Wesley Hunt, one of the first Black Republicans to represent Texas in the House of Representatives, announced on Monday that he was running for the Senate seat occupied by John Cornyn, adding a new complication to the already caustic and costly Republican primary in 2026.
Mr. Hunt had been teasing a Senate run for months, watching to see whether Mr. Cornyn would remain in the race in the face of a strong challenge from the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a darling of the state’s conservative Republican voters. Television advertisements have appeared around Texas, paid for by the main pro-Hunt super PAC, introducing the congressman to voters.
A Hunt challenge had seemed to grow less likely as Mr. Cornyn strengthened his position and lashed Mr. Paxton with millions of dollars in negative advertising, with recent polls showing a close race between the two bitter rivals.
But on Monday, Mr. Hunt went forward anyway.
“The time is now,” he wrote on social media, alongside a three-minute biographical video that stressed his military service, his conservative upbringing and his interracial marriage.
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Hunt said he decided to run because the race had become a “blood feud between Ken Paxton and John Cornyn” and that he would offer voters an alternative. He said that while Mr. Cornyn had succeeded in damaging Mr. Paxton’s standing in the polls, he had yet to improve his own numbers very much.
“They’re just slinging mud at each other,” he said. “I’m going to be the one that’s going to put the priorities of Texans first.”
Taking a swing at Mr. Cornyn, Mr. Hunt said his first priority if elected would be the repeal of a bipartisan gun control law that Mr. Cornyn helped negotiate after the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
“You cannot author gun control legislation in Texas,” Mr. Hunt said. Mr. Paxton has also attacked Mr. Cornyn on the issue.
That line of attack showed how Mr. Hunt’s entrance is likely to complicate Mr. Cornyn’s re-election effort. The congressman and the senator are likely to draw from the same pool of conservative voters who dislike Mr. Paxton because of his long history of legal and ethical entanglements.
“No one is happier this morning than the national Democrats,” Matt Mackowiak, a senior Cornyn campaign adviser, said in a statement, reflecting a widespread view that the Democrats would rather run against Mr. Paxton than Mr. Cornyn in the general election.
Mr. Cornyn’s campaign appeared to be ready for Monday’s announcement, issuing a statement attacking the congressman as “a legend in his own mind” almost as soon as Mr. Hunt posted his campaign launch video.
The Paxton campaign, however, welcomed Mr. Hunt to the race. “Wesley and General Paxton both know that Texans deserve better than the failed, anti-Trump record of John Cornyn,” said Nick Maddux, a campaign adviser to Mr. Paxton.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has been supporting Mr. Cornyn, had been urging Mr. Hunt for months not to run. The committee was already concerned that Mr. Paxton’s challenge was making the primary contest extremely expensive, drawing campaign cash away from general-election contests during a midterm election cycle that was expected to broadly favor Democrats.
The committee sent a memo in September to donors who had supported Mr. Hunt, telling them that they were wasting their money on a “vanity project that could cost Republicans control of the Senate.”
On Monday, the committee reiterated its support for Mr. Cornyn and its frustration with Mr. Hunt, promising a “full vetting of his record” in the Senate race.
Mr. Hunt, for his part, said he would not be upset if Mr. Paxton were to win the primary. “What we know about Ken Paxton is, he’s actually a conservative,” he said, implying that Mr. Cornyn was not.
Mr. Hunt, 43, has represented a wealthy, majority-white Houston district west of downtown since 2022, but he remains mostly unknown to voters elsewhere in the state. A poll conducted in late August by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin found that half of Republicans reached by pollsters had no opinion of Mr. Hunt, who at that time had not yet joined the Senate race.
He has pitched himself as a staunch conservative allied with President Trump, and representative of the Republican Party’s aspiration to attract more young voters, including those who are Black or Hispanic. At times, he has spoken openly about race and the history of slavery in the United States, presenting his own story of success as a ready-made response for Republicans to Democratic accusations of racism. Texas has never had a Black senator.
“Quite frankly, I don’t think Texans really care about race,” Mr. Hunt said in the interview on Monday.
He stressed the generational change that his candidacy would represent. “The United States Senate is not a retirement community, and the fact of the matter is, when John Cornyn first got elected into office, I was two years old.”
In an interview in 2022, he described his upbringing in a conservative Black military family and acknowledged voting in the Democratic presidential primary in 2008. Mr. Hunt said his primary vote that year was part of a conservative effort promoted by the radio host Rush Limbaugh to cause disarray in the Democratic ranks in that election, and that when it came time for the general election, he voted for Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for president.
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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