Could Republicans blow the Texas Senate race?

The Democratic primary is contentious, but the winner might get a shot at the sort of candidate who cost the GOP the Senate in 2022.

This man, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, shown in 2022 at the U.S. Supreme Court, might be the next Senator from Texas. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Voters will go to the polls in Texas next week — many have already voted early — and most of the attention has been on the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, where Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico are locked in a tight and increasingly nasty battle. But that Democratic primary isn’t necessarily just a fight for the silver medal in November. Texas is a potentially winnable race for Democrats, in part because Republicans have plenty of problems of their own. In fact, the smart money is that incumbent Sen. John Cornyn will lose his job. So let’s cover the Republican primary today, and we’ll have a story about the Democrats in your inbox later this week.

After every election, political commentators come up with countless theories for why the losing party failed. There’s usually a fair amount of disagreement about the correct lesson. But for 2022, a year when Republicans actually lost a seat in the Senate despite facing an already unpopular Joe Biden, it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that Republicans shot themselves in the foot by nominating a bunch of less-than-stellar candidates. It wasn’t the party’s only problem — the backlash triggered by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also hurt the GOP — but still, they lost winnable Senate races in Georgia and Pennsylvania in part because they nominated flawed candidates like Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz.¹

The Republican primary in Texas is giving strong 2022 vibes. Cornyn — an establishment figure who has a close relationship with Mitch McConnell and broke with Senate Republicans by not joining lawsuits challenging the certification of 2020 election results — is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is something of a MAGA darling and was recently endorsed by Turning Point USA, although President Trump hasn’t endorsed any one candidate in the race (more on that in a bit).

Paxton is also a scandal-magnet. And by scandals, I don’t mean missing a few votes in the Texas Senate:

• Paxton has allegedly cheated on his soon-to-be ex-wife (herself a member of the Texas state Senate) with two different women.

• To cover up the first affair, he allegedly abused his office to help a friend and real estate developer. In exchange, the developer hired Paxton’s girlfriend and helped the two meet in secret using a shared Uber account.

• The Texas House impeached Paxton over these corruption allegations, although he was acquitted by the Senate in 2023.²

• Paxton was also charged with securities fraud in 2015. The charges were dropped in 2024 after he agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution and complete some community service.

Cornyn will (probably) make it to the runoff

Although Cornyn is a favorite to lose eventually, don’t expect him to be officially knocked out next week. The race has gotten more complicated since U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt threw his hat in the ring in October. Hunt is also coming at Cornyn from the right, but his biggest scandal actually is about missed votes. More importantly, a three-way race makes it unlikely that any candidate will receive more than 50 percent of the vote next week. That means the top two candidates will advance to a runoff on May 26.

In an average of recent polls, Paxton leads with 32 percent of the vote compared to 28 percent for Cornyn and 21 percent for Hunt. (This is pretty much a straight average, but I did weight more recent polls more heavily.³) Only one poll this year has shown Cornyn leading the race — and it was sponsored by a pro-Cornyn Super PAC.

The caveat here is that primary polls are historically error-prone, and Paxton’s lead is small enough that a normal-sized polling error could give Cornyn the top spot. More importantly, around 15-20 percent of respondents are undecided across recent Texas Republican primary polls. If those voters break toward Cornyn, he could win — though prediction markets have Paxton as the clear favorite.

Of course, coming first in the first round of a runoff is a purely symbolic victory. The more important question is whether Cornyn could miss the runoff altogether. He’s struggled since the race began despite vocal support from Republican leadership and the national party. Of the seven Republican primary polls released this year, Cornyn came third in two of them, and there’s been meaningful spending on attack ads against Hunt. Still, given Cornyn’s 7-point lead over Hunt in the polls, on average, he has good odds of at least eking out a 2nd-place finish.

But at this point, you might be thinking that a long-time incumbent struggling to break 30 percent in the polls in a three-way primary against two opponents running in a similar lane is an ominous signal for the eventual runoff, when he’d only face one of them. You’d be right.

Paxton is in pole position

The most likely runoff matchup is Paxton vs. Cornyn. Obviously, the worst-case scenario for Cornyn is being eliminated in the first round, but facing Paxton head-to-head isn’t much better. (Nor is Cornyn vs. Hunt, but that’s a less likely outcome.)

Why? Because both Paxton and Hunt are running as MAGA true believers, more in touch with the Texas Republican base and against the old-school establishment-coded Cornyn. When Paxton isn’t making headlines because of a scandal, he’s making them by spending more than $6 million suing the Biden administration and instructing Texas schools to display the Ten Commandments. Not to be outdone, Hunt’s campaign website homepage features no less than three photos of Donald Trump.

The upshot is that both Paxton and Hunt are competing for the same voters who are dissatisfied with Cornyn. If Hunt, for example, is eliminated in the first round, his voters will probably break toward Paxton, further cementing the attorney general’s lead. Cornyn has tried to prevent this eventuality by embracing Trump’s second-term agenda. The first thing you see on his campaign website is “Sen. John Cornyn Votes with President Trump 99% of the Time.” But it’s likely too little too late.

Most pollsters have tested hypothetical runoff matchups after asking about the three-way primary. Based on an average of those two-way polls conducted since Hunt entered the race, Paxton currently leads Cornyn by about eight points. True, 16 percent of voters are still undecided, but Cornyn would need to win about 75 percent of them just to break even with Paxton.

Going up against Hunt wouldn’t be any better: Cornyn gets essentially the same vote share in both comparisons. What about the establishment’s nightmare scenario where Cornyn goes out in the first round? It’s a closer race, but Paxton still leads Hunt by about three points. So the clear frontrunner, based on the polls, is Paxton. He’s highly likely to make the runoff, and is favored against either of his potential opponents.

That doesn’t mean the runoff outcome is a foregone conclusion. Particularly if the Democratic nominee is Talarico, who is likely to have more crossover appeal than Crockett, what’s left of the old-guard GOP establishment will pour money into the runoff in a last-ditch effort to avert giving Democrats a juicy opportunity against Paxton or Hunt. This Senate primary (including the Democratic side) is already the most expensive on record.

So far, however, establishment Republicans’ investment doesn’t look like it’s paying off. Indeed, Cornyn has massively outraised and outspent his opponents. Even looking at just their campaign accounts, Cornyn ended 2025 with about $6 million in cash on hand, compared to $3 million for Paxton and only $800k for Hunt. And that comparison undersells Cornyn’s monetary advantage. He’s backed by Senate GOP leadership and the NRSC, and his allies have spent nearly $50 million on advertising since July. But Cornyn hasn’t been able to convert his funding advantage into meaningful additional support.

So if not money, what could save Cornyn’s campaign? Well, there’s one force in the Republican party more powerful than $50 million dollars: it starts with a “T,” ends with a “P,” and has a penchant for long red ties. Yes, an endorsement from Trump might have been the only shot Cornyn had at frontrunner status.

For months, Trump said he would stay out of the race. But after Democrats flipped a Texas state Senate seat Trump won by 17 points in 2024, he said he was “taking a serious look” at making an endorsement. It’s unclear who Trump wants to see as the next Texas senator, but you’d imagine there’s a rigorous debate going on between the angel and the devil on his shoulders. Senate leadership is practically begging for Cornyn, but Trump’s instincts might be to go with a diehard supporter like Paxton. In the end, he cut the baby in half (into thirds?) with a blanket endorsement: “They’ve all supported me. They’re all good, and you’re supposed to pick one, so we’ll see what happens. But I support all three.”

How beatable would Paxton be?

The logic of investing so heavily in Cornyn is predicated on his being a meaningfully stronger general election candidate than Paxton. Is that true?

To level-set, anyone who wins the Republican Senate nomination will be a favorite in November. Based on the current D +5.4 generic ballot average, our state-level benchmark for Texas is R +5.4. Even if Democrats gain another five points between now and November, the environment in Texas would still only be neutral.

That said, Democrats can marginally improve their odds by nominating a candidate with the best chance at overperforming — we’ll have more on that for you soon.⁴ And Republicans might make the blue team’s job easier by nominating a weaker one.

Cornyn, for what it’s worth, isn’t an electoral superstar. According to Split Ticket, his wins above replacement (WAR) in 2020 was D +0.7 (meaning he underperformed expectations by about half a point). Hunt grades out similarly on this metric (he underperformed slightly in 2024 but overperformed in 2022 and 2020).

Split Ticket doesn’t publish WAR for attorney general candidates. Luckily, we can bring out our new SB Scores to compare each candidate against how the Republican presidential candidate performed in their state or district.⁵ Paxton slightly overperformed in his first two races for attorney general, but in 2022 he underperformed expectations by 2.8 points. In comparison, Cornyn overperformed our presidential baseline by an average of 7 points across his two most recent races. In their one overlapping race (2014), Cornyn ran 9 points ahead of our baseline compared to Paxton’s 2.7. Hunt has also been a consistent overperformer based on his SB Scores.

There are other reasons why you’d prefer Cornyn to Paxton in a general election. Most obviously, Cornyn is an incumbent — and there’s probably still somewhat of an incumbency advantage in these races even if it’s getting smaller. And he’s going to be more appealing to Texas independents than a conservative firebrand like Paxton.

Paxton’s scandals will also take up oxygen during the campaign. (They already feature heavily in Cornyn’s attack ads.) The last time I wrote about political scandals, my general conclusion was that they matter a lot less than they used to. But they can still weaken a candidate, which could be meaningful if 2026 ends up being a sufficiently large blue wave.⁶

Of course, the big difference between this case and 2022 is that Texas is much further away from being a swing state than Pennsylvania or Georgia. Republicans can afford to lose a few points on the margin without blowing the race. But it’s clear that the GOP hasn’t ended its love affair with “unique” candidates — to put things politely.

1. You can also find non-Senate examples like Kari Lake’s Arizona gubernatorial campaign.

2. CORRECTION: the article initially stated that Paxton was impeached by the Texas Senate. He was actually impeached by the Texas House of Representatives but acquitted by the Texas Senate.

3. DDHQ’s more sophisticated average also has Paxton with 32 percent compared to Cornyn’s 28 percent.

4. Candidate quality also matters for downballot races. Even if Democrats lose the Senate seat, a weak candidate could hurt the party in local races.

5. For presidential years, a candidate’s SB score is simply their margin compared to the presidential margin. For midterms, we use an average of the preceding and following presidential margin, adjusted for changes in the national environment.

6. Jay Jones won the 2025 race for Virginia attorney general in spite of a major scandal, but he still ran nearly nine points behind the Democratic gubernatorial candidate.