Four-term Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who once came close to becoming majority leader in the Senate, lost a primary challenge to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday, ending a bitter race driven by a MAGA insurgency that ballooned into the most expensive Senate primary in history.
Cornyn became the second Republican senator to lose his seat in less than two weeks after President Donald Trump endorsed against him. Before Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) lost in the Louisiana primary earlier this month, no senator in either party had lost a primary since 2017.
Cornyn’s defeat ends a storied career in Texas and national politics. He was nearly elected Senate majority leader in 2024, was a close confidant to former Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and had never lost an election in his state before Tuesday.
Paxton, however, had been leading in public polling for months, capturing the state’s Republican base by accusing Cornyn of being a “Republican in Name Only.” He secured a major boost when Trump endorsed him over Cornyn a week before the runoff.
He will now have to reconcile with Senate Republicans, who had fervently backed Cornyn in the primary, arguing that he would be easier to defend in a general election against the Democratic nominee, state Rep. James Talarico.
Paxton has faced allegations of corruption, financial malfeasance and infidelity. He has also struggled to keep up with Cornyn or Talarico — both prodigious fundraisers — in raising money.
But he still stands a decent chance of winning in the general election. Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. Paxton has campaigned as a fighter for conservative causes, who took on the Biden administration, and an ally to the president in a state that voted for Trump by a 13.6-point margin.
The GOP is trying to defend a 53-47 Senate majority in the fall midterm elections.
Republicans are putting up considerable funds to hold on to seats in Maine, Ohio and North Carolina, where Democrats are investing tens of millions of dollars. Republicans also have their sights on winning Democratic seats in Georgia and Michigan.
“We have 24 seats up this time. The Democrats have only nine, so we’ve got a lot more ground to defend,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) told reporters last week, adding that he was optimistic about keeping the majority.
Statewide campaigns in Texas are abnormally costly. The state has more than 31 million residents across nearly 270,000 square miles and two of the country’s most expensive media markets — Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. The 2024 contest between Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic Rep. Colin Allred drew more than $210 million in ad spending, according to AdImpact.
Talarico has raised more than $27 million in the first three months of the year, more than most Senate candidates raise in their entire campaigns.
Paxton, by comparison, has raised just over $7 million and reported having roughly $2 million in the bank at the beginning of May.
Cornyn was a pioneer in the ’90s effort to turn the state red. He was the first Republican elected state attorney general since Reconstruction and transformed the office into a national force for conservative policy. He served as the second-most-powerful Republican in the Senate from 2013 to 2019.
Cornyn celebrated bipartisanship as a requisite for securing legislative wins. He worked with Democrats on gun-control legislation in 2022 after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. He advocated for the more genteel traditions of the Senate, while urging the GOP to appeal beyond its base. In 2023, he said that Trump’s “time has passed him by” and that the party should choose a more tonally moderate candidate to be its presidential nominee the next year.
That mentality infuriated Texas’s more incendiary Republican base. Cornyn was booed at the 2022 state Republican convention and censured by the Collin County Republican Party. The label “RINO” — Republican in name only — followed him everywhere.
Cornyn initially dismissed his detractors, saying that “legislating is not for sissies.” But as polling continued to show him trailing Paxton, a candidate he deeply despised, he pivoted toward appealing for Trump’s endorsement. He posted images of himself with the president and of him reading Trump’s memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” and he frequently cited his near perfect voting record on Trump’s agenda. He walked back his long-standing support for the Senate filibuster after Trump called for its elimination to pass changes to voting access, and said he was wrong to say time had passed Trump by.
“Look, in the heat of battle, people sometimes say things that they later come back to regret or reconsider,” Cornyn said in a February interview. “So, I hate to admit it, but I was wrong.”
Cornyn warned that having Paxton at the top of the ticket would endanger Republicans running in other Senate races, and that he would also be an “albatross” for Republicans running for the House in Texas. Democrats agree.
“Republicans made their bed a long time ago when they tied themselves to an unpopular agenda of higher prices that’s crushing Texans every day,” Madison Andrus, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement. “But if they want to nominate another extremist to dig themselves even deeper in the hole, they can be our guest.”
The Senate primary contest has already seen more money spent than any other in American history. Cornyn and his supporters in the Senate have spent more than $90 million ahead of Tuesday, according to AdImpact.
Cornyn defied expectations by narrowly edging into first place during the first round of the primary in March. But Trump’s endorsement “was the kiss of death for Cornyn,” said Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), a Paxton supporter.
The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with Republican leadership, did not spend in the primary and has maintained its neutrality going into the runoff. The group has not said how it will get involved supporting Paxton.
Gooden said it would be a major blow to Republicans’ standing among the base if they don’t rally behind Paxton after spending so much money on Cornyn.
“If they’re not willing to pony up that same amount or more to keep this seat in Republican hands, then I question their commitment to the Republican values that they’ve been preaching these last several months,” Gooden said.
Cornyn said this month that he will “support the ticket” in the general election, regardless of who wins the runoff.
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