Texas Republicans Roll the Dice with Paxton

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

 

There isn’t much more to add to tonight’s Texas GOP Senate primary, not after the reams of text already written here about the implication of Republican voters’ choice: The race was called the second polls closed in El Paso at 8 p.m. Central (an hour later than the rest of the state) and was a blowout in favor of Ken Paxton, who as of this writing is defeating incumbent Senator John Cornyn by over 24 percentage points.

 

By resoundingly selecting the scandal-tarred state attorney general over Cornyn, Texas Republicans have decided to roll the dice in an incredibly high-stakes game — and all to win a prize of dubious value.

 

There are many reasons why Texas Republican primary voters — a self-selectingly small subset of the voters who typically pull the lever for Republicans in general elections — have decided to jettison Senator Cornyn for a man who has countless scandals and public disgraces to his name. Most of the ones Paxton’s supporters will offer — wild claims that Cornyn is a secret amnesty-pushing gun grabber — are transparently farcical. Really it is about something more elemental and subrational: the fact that he represents the “old” in a primary environment where MAGA demands the new and the different — whether such candidate promises miracles or constitutional revolutions.

 

Meanwhile, Paxton has also proven extremely adept at playing to the frustrations of Texans who have grown to hate the Austin/Houston axis of state power. Paxton hails from the far outer suburbs of northeast Dallas but speaks with the disaffected populist voice of rural Texans, whom he has proven extremely good at persuading over the years by leaning into MAGA (which postdates him) and portraying himself as a persecuted martyr of “mini-Trump” proportions.

 

The fact that the race wasn’t terribly close suggests that it wasn’t Trump’s endorsement that nudged Paxton over the line; as I suggested earlier, Trump picked Paxton because he knew Paxton was going to win, and now he can claim credit for backing the winner. But even if Ken Paxton didn’t win this primary because of Trump’s intervention, Trump has every right and reason to claim him as one of his own: Paxton’s sordid and disgraceful career would have collapsed in any other era — this is a man who was impeached as attorney general by his own party a mere three years ago — and really only exists as a collateral result of the Trump phenomenon.

 

So Donald Trump can go to bed tonight satisfied that he has once again been vindicated in his supremacy among the Republican primary electorate: Truly, he can “pick ’em” in the primary, wielding the powers of the presidency as he does. But can he pick winners in the general election? That record is decidedly more mixed. Until then, expect an enormous amount of media attention to suddenly shift to the Lone Star State, as legacy media and activists alike converge on the new and unexpected center of the American political universe.