On the morning of Feb. 17, the opening day of early voting in the Texas primary elections, Senator John Cornyn had a warning for those gathered at a Mexican restaurant on the south side of Austin. You might think Texas is safely Republican, he told them, but if his chief opponent in the G.O.P. Senate primary, Ken Paxton, wins the nomination, the Democrats could run amok.
“We will have an Election Day massacre,” he declared. “Republicans up and down the ticket will pay the price of having an albatross like our corrupt attorney general hung around their neck.”
With the Tuesday primary fast approaching, Mr. Cornyn, seeking his fifth Senate term, is locked in a fierce brawl with Mr. Paxton, the state’s hard-right, scandal-plagued attorney general. Mr. Paxton made his political name as the maddest of partisan mad dogs, suing the Obama and Biden administrations a total of 107 times, as he loves to boast.
The attorney general’s ethical shiftiness is what truly sets him apart. A felony indictment, allegations of abuse of office, an impeachment trial, a messy divorce with accusations of serial infidelity — the stench of corruption is enough to raise even President Trump’s eyebrows. Much like Mr. Trump, Mr. Paxton has ducked accountability and turned himself into a right-wing hero by claiming he is a victim of political persecution. In this Senate race, the attorney general has enjoyed a slight lead in most polls, despite his party’s establishment aligning against him. Mr. Cornyn has come out swinging hard, running a campaign aimed at his opponent’s baggage.
The stakes are Mr. Cornyn’s political career — and, by extension, what his party stands for. His re-election struggle is more than personal. It is the last stand of the state’s old-guard Republicans.
Electability aside, “this is also about trust,” the senator told the Austin crowd, sounding even-keeled and courtly even when on the attack. “Texans can’t trust Ken Paxton.” He has lied to his family, members of his staff and the people of Texas, charged Mr. Cornyn. “What makes you think you can trust him to represent us in the United States Senate?”
“Character is on the ballot,” he said. “Ken Paxton is betting that character doesn’t matter to Texas Republican primary voters. I’m betting the opposite. I’m betting character. Still. Matters.”
Talk about a lousy bet in Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
Watching Mr. Cornyn on the campaign trail — his face lined, his snowy hair smoothed, his pearl-snapped denim shirt crisp — brings to mind an aging Texas Ranger in the Old West. The senator has not lost his moves, though, at 74, he is surely moving more slowly than he once did. But the old rules are gone. Politics is faster, crasser, louder, more aggressive than when he entered public service 40-odd years ago as a county judge. Its partisans are uncompromising and full of blood lust, and they demand champions who radiate a destroy-the-enemy, win-at-all-costs ferocity.
Nowhere is this more vivid than in the Texas G.O.P., which took a hard-right turn during the early Obama years and has not looked back. Gone are the days of Republican leaders such as Rick Perry, the former governor, or the members of the Bush clan, who blended Texas swagger with old-school gentility.
George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” would now be run out of the state on a rail; today’s G.O.P. sees the Bush era as an embarrassment to be repudiated in both style and substance. And the notion that Republicans still care about personal character feels beyond quaint — at least as the term was long understood. For the MAGA faithful, in Texas and elsewhere, character has been redefined as an unwavering loyalty to Mr. Trump. All other concerns are secondary, all other sins forgivable.
This shift bodes ill for Mr. Cornyn. Complicating his fight with Mr. Paxton is Wesley Hunt, a young, charismatic U.S. House member whose presence in the primary is expected to splinter the vote and force a runoff. Mr. Trump has so far declined to endorse a candidate in the race. Penned in by his two more MAGAish opponents, Mr. Cornyn might need divine intervention to save his job.
Mr. Cornyn is not one of the moderate Republican outliers in the Senate like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, nor is he a libertarian gadfly like Rand Paul. He served as the chamber’s No. 2 Republican for six years. His voting record is solidly conservative, as he is desperate to point out these days. His campaign rarely misses an opportunity to trumpet that he votes with Mr. Trump around 99 percent of the time. “There’s no daylight between me and President Trump when it comes to policy,” the senator told a crowd in San Antonio, the second stop on his early-voting kickoff tour.
The senator did vote to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory, and during the 2024 election he suggested it was time for the G.O.P. to move on from Mr. Trump. Mr. Cornyn has also committed some legislative transgressions. In 2022, he joined with Democrats to pass a modest gun control bill, after the mass shooting in Uvalde, a particularly bitter betrayal in the eyes of some Texas Republicans. “He is a 2-A RINO,” declared Rob Russ, a third-generation Texan I met at a Paxton rally.
On the whole, Mr. Cornyn has contorted himself aplenty in accord with his party’s right turn and with Mr. Trump in particular, promoting Mr. Trump’s policies, supporting his appointees and voting twice against convicting him in Senate impeachment trials. One might even say that by excusing Mr. Trump’s outrages time and again, Mr. Cornyn undermined the very “character matters” principle on which his re-election bid rests.
Mr. Cornyn’s biggest problem is that his vibe does not fit a party that has grown increasingly combative and anti-establishment. His Republican critics complain that he is not enough of a fighter, that he is too willing to compromise with Democrats, that he has grown complacent and arrogant, that he has been in office too long and been co-opted by the dreaded Washington establishment. In turn, he has dialed up the Trumpian toxicity a notch, contributing to the party’s scaremongering about Muslim immigrants imposing Shariah law on Texans. But such efforts mostly make him look desperate.
“Sometimes he seems like someone who has been holding on too long or is a creature of the past,” said Ross Hunt, a Republican pollster based in the state. (No relation to Wesley.) At the same time, “he’s a true Texas type,” with a real ”sense of duty and devotion to the law,” added Mr. Hunt. “And that sense of dignity carries through whenever you see him speak.”
Duty? Dignity? Devotion to law? So old-fashioned.
The last year a Texas Democrat won statewide office was 1994. But it was Representative Tom DeLay who is widely credited with “painting Texas red” in the early 2000s. Then the majority leader of the U.S. House and a master of shady partisan hardball, Mr. DeLay used a river of PAC money to solidify the G.O.P.’s grip on the Texas Legislature and then engineer a mid-decade redistricting in the state that gained the party multiple House seats. In 2010, the Tea Party revolution ushered in the rise of an uncompromising, hard-edge ideological conservatism, particularly on social issues. Then in 2016 came MAGA, which has a populist slant, but is more grounded in the in-your-face personality of Mr. Trump.
Along the way, the party’s internal politics “have become so fractious around conservative purity tests — and conservative purity tests that over time have become in part much more anti-institutional,” observed James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. A longtime incumbent and “very successful dyed-in-the-wool institutionalist” like Mr. Cornyn will not win a lot of love from the base, noted Mr. Henson. In a Texas G.O.P. defined by a combination of the party’s right wing and by Mr. Trump, he added, the senator is “very commonly out of step” with both those pieces.
In a presentation to donors last summer, the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC focused on Republican Senate candidates, reported that 58 percent of G.O.P. primary voters see Mr. Cornyn as moderate or even liberal. The group urged donors to invest early in his campaign to help correct this misperception.
At the Austin event, Mr. Cornyn told me that the point of a primary campaign is to remind voters “what you’ve done.” When you run only every six years, he said, “people forget.”
But Operation Save Cornyn has been underway for months. The party establishment has sunk tens of millions of dollars into ads reintroducing Texans to their senior senator and throwing shade on the attorney general. And still Mr. Paxton maintains his slight edge.
Mr. Perry, the former governor, is a Cornyn enthusiast and offered a salty take. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” he said in a phone interview. People “forget about your service. The electorate is fickle.” Mr. Perry nonetheless remains hopeful that Republican voters will do the right thing. You can pick through any politician’s record and find objectionable votes, he told me. But “character,” he stressed, is “the single most important characteristic of this election.”
That word again. People who interpret Mr. Trump’s victories to mean character doesn’t matter anymore misunderstand his appeal, said Mr. Hunt, the pollster. The president, he said, primarily attracts people by “sheer force of character. He makes people feel he has certain virtues — like courage, inventiveness, prudence.”
Paxton supporters certainly consider their candidate to be brimming with manly virtues. They praise his fighting spirit and tenacity. They cheer his aggressive use of his office to defend Texas against a radical left looking to destroy the American way of life as they define it. They use the word “bulldog” a lot.
As for the attorney general’s smorgasbord of scandals, his fans are unbothered. On the eve of early voting, I stopped by a Paxton rally in Tyler to talk with people about his alleged misdeeds. My inquiries were typically met with smirks, if not laughter. Supporters dismissed the corruption accusations against him as the products of witch hunts. Questions about his philandering earned me lectures about how many Americans are divorced. Who is anyone to judge a man’s private life?
In person, Mr. Paxton is nerdier and more soft-spoken than you’d imagine from his fire-breathing reputation. He lacks the charisma often associated with top-tier demagogues, and when he gets nervous, he tends to speak quickly. When I asked him about Mr. Cornyn’s focus on his character, Mr. Paxton launched into a verbal tap dance about his record.
Mr. Paxton’s apparent disregard for ethical niceties, along with his blustering approach to addressing them, might be his biggest commonality with Mr. Trump, and the candidate is eager to draw the parallel. In Tyler, he reminded the crowd that in 2016 Mr. Cornyn had called Mr. Trump “an albatross” around the G.O.P.’s neck. “Guess who he’s saying that about now?” he crowed. “Me.”
In a 2022 precursor to the challenge Mr. Cornyn is now facing, George P. Bush, Bush 43’s nephew, attempted to unseat Mr. Paxton as attorney general, running in the G.O.P. primary on a pledge to restore integrity to the office. Texas Republicans were not interested. Mr. Paxton won the runoff by 36 points.
Since then, the G.O.P. has only grown sharper and less concerned with civility and integrity, a development not everyone in the party is thrilled about. John Hellerstedt, an early arrival at Mr. Cornyn’s Austin rally, cringed when I asked if he was happy with the party’s direction. He is not alone.
This primary is closely divided in the polls because the Republican Party in Texas is divided, contended Mr. Hunt. And with Mr. Trump a lame duck, there is growing discussion, even angst, about what the next wave will bring. The big surges in Republican turnout in recent years have been driven by anti-establishment energy and devotion to Mr. Trump more than ideology, the pollster noted. Even in Texas, it’s unclear who or what will hold the Trump coalition together once its leader goes.
For now, the state’s Republicans remain in thrall to the president, and Mr. Paxton is widely recognized as more in the Trumpian mold. Which leaves Team Cornyn scrambling to sell his party’s voters an older model of conservatism they do not seem much interested in.
“He’s the last of my boys!” Bill Records, a retired photographer who worked with prominent Texas politicians over the years, shouted with pride as Mr. Cornyn eased through the Austin crowd.
The last of a dying breed.
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