Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is doing two things vulnerable incumbent senators are not supposed to do eight months before their primary elections: He’s acknowledging that he’s in serious trouble ahead of next March’s contest and he’s making it personal. Very personal.
“I refuse to let someone of his character—or lack of character—represent Texas in the Senate,” Cornyn told The Wall Street Journal. “I consider this to be drawing a line in the sand.”
The character in question is that of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the most far-out figures of the MAGA-era GOP. He has generated a blizzard of criminal and civil accusations throughout his career, but has endeared himself to members of the Republican base with his pugnacious audacity in attacking establishment Republicans such as Cornyn, as well as Democrats, including leading the failed effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
With the end of the most recent criminal investigation into allegations of personal corruption, Paxton was set to challenge Cornyn, who is seeking a fourth term.
So why at the outset of this blossoming horse apple of a contest, is the Republican Party of Texas suing to close its own primary? Party bosses tried and failed to get the Republican-controlled state Legislature to change the law, so they are now claiming the open primary violates their constitutional freedom of association. Chair Abraham George told CBS News that the suit wasn’t about the Cornyn-Paxton blood feud and that a closed primary wouldn’t make “a big difference” in the outcome.
“I haven’t looked at any of the numbers,” he said. Perhaps we can be of service.
In one recent poll conducted for a MAGA-aligned group that limited its sample to past Republican primary voters, the attorney general led by 22 points. In another poll conducted at about the same time by Texas Southern University that left the doors open for independents, Democrats and others, Paxton’s lead was 9 points — 7 points if Rep. Wesley Hunt, a new MAGA media star on the right, gets in the race.
A loss by 7 points is just as much of a loss as 22 points, but it certainly points to the kind of primary atmosphere the Texas GOP would prefer, i.e. one that really, really dislikes Cornyn.
For Cornyn to win, he needs a lot of the remaining cards to flop in his favor. An endorsement from President Trump would be his best hope, but Trump so far has remained neutral, while warning that he would “make a determination at the right time.” That’s a victory for Cornyn in itself, but puts him in a precarious place: between two electorates.
In the closed primary that Paxton’s allies in the state party are trying to deliver, Cornyn probably couldn’t win, even with Trump’s endorsement. The Texas GOP has a Roy Moore kind of problem in Paxton. Alabama Republicans nominated Moore for Senate in 2017 despite Trump’s endorsement of the very electable incumbent so that Moore could go on to be the first Republican Senate candidate to lose a general election in Alabama since 1990.
Indeed, the Texas GOP is very different than it was in the days of dynastic Bushism when Cornyn himself was elected attorney general in 1998 or his first Senate campaign four years later. But Texas is getting less like Alabama when it comes to politics generally. No Republican presidential candidate has gotten less than 60 presidential vote in Alabama since 2000, while no Republican has done better than 60 percent in Texas since favorite son George W. Bush in 2004.
The real warning sign for Texas Republicans was in 2018, when Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke got close enough to Sen. Ted Cruz (R) to make them really sweat down in Houston. It ended up at a margin of a little less than 3 points, but it was the best proof yet of Democrats’ long and usually exaggerated claim of blue Texas rising. While Cruz fared substantially better against then-Rep. Colin Allred (D) in 2024, this is a midterm cycle, and whoever the Republicans nominate for Senate will face a smaller, more Democratic electorate than the one that came out for Trump last year.
That explains why the same polls that show Cornyn getting brained in the primary keep showing Paxton faring the worst in the general election. If the attorney general does advance to the next round, national Republicans will have to spend potentially $200 million to win a race Cornyn would win handily. And if Allred makes another run for it, he could be the first Democrat since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 to win a Senate race in Texas.
So that’s where we find Cornyn stuck between the two electorates, with only one way out: He has to change the first one.
Cornyn has Trump messaging guru Chris LaCivita ready to unleash what we can expect to be a prairie fire of a negative campaign against Paxton. That will go a long way to persuade those lightly attached Paxton backers. But what Cornyn really needs is to get lots and lots of voters who didn’t usually participate in Republican primaries to come in and water down the hardcore Paxton vote.
That sounds a little like a 2014 contest in Mississippi when then-Sen. Thad Cochran found himself in a primary runoff with a proto-MAGA challenger, or maybe even a little like how Sen. Lisa Murkowski won in 2010. He’s an underdog for sure, but if Cornyn can rally the independents and even Democrats who have been voting for him for Senate in general elections since 2002 to vote in an open primary while simultaneously torching Paxton’s reputation with negative ads, it’s a possibility.
And that’s the tight spot where he will find himself between now and March: staying in good enough graces with MAGA to keep Trump out of the race on Paxton’s side while simultaneously courting the non-Republicans he will need to join a primary stampede.