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U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who is seeking a fifth term, is facing one of the toughest Republican primaries of his long political career, with serious challenges from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Houston-area U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt.
The latest campaign finance reports from the Federal Election Commission show Cornyn leading the field with nearly $5.9 million in cash on hand, compared to roughly $3.7 million in Paxton's coffers and less than $779,000 in Hunt's. But the latest independent poll shows Cornyn trailing Paxton by 7 percentage points.
Who would Trump support?
The three main candidates and their allied super PACs have spent tens of millions of dollars on advertising since Paxton announced he was challenging Cornyn, the incumbent, last April. But after months of Paxton and Cornyn running neck and neck, the latest poll by the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs found 38% of likely GOP primary voters back Paxton compared to 31% who support Cornyn and 17% for Hunt.
"Over the past couple of months, the Cornyn campaign and its allies have spent a considerable amount of money attacking Wesley Hunt, and the Hunt campaign and its allies have done the same with Cornyn," said Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute of Public Policy and co-author of the Hobby School survey. "Paxton hasn’t been unscathed, but he hasn’t received much incoming fire at all from Hunt, and while he’s received [fire] from Cornyn, it doesn’t seem to have really changed things too much in the sense that his supporters are sticking with him overall."
Many of the arguments in the Republican Senate primary seem to boil down to the question of which candidate will most support President Donald Trump and his agenda.
"[Cornyn's] never liked Trump," said Paxton in a late-January appearance on The Mark Davis Show. "He didn’t want him to win the 2016 [election], I’ve got clips of that. He didn’t want him to win in 2024. He suggested he was a criminal. There’s nothing about John Cornyn that’s real right now. It’s all fake to win a primary, because he knows that the voters like Donald Trump."
Hunt has made a similar case against Cornyn, though in his case, it's to make the argument that, as a younger candidate, he's better poised to carry Trump's agenda ahead over the long term. Cornyn just turned 74 years old, while Paxton is 63 and Hunt is 44.
"There’s a reason why our vice president is 41 years old," Hunt said in a recent appearance on Newsmax. "There’s a reason why our secretary of state is in his early 50s. There’s a reason why our secretary of war is in his mid-40s. Because President Trump understands that we’re going to need leadership for the future, not just now, but for the next 8, 12, 16 years."
The question of which candidate Trump would support is no small matter. The Hobby School survey found 55% of likely GOP primary voters would be more likely to vote for a Senate candidate who has Trump's endorsement.
"I don’t expect him to weigh in," said Bill Miller, an Austin-based political consultant who has worked with both Republicans and Democrats. "He’s very close to Ken Paxton, and John Cornyn is a sitting senator, and [Cornyn's] professed his love for Trump now. [Trump's] getting the best of all possible worlds."
Cornyn's strength may also be his biggest weakness
Paxton and Hunt have both criticized Cornyn's statements during the 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns – and after Trump's loss in 2020 – that they say showed less than full-throated support of Trump. But Cornyn himself has stressed his legislative record is one of near total support for the president.
"There’s a lot at stake with President Trump’s second term of office. I’d like to continue to help him accomplish his priorities and goals," Cornyn said in an interview with Houston Public Media last month. "Unfortunately, my opponents are people who, frankly, just want to join those ranks of performance artists who want to come to Washington, D.C., and want to become famous, get the most clicks on social media and raise money, but the job entails a whole lot more than that."
Cornyn voted to acquit Trump in both of his Senate impeachment trials. He says he's concerned about the prospects of a third Trump impeachment if Democrats recapture Congress, which he thinks is more likely if Paxton becomes the GOP Senate nominee.
"And I think the attorney general has discredited himself,” Cornyn said. “He claims to be a victim, but strangely enough, most of the things that has happened to him, like his impeachment, like a referral by his own senior staff to the FBI for interfering in a criminal investigation, and blowing up basically his own family, are the result of his own mistakes and misdeeds."
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That's a line that Cornyn and his supportive political groups have been pushing since Paxton entered the primary. But Miller, the political consultant, says it's not gaining much traction with likely GOP primary voters, who tend to see Paxton as the more conservative candidate.
"The striking thing about Ken Paxton is all these events, and if you add them, individually or collectively, they haven’t changed his ability to win elections. Not just win but win handily," Miller said.
Cornyn, who previously served as the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, has secured billions of dollars in federal funding for Texas over his nearly 24 years in the Senate. That includes $13.5 billion as part of Trump's 2025 signature tax and spending package to reimburse Texas for state spending on border security infrastructure under President Joe Biden.
"Cornyn's biggest weakness is his strength, which is his longevity," said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a creature of the institution. He comes from central casting for what a senator should look like, but ultimately, the party has gone through a number of revisions over the last, at least, decade-and-a-half that in some ways make Cornyn's approach to politics a little bit anachronistic."
Pivoting to the hard, anti-Muslim right
Cornyn appears to be concerned enough about winning the primary that he's joined Paxton and Hunt in catering to growing anti-Muslim sentiment among likely GOP primary voters. Gov. Greg Abbott has labeled the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a terrorist organization, and Paxton has asked a judge to shut down the group's operations in Texas.
"Republican voters have consistently expressed openness to hostility towards Muslim communities," Blank said. "This focus on a threat from Muslim communities, however small they may be, dovetails pretty conveniently with a focus on the rights and privileges of Christians in America. And that’s been a big part of Republican Party politics, especially part of Republican primary politics in this state."
Cornyn has released an ad, which doesn't mention either of his campaign opponents but does target CAIR, accusing it of trying to promote Sharia law in Texas and weaving in footage of ISIS.
"What John Cornyn, Ken Paxton and others are doing is tripping over each other to see who can be more anti-Muslim, who can stir up more fear of Texas Muslims in order to win votes," said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and member of CAIR Action, a political organization aligned with CAIR.
Mitchell said the Republican Senate candidates are putting a bullseye on the backs of the state's 300,000-plus Muslims, and he said Cornyn in particular should know better, having worked with Muslims over his long tenure in the Senate.
"John Cornyn is mixing pictures of ISIS, the extremist group, with a reference to CAIR, our civil rights group, even though ISIS quite literally called for the assassination of CAIR's director because we spoke up against their terrorism," Mitchell said. "John Cornyn knows what he’s doing. It’s defamatory, it’s dangerous, and he should be better than this."
Cornyn's campaign declined to comment on the ad beyond the press release that accompanied it.
Both Paxton and Hunt declined to be interviewed for this story.
A window of opportunity for Texas Democrats
As for who ultimately benefits from all the negative politics, the answer may be the Democrats. The Hobby School poll shows both Paxton and Cornyn leading in hypothetical general election matchups with either Democratic U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett or Democratic state Rep. James Talarico. But in each case, the Republican advantage is within the margin of error.
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It's all but certain the three-cornered Republican primary contest will result in none of the contenders emerging with a clear majority of the vote on March 3. That would mean a runoff between the top two GOP vote getters on May 26. Most analysts expect those will be Paxton and Cornyn, a view that the Hobby School poll supports.
"In a runoff between Paxton and Cornyn, Paxton holds an 11-point lead — not an insurmountable lead, but one that would clearly let him be the frontrunner coming out of the March 3 primary," said Jones of the Baker Institute.
By the time a GOP runoff election takes place, the Democratic nominee is likely to have been decided for more than two months.
"I think that’s the best thing that [Texas Democrats] could hope for is that the Republicans self-destruct," Miller said, "or are destructive toward one another during the primary and weakens him immeasurably for the fall. That’s how you win the race if you’re a Democrat these days in Texas."
The Texas Newsroom's Blaise Gainey contributed to this report.
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