In mid-May, around two weeks before the Texas Republicans’ Senate primary runoff election, state Attorney General Ken Paxton dropped yet another ad smearing his opponent, incumbent John Cornyn, for having “turned his back on President Trump.” Accompanied by a cinematic score, replete with intense, brassy blasts (BRAAAM!), the ad spliced together Cornyn admitting “the idea of a [border] wall is somewhat off-putting to a lot of people” and that “in politics, unless you can win an election, you’re pretty much irrelevant.”
These aren’t exactly barn-burning statements. The latter is only scandalizing, to some, because he was referring to Trump’s odds of winning in 2024. (He was, of course, wrong.) On practically every other level, Cornyn is about as orthodox a neoconservative as they come—trafficking the same revanchist, free-market dogma as decades of Republicans before him. (After the U.S. Supreme Court decision to repeal Roe v. Wade, for instance, he tweeted, “Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education.”) But in his 24 years as senator—six of which were spent as Republican whip, the second-highest ranking position in the Senate Republican Conference—the ground has shifted beneath his feet. This isn’t to say the party “left him,” as other longtime politicians have lately complained. If anything, Cornyn has gone great lengths to keep with the times, and in an increasingly cloying manner.
On May 12, he introduced a bill to rename U.S. Highway 287 to “Interstate 47,” in honor of Trump’s term as the 47th president. A day prior, he downplayed his previous opposition to lifting the federal gas and diesel tax after Trump floated the idea to combat costs due to his war in the Gulf. And online, the septuagenarian frequently rails against Democrats with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It’s all somewhat undignified, but these are undignifying times.
Compounding the second-hand embarrassment is the fact that, thus far, Trump has avoided endorsing Cornyn—though The Atlantic claimed Republican strategists “expected” it was coming in early March. (It wasn’t the first rumor of this sort.) While Cornyn has far out-raised his opponent, the latest poll from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs shows Cornyn trailing Paxton by three points.
Trump, for his part, has been uncharacteristically quiet. The day after the primary, he congratulated himself on Truth Social: “My Endorsements within the Republican Party have been virtually insurmountable!” (He endorsed more than 130 primary candidates across Texas, most of whom won.) In the coming days, he indicated that he would “be making my Endorsement soon” in the race between “John and Ken,” but he has been virtually silent on the matter since. Both candidates have done all they could to tie their masts to the president, but the president has refused to do the same.
Paxton is, according to the aforementioned ad, “the conservative fighter they couldn’t cancel.” The “they” here refers to a sizable cohort within the Texas Republican Party—and maybe his ex-wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, who divorced him last July “on biblical grounds” (i.e. adultery). When it comes to the general election against the Democrats’ choir boy, James Talarico, most polls agree that Paxton is weaker than Cornyn, due largely to all of the former’s dirty laundry.
In 2015, less than a year into his first term as attorney general, Paxton was indicted on securities fraud changes. In 2020, seven of his most senior staff members accused him of “abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” A couple years later, he was impeached by a Republican supermajority state legislature, only to be narrowly saved by the state senate. In 2023, federal prosecutors tried picking up where the impeachment left off, but weeks before Trump took office, the Department of Justice decided against pursuing charges. One might think this record would damage him in the eyes of voters—and in fact, Cornyn’s cohort is banking on it—but, as Paxton’s campaign website states (directly above a photo of himself with Trump), “He’s taken the hits and kept fighting,” again and again and again.
In an excellent Texas Monthly piece, Christopher Hooks argued this “may have set in motion a subtle shift in the way Republicans here think about [Trump] and plan for the post-Trump era.” Whereas a decade ago Trump was the insurgent candidate bulldozing the Republican establishment, today he is the party establishment, and “a short-termer, if not yet a lame duck.” Come November, the race against Talarico may actually prove competitive; it’d make more sense for a president approaching the midterms to fall in with the more palatable candidate—to prioritize “electability,” broadly construed—but that would snub the very crowd Trump relied on to consolidate power. In a state that has for years represented the bleeding edge of the conservative movement, the MAGA coalition isn’t exactly fraying so much as adjusting based on the signals it receives from the grassroots, and those signals, slowly but surely, are falling out of alignment with what Trump needs.
While powerful in its own right—and supercharged in recent years—the Texas Office of Attorney General is, for the most part, a springboard to other roles in government. Before reaching the Senate, Cornyn himself left a cushy job on Texas’s Supreme Court for the office, where he stayed from 1999 to 2002, only to be replaced by Greg Abbott, who held the role from 2002 until sweeping into the governor’s office in 2015. Together, Abbott and Paxton contorted the role into a hyper-disruptive arm of conservative lawfare, incubating future candidates like Senator Ted Cruz and training the next generation of federal judges. (Paxton boasts about having sued the Biden administration “over 100 times.”)
In between cudgeling Texas’s Democrat-led cities into compliance, however, Paxton has also targeted the “legal frameworks” established by former state Attorney General Cornyn. A recent analysis by the Texas Observer showed Paxton overruling Cornyn’s opinion that gave discretion for demographics to be considered in higher education, which of course elicited a “sprawling” screed on so-called DEI. Soon thereafter, he withdrew Cornyn’s 2001 opinion making room for noncitizens to get occupational licenses; Paxton accused him of having “put Texans last by rolling out the red carpet for the invasion of our state.”
Democrats haven’t won a statewide seat in Texas for over thirty years; that this so-called “invasion” of Texas has apparently continued under their watch is invariably blamed on other figures, local and national. But more recently, the target of Republicans’ ire has been other Republicans—and whether they’ve gone far enough.
While the issue of immigration has somewhat faded in importance among Texas voters, the goalposts among Republican leaders have shifted toward new and old fears of “Islamification,” mirroring the split within the MAGA movement surrounding H-1B visas, which allow employers to hire foreign workers for “specialty occupations.” H-1B visas have, improbably, reared their head as an issue among the candidates for the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil regulator, though of course they aren’t within the office’s purview. Not for nothing, H-1B visas were a policy of George Bush Sr., signed into law in 1990. One generation of Republicans created the “problem” that the latest one now wants to fix.
In late April, a Republican strategist spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity to assess the Texas Senate race. In their view, it was “a mess,” and a “failure by multiple entities to do their part.”
I’d argue that failure is part of its function. The beating heart of right-wing activism in Texas has for years relied on the animus created in reaction to the region’s rapacious appetite for growth to deepen its base. When there isn’t a Democrat to blame, the ire turns toward “Republicans in name only,” which is applied mostly to the veterans of the Bush era, and more recently toward the Tea Party elite like Ted Cruz, who still appears to be licking his wounds after Tucker Carlson’s thrashing on his podcast.
For decades, Texas’s political class got rich off the fat forked over by oil magnates and technocapitalists, real estate moguls and logistics empires. It overlooked most of its residents’ living conditions in favor of tax incentives aimed at enticing international investment. But the secret to their success was—and still is—their willingness to eat their own.
