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Trump’s Texas Senate Primary Win Is Going to Backfire Spectacularly

While MAGA candidate Ken Paxton’s win isn’t an assured victory for Democrats, he’ll at least embroil the GOP in a nightmare of its own making.

US Senate candidate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton waves to supporters as he takes the stage during a primary runoff election night watch party in Plano, Texas, on May 26, 2026.

Ken Paxton’s resounding win over long-serving Senator John Cornyn in the Senate Republican primary runoff in Texas is yet more evidence of Donald Trump’s personal stranglehold on the party. That this elevates the unpopular and toxically corrupt Paxton into a contest with the charismatic and cherubic Democratic nominee, James Talarico, suggests that the stranglehold has become a death grip.

I am less optimistic about Talarico’s chances in the fall than others, but I can assure you this: Paxton’s victory will blow a Texas-sized hole through Republican plans. It tears apart their Senate map, and it creates yet another disgruntled incumbent Republican with time in office on his hands and resentment to burn.

Trump’s most significant boost to Paxton’s campaign was his long stretch of quiet after the primary failed to push Cornyn into a clear victory—a silence that echoed his refusal to endorse incumbent senator Bill Cassidy’s ultimately doomed campaign for renomination in Louisiana. His blessing withheld, Paxton and Cornyn both competed to make the only case that matters to Republican primary voters these days: I’m the one most like Trump. And on that front, Paxton had the showiest, if not the most quantifiable, case.

Cornyn’s voting record actually set him above fellow Texas Senator Ted Cruz in terms of supporting Trump’s policy agenda (99 versus 95 percent). But, unlike Paxton, Cornyn has been trapped by the slow and maddeningly collegial machinery of the Senate for decades. The structure of the institution makes it difficult to successfully avoid the taint of a bipartisan action. What’s more, Cornyn committed the offense of engaging in a little institutionalism, voicing tepid criticism of Trump as, you know, maybe bad for the party. (“Time has passed him by,” he whispered back in 2023.)

Paxton, on the other hand, has been dedicated to using his capacity as state attorney general to offer slavishly Trumpian stunts and empty PR grabs as long as he’s been in office. (Too late, Cornyn tried his hand at such embarrassing ploys, only to give off the flop sweat of a perpetual tryhard.)

Flip back through the press releases on the AG’s website and you’d be pardoned for thinking Paxton a Trump cabinet member or otherwise a direct flunky: He’s mentioned at least once every 10 releases or so, and not just in the context of well-known Trump pet projects. For every “Attorney General Paxton and America First Legal Join President Trump to Defeat California’s Attempt at Forcing Radical ​’Green Energy’ Car Standards on America” there’s one touting a Trump agenda item you, and maybe Trump himself, didn’t know about: “Attorney General Ken Paxton and Trump DOJ Secure Historic Antitrust Settlement with Agricultural Data........

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