A Senate Blockbuster Looms in Texas, as Paxton Prepares to Challenge Cornyn

New York Times

02-04-2025

Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, is getting ready to challenge Senator John Cornyn in what could be the nastiest and most expensive Republican Party showdown of the 2026 election.
In an interview on Tuesday in Dallas, Mr. Paxton tiptoed close to declaring himself a candidate, offering up the kind of legislation he would first propose if elected to the Senate — tax cuts — and describing why he felt he could do more in Washington, D.C., than in Texas.
'I just think there's a lot of things that you could do at the federal level,' Mr. Paxton said. 'Trump can use the help and have a senator that actually is supportive and not critical.'
Asked how he made his decision to run, Mr. Paxton began answering the question. Then he was reminded by a campaign consultant that he had not yet officially decided to run.
'Right,' Mr. Paxton said.
The likelihood of a primary between Mr. Paxton and Mr. Cornyn has been growing in recent months. It would be perhaps the biggest electoral face-off yet in the ongoing war between the Texas Republican Party's old guard and an ascendant wing of hard-right social conservatives aligned with Mr. Paxton and President Trump.
The looming clash has been among the worst kept secrets in Texas politics.
'Good luck with your primary, John,' posted Colin Allred, a former Democratic representative in Dallas who unsuccessfully challenged Senator Ted Cruz last year and has said he is considering entering the 2026 Senate race.
Mr. Paxton, now in his third term, has been increasingly vocal in his criticism of Mr. Cornyn, mocking him on social media and during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson.
The attorney general and legal firebrand has been buoyed in his thinking about a Senate run by internal Republican polling that shows him with a considerable advantage among the party's primary voters.
A poll by Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, a firm used by the Trump campaign, found Mr. Paxton leading by a margin of 25 percentage points over Mr. Cornyn, and it grew with messages painting Mr. Cornyn as the more moderate candidate.
The poll, conducted about two months ago by allies of Mr. Paxton, showed him also winning against a Democrat in the general election, but by a smaller margin.
The internal polling results aligned with a nonpartisan poll from the University of Houston in February showing that more Republicans would 'definitely consider' voting for Mr. Paxton than for Mr. Cornyn, and that Mr. Paxton was viewed more favorably than Mr. Cornyn among Republican voters.
Mr. Cornyn's campaign did not make him available for an interview.
Mr. Cornyn, 73, has been in state politics for more than three decades. A former Texas attorney general and State Supreme Court judge, he was first elected to the Senate in 2002. Over that time, Texas has turned solidly Republican and the party's primaries have grown increasingly important, with the winner going on to victory in the general election in every statewide contest going back to the 1990s.
With an affable old guard presence out of an era of business-oriented conservatism in Texas, Mr. Cornyn was seen as someone possibly destined to be Senate majority leader. But after the retirement of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky from that post, Mr. Cornyn lost out to Senator John Thune of South Dakota last year. Mr. Cornyn is no longer in the Republican leadership.
And his willingness to occasionally work across the aisle, including on a package of gun control legislation passed in the wake of the state's worst school shooting in Uvalde in 2022, enraged many conservatives.
His approval ratings among conservatives dropped sharply at the time. He was booed loudly during an appearance at the activist-heavy Republican Party of Texas convention that year.
Mr. Paxton, 62, recalled being at the convention — he was waiting to speak — and watching Mr. Cornyn deliver his speech amid the booing.
'It clicked for me,' the attorney general said. 'I knew he lost touch with the voters.'
Mr. Cornyn officially announced his re-election campaign late last month with a video that leaned heavily on his actions on behalf of Mr. Trump.
'In President Trump's first term, I was Republican whip, delivering the votes for his biggest wins,' Mr. Cornyn said in the video. 'Now I'm running for re-election and asking for your support, so President Trump and I can pick up where we left off.'
The senator recently posted a photograph of himself reading 'The Art of the Deal,' Mr. Trump's book. 'Recommended,' the post said.
Mr. Paxton, for his part, has frequently used his office to support Mr. Trump, supporting the president's immigration enforcement efforts and, in 2020, suing to challenge the results of the election in four swing states. The Supreme Court threw out the case.
Asked how, as a potential senator, he might handle an effort by Mr. Trump to remain in office after his second term, Mr. Paxton said he was not sure.
'My understanding is that there's constitutionally two terms, but I am no expert on that,' he said. 'It may or may not come up. But he's got to decide he's going to do a third term. And then we would deal with the issue.'
An endorsement by the president would be a pivotal moment in the as-yet-undeclared race.
Mr. Paxton, in his interview with The Times at a Dallas social club, said he had already been talking with people in the president's orbit about it.
'I haven't directly talked to him,' he said. 'I've talked to people around him. They're very aware of this ongoing possibility.'
He added that he had heard 'nothing negative, that's for sure.'
Indeed, things have been looking up for Mr. Paxton lately.
For years, he had been battling overlapping corruption investigations into his actions as attorney general and a separate state indictment for securities fraud. But he emerged victorious, surviving an impeachment trial in the Texas Senate in 2023 and reaching a settlement last year in his criminal indictment, which involved paying restitution but not admitting to any wrongdoing.
'This is not the way it should be done in our country,' Mr. Paxton said. 'If you're elected, I don't care if you're a Democrat, the most liberal Democrat, that shouldn't happen to you any more than it should happen to me.'
Mr. Paxton said his decision to officially declare his challenge rested on whether he believed he would have enough money to take on an incumbent senator. About $20 million should do it, he said.
Respondents in the internal Fabrizio poll, obtained by The New York Times, were not unaware of the legal and ethical questions that have followed Mr. Paxton for much of his career.
When respondents were asked about the issues and actions they most associated with Mr. Paxton, the top responses included 'border security' as well as 'corrupt/fraud/crook/liar.'
For Mr. Cornyn, the top term associated with him underscored his challenges with an increasingly conservative Texas Republican primary electorate: 'RINO' — meaning, Republican in name only.