Senator John Cornyn of Texas believes he can win a no-holds-barred Republican primary next year with his state’s hard-charging attorney general, Ken Paxton, by making the race all about the character of his opponent.
It’s a tall order, considering that Mr. Paxton has already faced down corruption allegations that played out in public when the Republican-controlled State House impeached him in 2023, only to see the Republican State Senate acquit him.
But in an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Cornyn said that there was much more about Mr. Paxton than what voters knew, hinting that the allegations of corruption and abuse of office that led to his impeachment were “just the tip of the iceberg.” Many more revelations would surface before the March 2026 primary, Texas’ senior senator said.
“This is going to be a test of whether character still matters,” Mr. Cornyn said, seated under a painting of Superman in the offices of a small sticker printing business in Waco, Texas.
Mr. Paxton remains a darling of the Republican voting base even after his 2015 indictment for securities fraud, a federal investigation into corruption allegations and his impeachment, during which former top aides accused him of using his position to benefit a friend and political donor who had helped Mr. Paxton conceal his extramarital affair.
But Mr. Paxton, now in his third term as attorney general, has survived each of those inquiries. Instead of being hobbled, he appeared to emerge stronger with primary voters.
Still, Mr. Cornyn said, “I’m willing to bet my career and my future and this job on my belief that character does matter still.”
He said Mr. Paxton was making the opposite bet, “that he can get away with a whole litany of misbehavior and corruption that should disqualify him from the job.”
The fight — already joined — between Mr. Cornyn, a fixture in Texas politics for more than three decades, and Mr. Paxton, a standard-bearer for the state’s hard right, promises to be the fiercest, most expensive primary of the 2026 midterms. It could also have significant ramifications.
If the two Republicans damage each other in a year when the winds will almost certainly be blowing against the party, Democrats without many other options for gains may make a play in Texas for a Senate seat that has eluded them for years.
Mr. Cornyn’s bet is risky in an era when Republican voters, especially in Texas, have stuck behind President Trump, despite his felony convictions in New York, criminal indictments in Georgia and Florida, civil judgments for sexual abuse and defamation, and ends-justify-the-means actions that would have destroyed political careers in the past.
But focusing on character may be one of the few avenues available to Mr. Cornyn who could find it difficult to outflank Mr. Paxton on the right.
Many of the party’s most hard-line voters have long been skeptical of Mr. Cornyn. He was loudly booed by party activists during a speech at the Republican Party of Texas convention in 2022. Recent polls have shown Mr. Cornyn trailing Mr. Paxton — in some, by double digits — among primary voters, though the same polls show Mr. Cornyn performing better than Mr. Paxton in general election matchups.
“John Cornyn is peddling a new fake lie every week because he is down” in the polls, Mr. Paxton said in a statement.
Mr. Cornyn’s fate — like that of many in the Republican Party — could rest in the hands of the president, whose endorsement may prove decisive in the primary.
In recent months, Mr. Cornyn, a senior member of the Senate who has been willing to work across the aisle, has not been shy about courting Mr. Trump. At the same time, Mr. Paxton has eagerly reminded voters that Mr. Cornyn said, in 2023, that “President Trump’s time has passed him by.”
“I was wrong and President Trump was right, obviously,” Mr. Cornyn said in the interview with The Times in Waco. He added that other Republicans, like Senator Ted Cruz and Vice President JD Vance, had made similar determinations at different times over the years before rallying behind the president in his re-election bid.
Mr. Paxton supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, and he won over many Republican voters with sharply partisan legal actions on behalf of Texas against the Biden administration. He has set out to frame the campaign as a referendum on whether Mr. Cornyn is sufficiently aligned with Mr. Trump.
“Cornyn is directed by the Washington swamp,” Mr. Paxton said in an interview with The Times last month, suggesting that the incumbent senator was the kind of establishment figure who quietly opposed the president. And Mr. Paxton has attacked Mr. Cornyn’s support for bipartisan gun safety legislation after the 2022 school massacre in Uvalde, Texas.
Mr. Cornyn said he did not regret his role in passing the legislation. He pointed out that in addition to tightening background checks, the law included additional federal funding for community-based mental health care.
“I worked with colleagues across the aisle to solve what I viewed as an urgent problem,” he said. “I don’t think that any parent should have to send their kids to school worried that they are going to be safe.”
He said his deficit in the race’s early polling could reflect that he had not been on the ballot in Texas since 2020.
“I’m not as well known at this particular time,” said Mr. Cornyn, who was a State Supreme Court justice in 1991, became attorney general in 1999, and was elected to the Senate in 2002.
Mr. Cornyn said he would remind voters of his record of support for Mr. Trump and his policies. This week, Mr. Cornyn was crisscrossing Texas to drum up support for extending Mr. Trump’s first-term tax cuts and other measures contained in the far-reaching tax-and-spending bill now before the Senate.
“We cannot fail; we have to get this done,” he said at the event in Waco, where he watched a large machine cut “Made in USA” stickers.
The Cornyn campaign featured the president in its re-election launch video, and has posted to social media an image of Mr. Cornyn reading Mr. Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal.” His campaign also hired Mr. Trump’s pollster and strategist, Tony Fabrizio.
While Mr. Cornyn said he believed he could win without Mr. Trump’s endorsement, he also said that he had already discussed it with the president.
“I’ve talked to him about that,” he said. “I just don’t think he’s ready to make that endorsement.”
He added that the president had said “he was surprised that Ken Paxton was running because he said Ken had never talked to him.”
As Mr. Cornyn bolts to the right, his campaign released four attack ads on Wednesday focused on spending by Mr. Paxton’s office, highlighting groups like Legal Aid and a Houston-based L.G.B.T.Q. community center.
“Ken Paxton is funding the left,” each of the ads say.
And Mr. Cornyn said his campaign had a mountain of opposition research to draw from, including about Mr. Paxton’s personal wealth.
“Let me put it this way: For a guy that’s been on the public payroll for most of his career to somehow, all of a sudden, become a multimillionaire and own real estate all over the United States, including Hawaii,” Mr. Cornyn said, “where did that money come from?”
Mr. Paxton called Mr. Cornyn’s attacks “pathetic” and said they “can’t change the fact that he worked with Joe Biden to take away our gun rights.”
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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