Paxton vs. Cornyn Is a Choice Between Two MAGA Flavors
Both are awful. Both are Trumpy. One also happens to be extravagantly corrupt.
THAT ESCALTED QUICKLY—eight days from an inconclusive primary to a Ten Commandments runoff attack ad.
It seemed like Donald Trump was going to make it easy for Texas Sen. John Cornyn by endorsing him promptly and making clear to state attorney general Ken Paxton that he needs to drop out. But so far, Trump hasn’t done anything, and Democrats are enjoying a political cage match that could last until the May 26 runoff.
Cornyn kicked it off in uncharacteristically fiery style with an ad that suggests he’s channeling a higher power. “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” says a God-like voice echoing through a church. “Thou shalt not steal.” “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” A narrator details Paxton’s many scandals, and news reports fill the screen. Tagline: “Defeat the crook.”
Democrats have been salivating to run against Paxton, for obvious reasons. And it could still happen—he’s leading Cornyn by 8 points in a new survey of likely voters. Still, Democratic nominee James Talarico has a decent chance of flipping this seat—and potentially flipping party control of the Senate itself—whether he ends up running against Cornyn or Paxton. Another new poll showed him edging past both of them.
A state representative, Protestant seminarian, and former teacher, Talarico created a statewide grassroots organization that drew huge turnout in the March 3 Democratic primary. That included Latino voters responding to Trump’s missteps and the Talarico campaign’s outreach (sometimes by the candidate himself in Spanish, though he calls his facility so-so and in 2019 apologized for being “rusty”). The party, meanwhile, is coming together. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Talarico’s primary rival, said Democrats “must rally around our nominees and win,” and pledged to do her part.
Furthermore, Talarico has the opportunity to be ruthless—in a factual, civilized, respectful way, of course—about Cornyn’s record of enabling Trump’s terrible policies and personnel choices. That’s an especially promising path given Trump’s sagging 45 percent approval rating in Texas, with 66 percent of independents and 49 percent of all voters in the disapproval column, in a poll last month by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
And that was before February 28, when Trump started a war against Iran that nearly six in ten Americans opposed. Before oil and gas prices spiked as a result of that war. And before the March 6 national employment report showed 92,000 jobs lost in February.
AT 74, MORE THAN TWICE TALARICO’S AGE, Cornyn is seen as a traditional, establishment Republican. But much like the Democratic primary rivals in Texas—Talarico and Crockett, a firebrand lawyer—the differences are less about policy than they are about style. Cornyn’s reasonable, mainstream image is reinforced by his demeanor and his long résumé in Republican politics: He was first elected to statewide office in 1990, twenty-six years before Trump was elected president. He served as a justice on Texas’s highest court and then as the state’s attorney general, long before Paxton came to that job. He spent eleven years as part of the GOP Senate leadership. And he succeeded in passing a bipartisan gun safety package after the 2022 Uvalde school shooting.
But that was later, when Democrat Joe Biden was president. Cornyn has bound himself tightly to Trump in his primary campaign with a “Trump-Cornyn Record” webpage touting 99.2 percent support for the president’s agenda.
He voted to confirm incompetent, unqualified, and dishonest Trump nominees, one after another: Yes to the recently fired ICE Barbie, Kristi Noem. Yes to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Yes to Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, and Russell Vought.
He voted no to ending the “national emergency” Trump invented as an excuse to impose a chaotic, random tariff regime that drove up costs for U.S. companies and consumers and was declared illegal by the Supreme Court.
He voted yes on last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”—with renewable energy cuts forecast to “significantly” raise energy costs for Texas households, shrink the state’s GDP, and bleed up to 94,000 jobs; along with Medicaid cuts that could end coverage for over 300,000 Texans in 2027, and threaten hospitals that depend on Medicaid payments.
He voted no on a War Powers Resolution to constrain Trump’s options in Iran—after the fact, rather than before the administration acted in violation of the Constitution, which in plain language gives Congress the power “to declare war.”
Trump now is holding the Senate hostage by insisting it pass the SAVE Act that requires proof of citizenship—a birth certificate or passport—to register to vote. Many people don’t have either document or the time and money to get one of them. It’s especially complicated for married women, whose birth certificates often don’t reflect their married name. And it’s unlikely to pass.
But it’s a top Trump priority so Cornyn is, of course, a vocal advocate—even reversing his longtime support for preserving the Senate filibuster, and its 60-vote minimum for passing most bills, in the interests of winning both the SAVE Act and Trump’s endorsement.
Unlike Cornyn, Paxton brings very heavy baggage to the race. He has been indicted for felony securities fraud, accused of bribery and abuse of office, investigated by the Texas Bar Association for claiming four states cheated in the 2020 election, impeached by the Texas House, acquitted by the state Senate in a trial that exposed an affair, and later accused of adultery by his wife (one of those state senators) in a divorce filing citing “biblical grounds.”
It’s easy to imagine Paxton, a leading 2020 election denier, as the candidate of Trump’s heart; the fellow bad boy he’d love to endorse. On the other hand, Cornyn has an attribute with proven Trump appeal: He looks like a TV version of a senator.
Cornyn has warned that Trump’s second-term agenda is at stake in Texas and painted himself as a steadfast MAGA ally. He has shown he is willing to indulge our authoritarian president in nearly every whim and to protect him from all consequences. Cornyn has none of the legal or ethics issues that make Paxton a tempting target. But his Senate record alone is enough for the Talarico ads to write themselves—in both English and Spanish.
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