Senator John Cornyn, the veteran Texas Republican, is in the fight of his political life after finishing just slightly ahead of Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, in the first round of primary voting in Texas on Tuesday.
But it is a fight that Mr. Cornyn is happy to be in at all.
In the weeks before the election, Mr. Cornyn was trailing in polls despite his allies vastly outspending Mr. Paxton. Some of his colleagues in the Senate were worried that Mr. Cornyn might finish a distant second and face pressure to drop out, or that Mr. Paxton could win outright by drawing more than 50 percent of the vote.
Instead, Mr. Cornyn came just barely on top, perhaps with an assist from Representative Wesley Hunt, the third-place finisher who might have siphoned conservative anti-Cornyn votes from Mr. Paxton. Those votes might now migrate to the attorney general with the choice whittled down to two candidates in what will be a take-no-prisoners runoff in late May.
Here are the factors that have made Mr. Cornyn’s race such a tough challenge, and which will determine whether he can hang on.
He is a Senate institutionalist when voters disdain the establishment.
Mr. Cornyn, who is seeking a fifth term, takes the Senate seriously and has spent decades working within the institution instead of attacking it. He served as the No. 2 Senate Republican for six years as the top lieutenant to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the longest-serving leader. He then sought to become majority leader himself after the 2024 elections before losing to Senator John Thune of South Dakota.
Serving in congressional leadership used to be considered an advantage back home and a badge of honor. But President Trump’s hard-right base despises the political establishment. To many of them, Mr. Cornyn’s leadership record makes him a card-carrying member of the detested “uniparty,” which they see as a Washington cabal of politicians looking out for themselves rather than their constituents.
In the runoff just as in the early months of the primary, Mr. Paxton will assail Mr. Cornyn as tool of the Washington establishment, while Mr. Cornyn continues arguing that the scandal-plagued Mr. Paxton is a flawed man with a record of misconduct that makes him unworthy of the Senate.
President Trump has refused to endorse him — so far.
Despite pleas from Mr. Thune and other top Senate Republicans, the president has so far refused to endorse Mr. Cornyn, with whom Mr. Trump has had a sometimes rocky relationship. Mr. Cornyn criticized the president’s conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, and Mr. Trump has derided the senator with one of his favorite intraparty insults, branding him a “RINO,” short for “Republican in name only.”
Mr. Cornyn has sought in recent months to mend fences with the president, emphasizing his record as a very reliable vote for Mr. Trump’s agenda.
The president famously prefers to pick winners with his endorsements, and the concern that Mr. Cornyn would lose no doubt made Mr. Trump reluctant to back him despite the pressure from Capitol Hill.
Mr. Cornyn’s showing will increase calls from Republican senators for Mr. Trump to get behind the incumbent as the party’s best chance at defeating James Talarico, the Democratic state legislator who won the primary outright, and protect the endangered G.O.P. majority.
He is a conservative, but not that kind of conservative.
Mr. Cornyn is much more of a traditional conservative than the sort of firebrand the MAGA movement prefers, and his willingness to even engage with Democrats on difficult issues has become a political disadvantage. His combative Texas Republican colleague, Senator Ted Cruz, is much more in that lane and commands considerably more media attention at home and nationally as well as a strong embrace from the right.
Mr. Cornyn is known for striking a reasonable tone and has proved that he is willing to compromise and work with Democrats, as he did in negotiating gun safety legislation in 2022 after the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. That bill, signed into law by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a rare victory on gun control, and Mr. Cornyn knew at the time that it carried political risks. It has now become a major political liability back home.
Mr. Cornyn also championed a significant bipartisan criminal justice overhaul that had broad conservative support but later drew some criticism from the right for allowing the early release of prisoners and being soft on punishment.
As a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, the senator has been a strong supporter of conservative judicial nominees for the lower courts as well as the Supreme Court. But many on the far right still consider him insufficiently conservative in the contemporary sense — another theme that Mr. Paxton and his allies will try to emphasize.
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, primarily writing about Congress and national political races and issues. He has nearly four decades of experience reporting in the nation’s capital.
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