Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s primary win, bolstered by President Donald Trump’s late endorsement, has come at a staggering price for Republicans—setting up an expensive fight in the general election while underscoring how thoroughly the party has reorga
For months, John Cornyn’s camp tried to make Ken Paxton feel like a liability too large to carry. Yet when Paxton walked onto the stage at his Tuesday victory party, the numbers told a different story: Republican primary voters backed him by nearly two-to-one.
Paxton’s win capped Trump’s late endorsement earlier this month in Paxton’s bid to unseat four-term GOP Sen. John Cornyn. And while Lindsey Graham—Cornyn’s colleague—assured reporters. “I think we’ll win Texas no matter what. ” Graham said the real risk was cost. “The truth of the matter is, Paxton will cost more money.”.
For now, Cornyn and his national allies appear to have turned that warning into a reality. To fight Paxton in the primary. Republicans spent at least $92 million and produced what the article describes as the single worst primary performance by an incumbent senator in almost fifty years. The fallout reaches beyond Texas. Next comes an expensive general-election contest against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico—one that could help determine control of the chamber.
The margin itself is what landed hardest. Of Texas’s 254 counties, Paxton won all but one. The lone exception was tiny Kennedy County, where Cornyn carried it by a narrow margin, 6 votes to 2.
Paxton’s campaign has long been defined by a willingness to do what is asked regardless of whether it might be proper. The article frames his record as scandal-plagued: Paxton has been impeached by members of his own party. forced to take remedial ethics classes. admitted to breaking securities law. reported to the FBI by his employees. investigated by his state bar association. and his wife has filed for divorce on “Biblical grounds.”.
The piece also connects Paxton’s outcome to a wider, unsettling pattern inside the GOP’s primary battles this month. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy—who angered Trump by voting for conviction in the second impeachment trial—became the first incumbent senator to finish outside the top two in a primary since the 1940s. according to the Downballot. Last week in Kentucky, Rep. Thomas Massie lost by nine points after bucking Trump on the Epstein files and the Iran war. Before that. Trump helped take out six Republican legislators in Indiana who had blocked his push to redraw the state’s voting maps.
Among Republican primary voters, the bond to Trump has grown tighter even as Trump remains more unpopular than he’s ever been in the general electorate, the article notes.
In Texas, the president’s shadow sat over the race in a very specific way. Cornyn and his supporters spent most of last year running a series of blunt attack ads aimed at tanking Paxton’s numbers and scaring the president away. After the first round of the primary. when Cornyn unexpectedly came out on top in a three-person field. Trump said he would endorse one candidate soon and ask the other to drop out so the party could unite against Talarico. Paxton quickly said he would consider dropping out if the Senate passed the SAVE Act. an omnibus voter suppression and election-malfeasance bill that’s also described in the article as anti-trans.
The SAVE Act didn’t pass, and Paxton’s bluff, as the article puts it, remained safe. Trump then took another month to endorse.
Cornyn’s own history, as portrayed here, makes the switch feel even more stark. In Austin, Cornyn had been a less partisan attorney general than Paxton. In Washington. the article says. Cornyn passed a modest. bipartisan gun control law after the massacre in Uvalde. and he called Trump “reckless” after January 6. There was even a sense that some in the chamber respected him. The piece insists there wasn’t much evidence that anyone believed Cornyn would stop the direction the party was taking.
Democrats in the state escaped to Illinois last summer to deny quorum. It was Cornyn, the article says, who suggested the FBI be used to track them down. In that telling, Cornyn’s campaign rested on a fatal idea: to stop Paxton, he would have to become him. But the piece argues there was no substitute for the real thing.
The article’s description of Paxton’s tenure is sweeping: it says the AG’s office has been “fully weaponized. ” launching frivolous but harassing investigations of voting rights groups and immigrant aid organizations. targeting Trump critics and Democrats. and building the legal foundation for overturning a presidential election. It also ties Paxton’s staying power to an allegation from his impeachment in 2023: the impeachment was for allegedly using his office to benefit the interests of a single donor. The article says he was acquitted by the state senate and has denied wrongdoing.
That alleged “concierge service” is presented as the secret to his power—an increasingly common route to advancement in Republican politics. according to the piece. Instead of blocking and tackling. constituent service. or quietly building a reputation. it says the pathway is to do what’s asked by the big guy.
Trump, it argues, is what those politicians want to be: saying and doing what he wants, making deals, getting rich. But in the article’s telling, Ken Paxton is the closest reflection most of them have—“background music in someone else’s story,” rather than the author.
The piece closes the circle by pointing to who Paxton is set to join. It says the Senate Republican caucus already includes two other former state attorneys general who signed the Texas AG’s shoddy brief seeking to throw out the results of the 2020 election. Graham and the rest. the article says. will welcome Paxton even if it costs $100 million to get him there. because the old guard has retired or been forced out.
It lands on the same blunt conclusion the title promises: “There’s no more delusion about what a Republican senator is or needs to be in Trump’s second term: They’re all Ken Paxton now.”
Ken Paxton John Cornyn Lindsey Graham Donald Trump SAVE Act Texas Senate James Talarico Bill Cassidy Thomas Massie Indiana voting maps 2020 election Texas brief