has faced a series of scandals, having been under federal indictment almost as soon as he became attorney general in 2014, though the Department of Justice declined to prosecute him. He also agreed to pay $300,00 in restitution to end the charges.
But it’s not the only controversy he faces. In 2023, the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives impeached him for corruption, specifically, using his office to benefit a donor named Nate Paul, who at the time faced a federal investigation. The state Senate would later acquit him, but not without spilling a litany of details about his alleged affair.
Paxton’s wife, Angela, a state senator in her own right, would later announce her divorce “on biblical grounds,” because of his supposed philandering.
Supporters of Paxton and the attorney general himself have argued that Cornyn’s defiance takes money away from helping Republicans flip Senate seats and protect vulnerable incumbents and open seats in places such as Maine, Alaska and North Carolina.
The race almost certainly will be incredibly expensive. But Cornyn has warned that Paxton being at the top of the ticket could create a disaster for Republicans lower on the ballot and be an “albatross.”
But many Republicans are prepared for Paxton’s arrival. Last week, during Trump’s State of the Union Address, while Cornyn sat in the front rows with other senators, Texas Rep. Troy Nehls invited Paxton as his guest.
On the Democratic side, early results showed Talarico had won at least a majority of the vote. But Crockett said voters would likely not know the results because of chaos in Dallas County where a lack of coordination between the two local parties led to people not knowing where to vote.
“Unfortunately, this is what Republicans like to do, and so they specifically targeted Dallas County, and I think we all know why,” Crockett told supporters in Dallas.
Democrats had attempted to keep the polls open until 9:00 PM, but the Texas Supreme Court put a stay on the legal action.
