Ken Paxton Topples John Cornyn in Texas GOP Senate Runoff, Ending a Political Era

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton routed Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday's Republican primary runoff, a watershed result that ends nearly a quarter-century of Cornyn's dominance over Texas politics and hands the state's restive conservative base one of its biggest scalps yet. The Associated Press called the race for Paxton shortly after 8 p.m., about an hour after most of the state's polls closed.

The defeat makes Cornyn, who was first elected to the Senate in 2002 and once served as the chamber's No. 2 Republican, the first GOP senator from Texas to lose his party's nomination for reelection. For a candidate who spent the better part of a year casting himself as a steady, reliably conservative workhorse, the loss was a stinging repudiation delivered by an electorate that has grown increasingly hungry for confrontation.

"Tonight, we just sent a Texas-sized message to Washington," Paxton told supporters, framing the win as the start of a longer campaign rather than its culmination. "Tonight is not the end of the campaign. Tonight is the beginning of the fight to preserve every value we hold dear." Cornyn, conceding, reached for scripture, paraphrasing the Apostle Paul: "I fought the good fight. I finished the race, I kept the faith."

The decisive factor, by most accounts, was President Donald Trump. After both men spent more than a year openly lobbying for his blessing, Trump waited until the eleventh hour to throw his weight behind Paxton — a move that landed more than two months after the March primary, in which Cornyn had finished about 1.5 percentage points ahead of the attorney general. Trump made little secret of his grievance with the incumbent. "He was not supportive of me when times were tough," Trump said of Cornyn.

Paxton's ascent is remarkable given the legal and personal baggage he carries. He spent years under indictment on securities-fraud charges, survived a 2023 impeachment by the Texas House over allegations of bribery and abuse of office, and has weathered a steady stream of controversy throughout his tenure as attorney general. Democrats have made no secret of their belief that those liabilities make him beatable in November.

That general election now pits Paxton against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico of Austin, a former teacher and seminary student who has built a national profile and led Paxton in several recent surveys. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted its rating of the Texas Senate race from "likely Republican" to "lean Republican" in the wake of the runoff — a modest but telling acknowledgment that a seat Republicans have held without interruption for three decades is suddenly, at least in theory, in play.