Ken Paxton, a twice-impeached attorney general who spent years fighting corruption allegations in court and in the press, will be the Republican nominee for the United States Senate from Texas — a result that simultaneously confirms Donald Trump’s iron grip on the GOP and opens what party strategists have privately feared for months: a credible Democratic path to flipping a seat Republicans have held for decades.
Fox News and CNN called the race within minutes of polls closing Tuesday.
Cornyn, a four-term senator and former Republican whip who had represented Texas in Washington since 2002, entered the runoff as the prohibitive favorite. He carried the backing of major donors, the institutional Republican apparatus, and two decades of accumulated Senate seniority. None of it was enough. Trump endorsed Paxton, and the race was effectively over before it was formally decided.
“Tonight, we’ve made history,” Paxton told supporters after the result came in, calling Trump’s endorsement “the most powerful force in politics.”
He is not wrong. This month alone, Trump-backed primary challengers removed Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie from office. Cornyn becomes the latest — and arguably the most senior — Republican to discover that institutional standing inside the party means nothing if the president has decided it means nothing. He is also the first Republican senator from Texas to lose his own party’s nomination for re-election, a distinction that is likely to end his Senate career when his term expires next year.
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Cornyn’s trouble was partly biographical and partly political. He had criticized Trump publicly in the past, and his support for bipartisan gun legislation in the wake of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting — a massacre that killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in his own state — cost him with a base that has grown intolerant of any cross-aisle accommodation. Paxton, by contrast, built his political identity around MAGA loyalty, surviving his own 2023 impeachment by the Republican-led Texas House and a subsequent acquittal by the Texas Senate to emerge as one of Trump’s most reliable allies.
“Tonight, we’ve come up short,” Cornyn said simply when reporters caught up with him after the call. He added that he had always supported the Republican ticket and intended to do so again — a concession statement so brief it functioned almost as an epitaph.
The legal and ethical cloud that trailed Paxton through the primary does not dissolve now that he has a nomination. He faces allegations of bribery and misconduct that his acquittal did not definitively resolve, a high-profile divorce that played out publicly, and an impeachment proceeding that was itself driven by members of his own party. He has dismissed all of it as politically motivated. That argument worked inside a Republican primary. Whether it holds in November is an entirely different calculation.
His general election opponent is Democratic state Representative James Talarico, 37, who has spent the campaign building crossover appeal with moderate and independent voters — a strategy explicitly designed to exploit the vulnerabilities that Paxton’s nomination creates. An internal Republican Senate campaign memo circulated last year warned in direct language that a Paxton candidacy could give Democrats a genuine opening in Texas and force the party to pour resources into defending a seat it has never had to seriously defend.
Paxton acknowledged as much himself, with a candor that sounded more like a fundraising alarm than a victory speech.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, I will be the Democrats’ number one target in November,” he said. He predicted Talarico would raise more money than any Democratic Senate candidate in the country and urged his supporters to give immediately.
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Talarico wasted no time. Within minutes of the race being called, he posted on X that Paxton was “the most corrupt politician in America” and invited Cornyn’s supporters to find a home in his campaign. “You have a place in our campaign,” he wrote — a direct play for the Republican establishment vote that Cornyn commanded and that Paxton never really wanted.
Texas has 40 electoral votes and has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. That streak is now the central question of the American political autumn.