The Senate race in Texas was already the most expensive primary contest for the chamber since at least 2018. A runoff election only made it more expensive.
That second round of voting between Senator John Cornyn and his right-wing challenger, Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, pushed another $29 million worth of ads in front of Texans before the election on Tuesday. The total bill for the Republican primary race? About $128 million worth of ads as of Monday evening, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact.
At least $92 million of that has been spent to help Mr. Cornyn, including $22 million in the overtime period since the first round of primary voting in early March.
Cornyn’s big money advantage
Mr. Cornyn has been finding that money isn’t always enough.
The state’s senior senator, he was long the preferred choice of Senate Republican leaders and major party donors, who threw cash at his re-election effort as he struggled to prevail in a fierce battle with Mr. Paxton.
Then, after months of teasing an endorsement, President Trump backed Mr. Paxton last week, leaving Mr. Cornyn’s supporters worried that all of the money and effort would be for naught.
Even after the endorsement, the Cornyn Lonestar Victory Fund has continued to blast the state’s airwaves with an advertisement saying that Mr. Cornyn has voted with Mr. Trump “99 percent of the time” and featuring clips of the president expressing his support for the senator on things like immigration and the confirmation of conservative judges. It has been seen more than 89 million times, making it the most viewed advertisement of the runoff.
In an ad seen about 61 million times, the second most viewed of the runoff, the Ken Paxton Victory Fund attacked Mr. Cornyn’s immigration record, saying that he was “pro amnesty” for migrants and that he criticized the president’s border wall.
In addition to his spending advantage, Mr. Cornyn has raised far more than Mr. Paxton did, hauling in more than $26 million in contributions to his main campaign committee and two other committees since January 2025, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission through early May. Mr. Paxton has fallen short of the $20 million he previously suggested he would need to unseat Mr. Cornyn, raising only about $8 million over the same period.
National Republicans have been worried that if Mr. Paxton wins the nomination, they will need to dedicate huge sums of money to the general election in Texas. He has a long history of scandal that has made him polarizing even among Republicans in the state, and Democrats have nominated a fund-raising powerhouse in James Talarico, a state representative who has reported raising about $40.2 million from September through the end of March.
But Doug Deason, one of the relatively few major Republican donors in the state who support Mr. Paxton, made a different argument.
He said that Mr. Trump’s endorsement would give Democratic donors “false hope” that Mr. Talarico could win in Texas, long a deep-red state.
“They will flood the market with money, redirecting it from states where they actually have a chance,” Mr. Deason said. His only disappointment was that Mr. Trump did not endorse Mr. Paxton before the first round of primary voting in March: “It should have been done before the first primary election, as many of us had asked.”
The Senate primary isn’t the only runoff election unfolding on Tuesday in Texas.
$17 million to himself
The Republican runoff that will determine who will succeed Mr. Paxton as the state’s attorney general has also attracted significant investment. But much of that money has come from the front-runner himself.
That leading candidate, Mayes Middleton, a state senator and oil executive, dropped just over $17 million of his own money on the race from January 2025 to mid-May of this year, according to Texas Ethics Commission filings.
Mr. Middleton’s top rival, Representative Chip Roy, had lagged behind in the fund-raising race, but he received a substantial $5 million cash bump from Alex Fairly, a Texas businessman, after the first round of primary voting in March.
In the runoff battle, Mr. Roy’s campaign has outspent Mr. Middleton’s on advertising, laying out $8.3 million in ads as of Monday evening, compared with Mr. Middleton’s $5.2 million.
Can crypto crush a critic?
One key runoff election in Texas features big dough from one of the cycle’s biggest spenders: the cryptocurrency industry.
In the Houston area, a group tied to Fairshake, the main super PAC backed by the crypto industry, has spent $3.8 million on advertising in a runoff to help Representative Christian Menefee, a Democrat who won the seat in a January special election, and to target Representative Al Green. Mr. Green, an 11-term Democrat, is running against Mr. Menefee in the 18th District after his own district was redrawn by Texas Republicans last year.
Mr. Green has expressed concerns about cryptocurrency, and he is now at a big financial disadvantage: His campaign spent less than $100,000 on ads in the runoff.
Matt Zdun is a data reporter for The Times who combines quantitative analysis with traditional reporting skills.
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