The standoff in Texas over redrawing the state’s U.S. House districts to a sharply tilted Republican advantage has played out before the backdrop of a contentious U.S. Senate race that may well be making the redistricting fight more contentious.
On the Republican side, the incumbent senator, John Cornyn, has set aside his often conciliatory demeanor, as he vies with his Senate primary opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, to see who can look tougher with runaway Democratic lawmakers.
On the Democratic side, State Representative James Talarico and former Representatives Beto O’Rourke and Colin Allred have used the standoff to gain publicity and rally the Democratic base around the notion that democracy itself is at stake. All three are potential rivals in the Senate race.
As the candidates position themselves, they’ve woven threats of prosecution and lawsuits with taunts and dares at the other party — and, in the case of Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton, at each other — with few incentives for compromise.
Amid the posturing, the runaway Democrats have been left to make decisions on their own on when they will return to the Capitol to give the Legislature a quorum to proceed with a rare mid-decade redistricting. Now that Texas’ Republican leaders have said they would end their special legislative session on Friday — and immediately call another one — that resolve may be weakening.
“We want to stay unified,” State Representative Ron Reynolds, a Houston Democrat, said. “We made a decision to break quorum as a unit, and we’re going to make a decision to go back as a unit.”
Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton have been ratcheting up the heat over redistricting in their bitter 2026 Senate primary campaign, with each falling over the other to attack dozens of wayward Democratic state lawmakers. The lawmakers fled Texas this month to halt the passage of a new congressional map that more strongly favors Republicans.
Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Paxton have each used his office in novel ways, pushing the primary contest into ever greater extremes. Mr. Cornyn has sought the F.B.I.’s involvement to track down the absent lawmakers. Mr. Paxton has filed a barrage of untested lawsuits, including trying to remove the Democrats from their seats, which he argues they abandoned by refusing to show up at the Texas Capitol.
In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Mr. Cornyn called some of Mr. Paxton’s actions “impotent” and attacked his opponent for being slow to file the suit to oust the Democrats from office, doing so only after Gov. Greg Abbott filed a similar lawsuit.
“He was out of the country on a golf vacation and wasn’t doing his job,” Mr. Cornyn said.
According to the Paxton campaign, the attorney general announced his intention to file suit before Mr. Abbott moved ahead with his. “This is textbook Paxton Derangement Syndrome,” said Nick Maddux, a political adviser to Mr. Paxton, accusing Mr. Cornyn of “desperate attempts to find relevancy during this redistricting battle.”
While both their efforts may not ultimately prevail in practice or in court, they appeared tailored to appeal to Republican voters and President Trump. The president has been behind the push for Texas’ redistricting, with the goal of redrawing district lines in order to maintain Republican control over the U.S. House after the 2026 election. His endorsement could be crucial in the Republican primary in Texas.
The redistricting fight has also drawn in prominent potential candidates on the Democratic side who have used the Republican attacks to prove their own bona fides with base voters.
“I’ve never seen these kinds of threats, these kinds of authoritarian tactics being used,” said Mr. Talarico, an Austin Democrat who walked out and now faces Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit to remove him from office. “Regardless of how this ends, we have certainly shined a spotlight on the corruption in Texas.”
Mr. Paxton has also gone after Mr. O’Rourke, accusing him of improperly raising money to support the walkout by Texas Democrats. On Tuesday, Mr. Paxton asked a court in Tarrant County to jail Mr. O’Rourke, arguing that he was refusing to follow its temporary restraining order curtailing certain fund-raising.
“It’s time to lock him up,” Mr. Paxton said in a statement.
Mr. O’Rourke responded on social media that the attorney general had lied in his filing, and that Mr. O’Rourke’s lawyers were asking the court for “maximum sanctions in response to his abuse of office.”
Mr. O’Rourke, who narrowly lost his challenge to Senator Ted Cruz in 2018, has been mulling another Senate run as he holds events around Texas in solidarity with the State House Democrats. Mr. Allred, a former U.S. representative from Dallas who lost to Mr. Cruz in 2022, has already launched his 2026 Senate campaign, and is going on his own statewide tour later this week.
“This has people fired up,” Mr. Allred said in an interview, recalling recent conversations at Black churches around Dallas, Fort Worth and outside Houston.
Mr. Allred, a former N.F.L. linebacker, called Mr. Cornyn “pathetic in his groveling” to appeal to Mr. Trump, and accused Mr. Paxton of a “pattern of pushing far beyond what his office is, in ways that I think are dangerous.”
Mr. Talarico said he was actively considering running for Senate, but would not make his decision until after the end of the walkout. “I’ve always thought primaries are good things,” said Mr. Talarico, 36, a former public-school teacher who is studying in seminary to become a pastor. “Competition makes us all better.”
For Republicans, the flight of Democrats like Mr. Talarico, who went to Illinois last week to avoid civil arrest warrants issued by the Texas House, has provided a rich and useful target for scoring points with primary voters.
That appeared to be particularly so for Mr. Cornyn, a Senate veteran who early polling has shown is trailing Mr. Paxton in the primary. It was Mr. Cornyn, not Mr. Paxton, who came out of the gate rapidly last week, asking for the F.B.I. to get involved in locating the Democrats who fled to Illinois — even though none has been charged with breaking any laws.
In the interview, Mr. Cornyn cited the F.B.I. director as saying last week that he was “assigning agents from the San Antonio and Austin office” to the matter of the absent Democrats. That was notable because the agents apparently would not come from the agency’s large office in Chicago, closer to where dozens of Democrats were taking refuge.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which supports Mr. Cornyn, quickly released an ad last week: “Cornyn fights, Paxton folds.”
Mr. Paxton, a conservative hard-liner, has appeared eager to accept the challenge from Washington Republicans. Soon after the ad appeared, he filed his suit seeking the removal of Democrats from office, even though just days earlier he tempered expectations for such a move, saying it had never been done before.
Mr. Paxton is also trying another untested legal approach, asking a court in Illinois to order that the civil arrest warrants issued by the Texas legislature are enforceable in Illinois. So far the court has taken no action in the case, filed late last week. Mr. Cornyn called the request a “fairly impotent act.”
Amid the Republican threats and escalations, Democratic lawmakers have so far stood their ground, insisting that they intended to stay out of the state at least through the first special session called by Mr. Abbott.
After that, they said, it was not clear how long they would continue to prevent a vote on the maps. There were 96 lawmakers present in the House chamber on Monday — four short of the 100 needed for a quorum in the 150-member body.
On Tuesday, legislative leaders said they would end the special session on Friday, adjourning a few days early, if there were not enough Democratic lawmakers present by then.
But Mr. Abbott said he would call special sessions over and over again with the same agenda, and possibly new items, “until we get this Texas-first agenda passed.”
Democrats were planning to meet to discuss the future of their walkout on Wednesday, Mr. Reynolds said. “I don’t think my colleagues are ready to say, We’ll go back if it’s business as usual,” he said. “No one has a plane ticket back to Texas.”
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
The post How a U.S. Senate Race Is Shaping the Fight Over Redistricting in Texas appeared first on New York Times.
