May 28, 2026
While MAGA candidate Ken Paxton’s win isn’t an assured victory for Democrats, he’ll at least embroil the GOP in a nightmare of its own making.
US Senate candidate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton waves to supporters as he takes the stage during a primary runoff election night watch party in Plano, Texas, on May 26, 2026.
(Smiley N. Pool / The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images)
Ken Paxton’s resounding win over long-serving Senator John Cornyn in the Senate Republican primary runoff in Texas is yet more evidence of Donald Trump’s personal stranglehold on the party. That this elevates the unpopular and toxically corrupt Paxton into a contest with the charismatic and cherubic Democratic nominee, James Talarico, suggests that the stranglehold has become a death grip.
I am less optimistic about Talarico’s chances in the fall than others, but I can assure you this: Paxton’s victory will blow a Texas-sized hole through Republican plans. It tears apart their Senate map, and it creates yet another disgruntled incumbent Republican with time in office on his hands and resentment to burn.
Trump’s most significant boost to Paxton’s campaign was his long stretch of quiet after the primary failed to push Cornyn into a clear victory—a silence that echoed his refusal to endorse incumbent senator Bill Cassidy’s ultimately doomed campaign for renomination in Louisiana. His blessing withheld, Paxton and Cornyn both competed to make the only case that matters to Republican primary voters these days: I’m the one most like Trump. And on that front, Paxton had the showiest, if not the most quantifiable, case.
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Cornyn’s voting record actually set him above fellow Texas Senator Ted Cruz in terms of supporting Trump’s policy agenda (99 versus 95 percent). But, unlike Paxton, Cornyn has been trapped by the slow and maddeningly collegial machinery of the Senate for decades. The structure of the institution makes it difficult to successfully avoid the taint of a bipartisan action. What’s more, Cornyn committed the offense of engaging in a little institutionalism, voicing tepid criticism of Trump as, you know, maybe bad for the party. (“Time has passed him by,” he whispered back in 2023.)
Paxton, on the other hand, has been dedicated to using his capacity as state attorney general to offer slavishly Trumpian stunts and empty PR grabs as long as he’s been in office. (Too late, Cornyn tried his hand at such embarrassing ploys, only to give off the flop sweat of a perpetual tryhard.)
Flip back through the press releases on the AG’s website and you’d be pardoned for thinking Paxton a Trump cabinet member or otherwise a direct flunky: He’s mentioned at least once every 10 releases or so, and not just in the context of well-known Trump pet projects. For every “Attorney General Paxton and America First Legal Join President Trump to Defeat California’s Attempt at Forcing Radical ’Green Energy’ Car Standards on America” there’s one touting a Trump agenda item you, and maybe Trump himself, didn’t know about: “Attorney General Ken Paxton and Trump DOJ Secure Historic Antitrust Settlement with Agricultural Data Broker to Lower the Prices of Meat Products.” Also no doubt attractive to Trump was Paxton’s singular obsession with suing Beto O’Rourke over O’Rourke’s Democratic fundraising operation, a campaign that allowed Paxton to call O’Rourke a “loser” in official state documents—and peevishly refer to him as “Robert Francis O’Rourke.” (O’Rourke ultimately succeeded in getting Ken Paxton’s suit dismissed.) Even Paxton’s historic and breathtaking level of corruption probably put him on Trump’s good side.
Trump’s explicit if tardy endorsement of Paxton on May 19, a day after early voting started, was no surprise, but it undoubtedly pushed Cornyn’s loss into straight-up embarrassment territory. It also gave Paxton coattails: Two other statewide runoffs pitting a kind-of-Trumpy candidate against a more florid character both wound up tipping toward the more MAGA candidate. The race to fill Paxton’s seat saw Representative Chip Roy, who endorsed Ron DeSantis in 2024, go down to a state senator with no courtroom experience and lots of money who branded himself as “MAGA Mayes” Middleton.
In the more obscure race for Texas railroad commissioner, a Trump acolyte candidate so objectionable he was decried by the Texas lieutenant governor succeeded over the incumbent. Last June, Bo French posted a poll to X, asking, “Who is a bigger threat to America?” With two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.” In response, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called for French’s resignation as the Tarrant County GOP chair. Now French is the Republican commission chair nominee. The railroad commissioner seat is a quietly powerful sinecure that, confusingly, oversees the gas and oil industries; its primary relationship to traditional GOP interests has been in not actually overseeing those industries that much. But French has said he’ll use the power of the office to “defend Texas, stop the Islamic invasion, and defeat the left,” presumably using scraps of metal from the 10,000 abandoned oil wells in the state.
All of this is worth rehearsing because, obviously, the exact same record that helped Paxton grind Cornyn’s career to fine dust and propelled the most MAGA candidate onto November ballots will be a powerful weapon in the fall.
Before getting further into the good news, we might as well address two sunny assumptions that out-of-state Democrats seem to be making about why Paxton is such a delicious opponent: first, that his weak fundraising haul against Cornyn means he’ll have trouble putting up cash against Talarico, a darling who pulled in the biggest fundraising haul of the campaign off Paxton proclaiming victory. Second, that there will be some slice of Republican voters so disgusted with Paxton that they’ll sidle over to Talarico.
Both of these happy forecasts are untrue, but they are untrue in ways that offer their own kind of hope.
- Paxton will raise money just fine—and it will come at the cost of every other seat the Republicans are trying to either flip or protect. According to Time, Republicans on the Hill are whispering about shelling out an estimated $250 million just to hold the seat. Figuring that Democrats are prepared to put up that kind of cash—and Talarico does seem set to draw in such sums—that sets the Senate race up to become the most expensive in American history. This draws out of the Democrats’ coffers as much as Republicans’, but, crucially, Republicans were not planning on having to defend the seat.
- Republican voters gonna Republican. The thought of peeling off former Cornyn voters engages in the sort of wishcasting that put Kamala Harris on stage with Lynn Cheney. Polls prior to the election showed that 90 percent of Cornyn voters would vote for Paxton if he got the nomination. Two percent said they would vote for Talarico. (And the margin of error for the poll was almost 3 percent.) But what hopeful progressives need to remember is there just aren’t that many dedicated Republicans left.
Demographics are trending strongly in Democrats’ favor in this regard. A New York Times analysis has suggested that national-level gains among both Latino voters, a full 25 percent of the Texas voter cohort, and white voters have put Texas in play for similar reasons that (expensive, and ultimately purple) George now is.
The question isn’t whether Talarico wins but what it costs Republicans that he can credibly compete.
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There are numbers and there are vibes, and the national repercussions of Paxton’s win might be felt along the taut strings of grievance more than the solid ground of polls and fundraising totals. Imagine with me a scenario in which Cornyn goes the route of other politicians recently toppled by a Trump-endorsed opponent: In the wake of his defeat, Thomas Massie promised to read the names of the Epstein victims into the Congressional Record and teased being able to prove that Melania knew. Following his, Cassidy poked at Trump in his concession speech, noting that he was in fact conceding rather than “claim[ing] the election was stolen.” Later, Cassidy laughed off a reporter’s question: “Do you think Trump has been honest with you?”
Cornyn embarrassed himself—such humiliations can be salved by either retreat or churlishness. The former party whip could still have enough hustle to bend a few equally disgruntled colleagues into something resembling at least soft resistance. That he was bumped off by a man with the morals of a ground snake might put the MAGA movement on Cornyn’s fighting side. He’s found some level of courage before. Yes, at a micro level, I believe it is more possible to peel off Cornyn than those who showed up to vote for him yesterday.
With all the reasons that Texas seems winnable, it’s tempting to forecast a Talarico victory, straight up. But that’s not the most certain success on the table.
A $500 million race that drains the RNC, forces it to defend Bo French to the world, and produces a free-agent Cornyn is a different kind of Republican victory than the party wanted. Trump won the runoff. Whether he can survive his own win is an open question.
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