John Cornyn, an ally of Senate leader emeritus Mitch McConnell, is relying on a familiar dynamic to ensure victory in a race where polling shows he may be down by as far as 22 points.
The Texas senator received a shot of adrenaline on Thursday. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, his Republican primary challenger, announced a separation and impending divorce from his wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, who cited “biblical grounds” for their differences.
It was a development that was as expected as it was laden with potential political opportunity for Cornyn, who is running behind his opponent even in a survey commissioned by the McConnell and John Thune-tied PAC, Senate Leadership Fund (SLF). Paxton went through a messy impeachment fight in 2023; he survived, but in documents published as part of the process, Uber records showing him traveling to the residence of an affair partner were made public.
Make no mistake: this is going to get ugly. Even if Cornyn himself doesn’t jump into the gutter, the groups tied to him and his allies happily will, as they try to use Paxton’s long history of personal and political scandals to weigh down and ultimately defeat the attorney general and would-be senator. The Texas Senate race is one (though not the easiest) of the avenues for Democrats to win back majority control of the Senate next year, a crucial step in halting the president’s legislative agenda.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) was the first dive in on Thursday. Like SLF, the NRSC is closely tied to GOP leadership and works to protect incumbent senators as well as back challengers to Democrats.
“What Ken Paxton has put his family through is truly repulsive and disgusting,” said Joanna Rodriguez, the NRSC’s comms director, on Thursday. “No one should have to endure what Angela Paxton has, and we pray for her as she chooses to stand up for herself and her family in this difficult time.”
And if Angela Paxton’s own statement is any indication, Thursday’s development stemmed from an as yet unreported conflict between the couple, given that she tweeted that her decision came “in light of recent discoveries” and her husband’s affair has been in the public eye for two years.
Yes, the seemingly obvious issue of “candidate quality” is rearing its ugly head again for the Republican Party’s far-right wing. Paxton, who is running a MAGA-aligned campaign against “RINO” Cornyn (without President Donald Trump’s endorsement, so far) is just the latest example of an ultra-conservative Republican who could be bogged down by personal scandal and whiff an otherwise winnable election. McConnell, retiring next year, has worked for much of his career to keep such candidates from his party out of general election contests, though not always with success.
In 2022, McConnell, then minority leader, famously downplayed his party’s chances of winning the Senate in that year’s midterm contests in an interview over the summer, months before the elections. He cited “candidate quality” as a key factor. Months later, after the election, he unloaded on Trump for being the source of that problem as he sought out Republicans who would put loyalty to him and his false claims about the 2020 election over other factors when awarding his endorsement.
“We ended up having a candidate quality test,” McConnell said in December of 2022, pointing to the defeats of Kari Lake in Arizona and Herschel Walker in Georgia.
He added: “Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in ’22 because the support of the former president proved to be very decisive in these primaries.”
Trump appeared to learn his lesson, at least somewhat, and in 2024 his party retook the Senate on the back of several of his endorsed candidates, such as Bernie Moreno in Ohio and Tim Sheehy in Montana. The party still ran Royce White, who got busted spending his previous campaign’s money at a strip club in Florida, in a race against Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota.
Cornyn, for his part, made clear earlier this year that he believes that a win for Paxton in next year’s primary would mean defeat for their party in the general election.
"I’m absolutely determined to run and to win — if I didn’t think I could win, I wouldn’t run," he said in late June, according to Houston Public Media. "I’ve simply labored too long in Texas Republican politics to turn the seat over to Democrats in November. ... Any suggestion that I’m thinking about dropping out of the race is false."
Democrats have not settled on a candidate yet, either. Colin Allred, a former congressman, is running again after losing to Ted Cruz in 2024. A recent poll conducted by the NRSC also tested the popularity of Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Rep. Joaquin Castro, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke against Allred’s, though none of the three have announced an intent to run.
Were any of the three to jump in the race it could set up two hyper-competitive primaries for the same seat next year.
