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 has already served, struggling to represent his longtime constituents who may have already left him behind.

Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) will fight a runoff in late May, with neither having topped 50 percent in Tuesday’s election. The runoff was expected after Rep. Wesley Hunt (R) entered 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 political: He boasts in his $70 million advertising barrage that he votes with President Trump 99 percent of the time. True, he was pushed to vote for an extremely modest gun reform bill after some of his child voters were shot in Uvalde, and he once thought that “President Trump’s time had moved on” (after voting for his acquittal following his January 6 impeachment). None of these data points endeared him to the increasingly MAGA-loyal Texas Republicans.

But there is a sense that his real failure lies less in what he did (almost uniformly Trump’s will) than in how he behaves – politely, sometimes gently. He says things like: “I believe that legal immigration has been a blessing to our country. It has made us who we are today, because we all come from somewhere else.” He prides himself on bipartisan work and calls himself a “workhorse.”

In the Trump era, even this gentle nobility seems sepia.

Paxton’s sins, on the other hand, are happening. He has a Trumpian record of high crimes and misdemeanors: impeached by a Republican state House, investigated for securities fraud and corruption, accused by his ex-state senator wife of elaborate infidelity, and using his office to cover up the affair.

But where Cornyn represents good manners and institutionalism, Paxton represents vengeance and pomposity. He has turned his outpost of the attorney general’s office into the cradle of the culture war, indiscriminately launching lawsuits against abortion providers and hospitals serving trans children, against environmental regulations, against everything President Biden has done, including his victory in the 2020 election.

Republican voters, who were enthusiastic about voting for Trump because of, not in spite of, his brutality and decades of varying degrees of bad behavior, seemed to find that accepting Paxton was also easy—nearly every poll in Texas had the attorney general leading.

For Cornyn, this three-month extension is therefore less of a fight for his own future – he is 74 years old and has already served as attorney general of Texas and a justice of the State Supreme Court in addition to his four terms in the Senate – and more of a last gasp against the inexorable march of his party into the arms of a (another) little faithless and selfish fraudster. A party where a deputy who votes with his president 99 percent of the time is still too heterodox.

He makes little effort to hide that his personal disdain for Paxton is the driving force behind his campaign, after many expected him to retire after missing out on the top Senate job to John Thune (R-SD).

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

John Cornyn will therefore advance on honor, his future being in the hands of Paxton’s ancestor – only an endorsement from Trump can probably save him in a runoff, where the electoral base is generally even further to the right than that of a primary.

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