Bloody Texas Primary Will Stretch into Runoff as John Cornyn Fights for His Political Life

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has three more months to extend his Senate career beyond the two decades he’s already served, fighting to represent his longtime constituents who may have already left him behind.

Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) will battle on to a late May runoff, as neither topped 50 percent in Tuesday’s election. The runoff was expected after Rep. Wesley Hunt (R) jumped into the race late, forcing a three-way split. The Associated Press made the call just before 11 p.m. ET.

Cornyn’s sins are more aesthetic than policy-based — he touts in his $70 million ad barrage that he votes with President Trump 99 percent of the time. True, he was moved to vote for an extremely modest gun reform bill after some of his child constituents were gunned down at Uvalde, and once mused that “President Trump’s time has passed him by” (after voting to acquit him post-his Jan. 6 impeachment). Neither of those data points has endeared him to ever-more MAGA-fied Texas Republicans. 

But you get the sense that his real failing is less what he’s done (almost uniformly Trump’s bidding) and more how he carries himself — politely, sometimes gently. He says things like: “I believe that legal immigration has been a blessing for our country. It has made us who we are today, because all of us come from somewhere else.” He takes pride in bipartisan work, in calling himself a “workhorse.”  

In the Trump era, even this mild gentility feels sepia-toned. 

Paxton’s sins, alternatively, are in the doing. He boasts a Trumpian rap sheet of high crimes and misdemeanors: impeached by a Republican state House, investigated for securities fraud and bribery, accused by his state senator ex-wife of elaborate infidelity and using his office to cover it up. 

But where Cornyn is manners and institutionalism, Paxton is retribution and bombast. He’s turned his outpost in the attorney general’s office into the cradle of the culture war, indiscriminately spraying lawsuits at abortion providers and hospitals serving trans kids, at environmental regulations, at anything President Biden did, including winning the 2020 election.  

Republican voters, who have proven themselves giddy to vote for Trump because of and not in spite of his brutalities and decades of varyingly bad behavior, have seemed to find that acceptance of Paxton comes easy too — almost every poll out of Texas gave the attorney general the lead. 

For Cornyn, then, this three-month extension is less a fight for his own future — he is 74, and has already served as Texas attorney general and justice on the state Supreme Court besides his four terms in the Senate — and more a last gasp against the inexorable march of his party into the arms of (another) unfaithful, small, self-serving fraudster. A party where a lawmaker who votes with his president 99 percent of the time is still too heterodox. 

He makes little effort to conceal that his personal disdain of Paxton is the driving force of his campaign, after many expected him to retire when he missed out on the top Senate job to John Thune (R-SD). 

“If there’d been an honorable person who was serious and willing to do the job, I would have to think twice, cause all good things have to come to an end,” he told Politico, adding of his wife: “When she heard the alternative was Paxton, she said: ‘You have to run.’”

So John Cornyn will press ahead on honor, his future in the hands of Paxton’s progenitor — only a Trump endorsement can likely save him in a runoff, where the voting base is typically even more right-wing than that of a primary. 

And Democrats will cross their fingers that Paxton unseats the incumbent, that his dirty laundry and hard-right legacy make him toxic enough in a general election to put Texas on the table for the first time in over 30 years.