As the midterm elections that will decide who controls Congress get fully underway this week with the first primary contests, both parties are grappling with one of the central questions of American politics in the Trump era. Do voters want partisan rage or a political reset?
In the midst of one of the most volatile political moments in decades, Democrats are trying to figure out whether their path back to power is to re-energize their base with fiery appeals or to court swing voters. Republicans are testing the continuing power of the MAGA brand over traditional conservatism.
Those dynamics are being tested in Texas, where voters will go to the polls on Tuesday to cast their ballots in primaries for the U.S. Senate that have already broken records for early voting turnout and political spending.
Senator John Cornyn, a four-term Senator once seen as the courtly, conservative embodiment of the Texas Republican brand, is fighting for his political life against Ken Paxton, the state’s scandal-scarred attorney general who is beloved by the MAGA base.
On the Democratic side, James Talarico, a state representative, has made a point of campaigning in counties that President Trump won and of speaking about his vision of progressive Christianity. He faces Representative Jasmine Crockett, a firebrand lawmaker with a national profile who argues that Democrats can win by making bold appeals to inspire their base to vote.
The results could offer an early indication of the direction the parties and voters are heading as they look toward the midterm contests and beyond to the 2028 presidential primary races. This year Democrats are fighting an uphill battle to reclaim the Senate by flipping seats in swing states including Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio while defending the states they hold.
Snapshots of the candidates as they traveled across the state — to the worship halls of Black churches in Dallas and San Antonio, border town swap meets, and East Texas barbecue joints — capture the contours of a vicious and expensive primary race where the divides are more stylistic than ideological. It has been the most expensive primary on record, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm, with more than $110 million spent so far.
The majority of the money has gone toward buttressing Mr. Cornyn, who remains in a tight race with Mr. Paxton after running attack ads for months. A third candidate, Representative Wesley Hunt, a two-term congressman from Houston, is also running, which makes it likely that the Republican race ends up in a runoff in late May.
On the Democratic side, the matchup between Mr. Talarico and Ms. Crockett, both staunch opponents of the president on nearly every issue, has fueled a surge in early voting turnout far beyond what the party has seen in recent primaries.
“We should all feel really good about this,” said Emmy Ruiz, the former White House political director for the Biden administration and Texas political consultant, who is uncommitted in the race.
Still, strategists from both parties agree that regardless of the nominees, Democrats will face a steep climb in November: No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. Karl Rove, a top White House adviser to former President George W. Bush who got his start in Texas politics, put it simply: “Texas is not New Jersey in waiting,” he said.
Cornyn Tries to Stave Off a Vigorous Challenge
The Cornyn campaign was not expecting a crowd. The outdoor restaurant patio, alongside a howling interstate highway in Houston, could accommodate only several dozen people. Far fewer were in attendance, a group of mostly longtime supporters and old friends, when Senator Cornyn arrived.
“I’m here to tell you I believe that character still matters,” Mr. Cornyn said to polite applause. “I know that the people of Texas are with me.”
Through the bitter campaign, Mr. Cornyn has maintained his even-spoken senatorial composure, even as his supporters have grown increasingly desperate to save his political life.
His campaign and allied super PACs have spent more than $60 million on the primary so far, blanketing the airwaves and social media across Texas with messages linking Mr. Cornyn to Mr. Trump, attacking Mr. Paxton and Mr. Hunt and adopting hard-line stances popular among the state’s Republican primary voters, including some with pronounced anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Still, Mr. Cornyn, 74, has struggled to reintroduce himself to Texas Republicans, who have grown up voting for him but appear to have soured on the kind of deal-making politics he represents.
“He’s a statesman and I don’t know if our society will tolerate a statesman anymore,” said Suzanne Feather, a Houston Republican who has long backed Mr. Cornyn. “It makes me cry.”
Among the most effective criticisms has been deriding Mr. Cornyn’s role in supporting a bipartisan gun safety measure in the aftermath of the 2022 school massacre in Uvalde, Texas. He was roundly booed for the effort at a state party convention at the time, and it still ruffles many Republicans.
Mr. Cornyn has argued that his votes have been in lock step with Mr. Trump. At times he has appeared motivated at least as much by his firm desire to prevent Mr. Paxton from ascending to the Senate — after years of legal and ethical scandals — as to hold onto the seat.
In the waning days of the primary campaign, Mr. Cornyn has warned that Republicans down the ballot in Texas would suffer if Mr. Paxton were the nominee for Senate. “Ken Paxton would be the kiss of death for Republicans,” Mr. Cornyn said.
It is a message that Republican political consultants said was aimed in part at convincing Mr. Trump to throw him a lifeline by finally endorsing. So far, Mr. Trump has said he supports all three candidates.
After he spoke, Mr. Cornyn shook hands with supporters. A table of snacks sat largely uneaten, including dip adorned with little smiley faces drawn with sauce, undisturbed by any dipping.
Paxton Stumps at the Angry Elephant
A few hours later and about 50 miles north, in Magnolia, Texas, Mr. Paxton took the microphone like a standup comedian for his own campaign event inside a bar called the Angry Elephant.
“This doesn’t look much like a John Cornyn event, you know why?” he asked the crowd of around a hundred people.
“There are people here,” a woman called out.
“That’s exactly right!” he responded, as the room exploded with laughter.
The appearance was among the few public events Mr. Paxton has held during the contest, a lack of aggressive campaigning that has been matched by his relative lack of spending in response to the torrent of ads from Mr. Cornyn.
Mr. Paxton, 63, appears regularly on the circuit of conservative podcasts and television news programs. His supporters said they liked his forceful use of his position as Texas attorney general to attack Democratic causes and support President Trump, including a failed lawsuit challenging the results of the 2020 election.
“Federal elections are not fair,” he said in response to a question of how, if elected to the Senate, he would handle certifying the 2028 presidential election results in the case of a Democratic victory. “We have no idea whether we’ve got the right people voting.”
Over the past year, Mr. Paxton has accelerated the pace of lawsuits and news releases from his office — suing to stop a Houston area midwife accused of providing abortions, seeking to stop public school students from protesting against ICE, challenging the Muslim developers of a housing subdivision outside of Dallas — earning attention without spending campaign money.
“Ken Paxton is very damn beneficial — he’s not a RINO, he’s a hell-raiser,” said Freddie Brooks, who lives nearby in Montgomery County, using an acronym to describe Mr. Cornyn as a Republican in name only.
Much of Mr. Paxton’s remarks underscored his three terms as attorney general in which he alternated from suing to stop federal government action under Democrats, to bolstering it under President Trump.
Another supporter, Steve Blanke, 68, listened at a table with his wife Linda. Mr. Blanke said he knew all about the corruption charges against Mr. Paxton, and the accusations of adultery by his wife as part of a messy divorce. “I know he’s got his controversies,” he said. “Just like our president.”
Talarico Talks of the ‘Politics of Love’
On a Wednesday evening in Dallas, Mr. Talarico was preaching the politics of love from the campaign stump.
It’s an unusual message from a politician, he admitted to the crowd. But it is one the 36-year-old believes a divided nation desperately needs to hear.
“My faith teaches me that love is the strongest force in the universe,” he told the audience. “There is a deep hunger for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of hate, or fear or division but a politics of love.”
His pitch is aimed at expanding his support to include moderate and Republican voters, a necessity in a state Mr. Trump won by nearly 14 points in 2024.
But the heart of his message is a spiritual and cultural appeal to win disaffected Trump voters through the language of faith and working-class economic anxiety.
“We can be angry,” he told reporters, after his campaign event in Dallas on Wednesday. “But we shouldn’t lose sight of the humanity of the people that we are opposing. We have to love our enemies.”
The enemy, he argues, isn’t Republicans or even Mr. Trump. It’s a billionaire class that divides the nation “by party, by race, by gender, by religion” through social media algorithms that have turned politics into a circus of “trolling” and insults.
“There was a big push during the first Trump administration that you wanted a hard person to fight back,” said Osvaldo Dominguez, 27, as he waited for Mr. Talarico to speak. “Now people want to have some type of normalcy with politics.”
But convincing enough Democratic primary voters to embrace expanding their tent over their rage at the Trump administration may be difficult.
Sitting in the audience, Nicole Estrada, an elementary teacher from Dallas, said she was leaning toward supporting Ms. Crockett, who she described as a “firebrand,” but wanted to hear what Mr. Talarico had to offer.
“She states her mind and she don’t hold back, that’s what I like,” she said of Ms. Crockett. “I just need to see if I hear a little more of that out of him.”
Crockett Sells Herself as ‘a Proven Fighter’
Ms. Crockett entered the race late, with a little less than three months before the primary election to make good on the promise of her candidacy to energize voters and bring apathetic Democrats and nonvoting Texans out to the polls.
She tried to do so by holding big events, including rallies in places like Lubbock and San Antonio, and also appearing in much more intimate gatherings. At a restaurant in Houston on a recent morning, Ms. Crockett, who is Black, met with about two dozen Black pastors for breakfast, hoping that their support would ripple out into the various church communities they represented.
“We are in the fight for our lives,” she told the pastors. “People can take a chance on somebody that says that they will fight — or they can go with a proven fighter.”
T. Grant-Malone of the St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Houston said that he wanted “the base to be galvanized.”
“You’ve got a sleeping giant in Texas,” another pastor, Charles Turner of the New Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church, said of the large and growing Black population of Texas, which is the largest of any state in the U.S. with more than 4 million residents, according to according to the Pew Research Center.
The Democratic primary has been marked by a sharp split along racial lines. Ms. Crockett has attracted strong support from Black voters, according to polls, while her opponent, Mr. Talarico, who is white, has seen greater support among white voters. Both have courted Hispanic voters, who make up the state’s largest demographic group, but their events have been largely a contrast in Black and white.
Mr. Talarico’s supporters have questioned whether Ms. Crockett could win a statewide race in Texas, arguing that her aggressive partisan persona would alienate large swaths of independents and some Republicans who have soured on President Trump. Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have already featured her in advertisements as part of an effort to drive more Republican primary voters to the polls.
Ms. Crockett, 44, has denounced questions about her electability as a racial “dog whistle.” At the event in Houston, she emphasized her national profile and her willingness to fight. And she described her résumé — she is lawyer turned state representative turned congresswoman — as that of a natural candidate for the U.S. Senate.
“People keep telling us that the only way you can win anything in deep red Texas is by making sure that you do whatever you can to appease people,” she said, describing Mr. Talarico’s approach.
She said Americans were suffering and that the moment called for Texas Democrats “not to be scared” but to try to win by being bold.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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