Paxton takes the stage at his Tuesday victory party.Tony Gutierrez/AP
When President Donald Trump endorsed Texas attorney general Ken Paxton earlier this month in his race to unseat four-term GOP Sen. John Cornyn, it fell to Lindsey Graham—as it so often does—to say the loud part loudest.
Sure, Cornyn is Graham’s colleague. And Paxton is a scandal-plagued hack lawyer who has been impeached by members of his own party; forced to take remedial ethics classes; admitted to breaking securities law; reported to the FBI by his employees; investigated by own his state bar association; and whose wife has filed for divorce on “Biblical grounds.” But what Graham actually feared about the prospect of Paxton winning their primary was telling. “I think we’ll win Texas no matter what,” the South Carolina senator told reporters. “The truth of the matter is, Paxton will cost more money.”
For now, it’s Cornyn and his national Republican allies who have just lit giant bags of cash on fire, spending at least $92 million to produce the single worst primary performance for an incumbent Senator in almost fifty years. Next up for Republican funders after Paxton’s victory on Tuesday is an expensive general-election against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico that could help decide control of the chamber.
Paxton’s win was not surprising, with Trump’s late endorsement perhaps more a reflection of the underlying realities than a determinative factor itself. But the margin was nonetheless stunning. Paxton won Republican voters by nearly two-to-one. Of the state’s 254 counties, all but one went for the AG. The exception was tiny Kennedy County—Cornyn carried it 6 votes to 2.
The GOP’s Texas nominee is remarkable for his willingness to do what is asked regardless of what might be proper.
Incumbents almost never lose like this. But it’s not even the only time it’s happened this month. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who angered Trump by voting for conviction at the second impeachment trial, recently became the first incumbent senator to finish outside the top two in a primary since the 1940s, according to the Downballot. Last week, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie lost by nine points after bucking Trump on the Epstein files and the Iran war. Before that, the president helped take out six Republican legislators in Indiana who had blocked his push to redraw the state’s voting maps. Trump is more unpopular than he’s ever been in the general electorate. But among Republican primary voters, the bond has never been tighter.
Trump has always hovered over the Texas race in instructive ways. Cornyn and his supporters spent most of last year running a series of extremely blunt and ultimately kind of amusing attack ads with the goal of tanking Paxton’s numbers and scaring the president away. After the first round of the primary, when Cornyn unexpectedly came out on top in a three-person field, Trump said he was going to endorse one candidate soon and ask the other candidate to drop out, so the party could unite against Talarico. Paxton was quick to say that he would consider dropping out if the Senate would pass the SAVE Act, an omnibus voter suppression and election-malfeasance bill that’s somehow also anti-trans. The SAVE Act didn’t pass and Paxton’s bluff was safe—and in the end, Trump took another month to endorse.
Cornyn’s trajectory is instructive, although there are vanishingly few pre-MAGA Republicans left to take note of it. He was a less partisan attorney general than Paxton, in his previous life in Austin. In his current one in Washington, Cornyn passed a modest, bipartisan gun control law after the massacre in Uvalde, and called Trump “reckless” after January 6th. A lot of people in the chamber seemed to respect him. There is not even a billow of smoke about a messy personal life. But there has also probably never been a point in the last two years of Trump’s rule where anyone has thought, Well, John Cornyn will put a stop to this. He, too, told a story about what MAGA does to Republican officeholders, about how people who might know better simply find a different version of themselves. When Democrats in the state escaped to Illinois last summer to deny quorum, it was Cornyn who suggested the FBI be used to track them down. This was the fallacy of his campaign—that in order to stop Paxton, he must essentially become him. But there was no substitute for the real thing.
As I explained in a profile of Paxton several years ago, the newly minted Republican nominee embodies something essential about the GOP in the age of Trump. He is remarkable not for his smarts or charisma, but for his willingness to do what is asked regardless of what might be proper. Shame can only hold you back. Under Paxton, the AG’s office has been a fully weaponized agency, that has launched frivolous but harassing investigations of voting rights groups and immigrant aid organizations; targeted Trump critics and Democrats; and built the legal foundation for overturning a presidential election. He has been elected over and over again by running against the enemies of Donald Trump and Christian nationalists—a Jewish Republican speaker; business-minded Republicans in the state legislature; a Bush scion; and now a white-haired elder statesmen who looked like someone who might broker a grand bargain even if he never really did.
It’s fitting that when Paxton was impeached in 2023, it was for allegedly using his office to benefit the interests of a single donor. While he was acquitted by the state senate and has denied wrongdoing, that kind of concierge service is the secret to his staying power. Increasingly, it’s just how you get ahead in Republican politics—not by blocking and tackling, or constituent services, or quietly building a reputation, but doing what is asked by the big guy.
Trump is who they want to be—saying and doing what he wants, making deals, getting rich. But Ken Paxton is all that most of them are: A bad lawyer looking to get ahead, background music in someone else’s story. After all, the Senate Republican caucus already includes two other former state attorneys general who signed the Texas AG’s shoddy brief seeking to throw out the results of the 2020 election. Graham and the rest will welcome him, even if it costs $100 million to get him there, because whoever was left of the old guard has retired or been forced out. There’s no more delusion about what a Republican senator is or needs to be in Trump’s second term: They’re all Ken Paxton now.
