U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt wants Republican voters who may be unfamiliar with him to know that he’s much more like Attorney General Ken Paxton than he is like incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
The long-shot Republican faces off against the two political giants this March for the U.S. Senate primary. Publicly he’s presenting himself as a younger Paxton with a longer political runway. Privately, his backers are noting he also lacks Paxton’s scandals and baggage.
“Me getting in this race ensures that you’re going to have a conservative warrior [in the Senate],” Hunt said in an interview. “Ken Paxton has been just that. The only thing that I think will be really different, quite frankly, is our age.”
Hunt, 43, believes his age enables him to do something Paxton, 62, cannot — serve at least three terms implementing President Donald Trump’s America First agenda.
The age question has roiled Democratic politics since octogenarian President Joe Biden’s political implosion last year, but Hunt believes a reckoning is happening on the Republican side as well. Republican voters are clearly willing to elect elderly politicians — Trump is 79, six years older than Cornyn, 73 — but Hunt said Trump has intentionally selected younger proteges like Vice President JD Vance, 41, with the future of the movement in mind.
“Ken is not an old man by any stretch of the imagination,” Hunt said. “However, he is limited, because he’s 20 years my senior. And what I want to tell people all day, every day, is that the United States Senate is not a retirement community…The President is building a coalition of young, America First fighters to continue to carry on his legacy after he has gone. And I think I am positioned perfectly to do just that.”
Hunt even told Texas Monthly he was “fine” with himself or Paxton taking the seat, but that Cornyn would not win the primary.
To win his underdog bid, Hunt will need to siphon off enough support from both candidates. Public polling of the race that includes him shows that Hunt pulls fairly evenly from Cornyn and Paxton.
But his ire has been far more trained at the former. And the feeling seems to be mutual; a Paxton adviser welcomed Hunt to the race in a statement, while a Cornyn adviser called Hunt a “legend in his own mind.”
“Watching John Cornyn and [Senate Leadership Fund] have a complete meltdown when I entered the race and revert to ad hominem attacks, memos that are sent to donors, and watching them freak out just tells me that we are right over the target zone,” Hunt said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “We’re doing exactly what we need to do, and the right people are getting upset.”
Hunt is quick to draw contrasts with Cornyn, who has been in the Senate since Hunt was an undergraduate at West Point and has been the subject of ridicule from right-wingers over his support of a bipartisan gun safety bill, among other issues. Cornyn, Hunt said, was too slow to embrace President Donald Trump’s comeback bid, too supportive of assistance to Ukraine and too soft on gun rights.
Texas’ senior senator endorsed Trump after he won the New Hampshire primary in 2024; Hunt offered his support in November 2022. Cornyn voted for various Ukraine aid packages, while Hunt has voted against them at every turn.
“Senator Cornyn has not seen a Ukraine spending bill that he didn’t love,” Hunt said. “In fact, I almost wonder if Senator Cornyn should be the ambassador to Ukraine at this point.”
Political scientists said Hunt’s strategy to attack Cornyn but not Paxton is understandable — the Cornyn campaign is already spending money to negatively define the attorney general — but it may end up diluting the anti-establishment vote.
“This was a race about who can capture the grassroots and the most committed conservative voters in an effort to essentially provide a more conservative alternative to Cornyn,” said Joshua Blank, the research director at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas-Austin. “The fact that Hunt has jumped in and essentially put himself as an alternative to Cornyn makes a lot of sense. The real challenge is going to be, can he make himself a viable and reasonable alternative to Paxton? Because I think that’s really the tougher needle to thread here.”
“This race cannot be about a blood feud“
Texas’ Republican Senate primary has been contentious from the start, since Paxton announced a right-wing challenge to Cornyn in April buoyed by double-digit polling leads. But head-to-head polls have tightened significantly since the summer, now showing a neck-and-neck.
Cornyn and his allies have pumped close to $30 million into the race, promoting the senator’s pro-Trump voting record and attacking Paxton’s character and scandals. The attorney general was impeached — and acquitted — by the Texas Legislature in 2023 over bribery and abuse of public office charges. Paxton was also indicted in 2015 on state securities fraud charges; he pleaded not guilty and the charges were ultimately dropped last year.
The attorney general has dealt with a series of negative headlines this year, including the announcement of his divorce from his wife in the Texas Senate in the wake of allegations of infidelity, the revelation that he is allegedly claiming multiple homes as his primary residence on mortgage records and a renewed focus on the wealth he has accumulated over his time in office.
“I think [Hunt’s] trying to let the obvious difference between him and Ken Paxton go without saying — that is, the implicit difference is that he is not corrupt,” said Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University. “But I understand why he doesn’t want to make that point explicit, because a lot of GOP primary voters think that Ken Paxton has gotten a raw deal and been persecuted by the establishment.”
A recent poll from the University of Houston and Texas State University showed both the opportunities and challenges Hunt faces. Conducted before he got into the race, Hunt sat in third at 22%, to Paxton’s 34% and Cornyn’s 33%. But head-to-head general election tests of various Republicans and Democrats in the race showed Hunt with larger margins of victory against each Democrat in the race than Cornyn or Paxton.
Texas’ Senate primary is one of the few contests where Trump has not put his thumb on the scale.
“Under no circumstances did the President tell me to get in this race [or] tell me not to get in this race,” Hunt said. “He has said nothing to me. And so I am viewing this as an opportunity to earn the Texas primary voter, and Trump has stayed out of it to let this play out.”
Hunt’s main challenge will be boosting his name recognition in a race against two men who have appeared on statewide ballots for years — nearly three decades in the case of Cornyn, and since 2014 for Paxton. To that effect, Hunt and his allies have spent close to $7 million since February running ads in media markets around the country. But the clock is ticking — Texas has the earliest primary in the country, on Mar. 3.
“It’s going to be hard for him in terms of lack of name ID and also just the time,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist who managed Cornyn’s reelection campaign in 2014 and called Hunt impressive. “We have the holidays coming up, early voting starting in January. He just doesn’t have a lot of runway to get his name out there.”
Hunt’s campaign has been spending money quickly, far outpacing his fundraising efforts in the third quarter. He raised $366,145 in the third quarter and spent close to $1.9 million — including $1.2 million on ad buys — and has $1.5 million on hand going into the end of 2025. The Cornyn campaign, by contrast, has $6 million on hand in its official campaign account.
Many Republican strategists, including groups in Washington that are backing Cornyn, argue that Paxton has too many liabilities for Republicans to trust him in a general election. Hunt said the electability argument is part of his pitch to Texas primary voters.
“We can’t afford to play games with this Texas seat,” he said. “We absolutely have to win, and I’m already winning it by the largest margin — and I just got into this race again. I’m the person that’s the America First patriot that stood with President Trump on Day One, that can win the primary without it costing the party tons of money.”
Outside of an age difference, the one contrast he drew with Paxton was a difference in focus on the oil and gas industry.
“This campaign, and this race, cannot be about a blood feud between Ken Paxton and John Cornyn,” he said. “And nobody — neither one of them, to be frank with you — is talking about the number one industry in Texas, and that is the oil and gas industry.”
The Cornyn campaign has swiped back at Hunt, calling out his record of missing votes in particular. In the 118th Congress, Hunt missed 16.4% of votes, according to GovTrack, while Cornyn missed just 2.4%. Hunt has defended himself for the missed votes by noting that his son spent time in the NICU in 2023, and that he was on the road campaigning for Trump in 2024. Hunt has continued to be absent at a high rate in 2025, missing at least 20% of votes in each quarter of the year, per GovTrack. Hunt’s campaign said most of his missed votes come on Mondays, when the House typically votes on non-controversial suspension bills and he is responsible for child care because his wife, who is a nurse practitioner, has a hospital shift.
“I think the primary voter is less interested in me missing roll call voice votes and renaming post offices, and more keen to try to figure out if their next senator is going to support gun control legislation, not support the border wall and vote for more Ukraine funding,” Hunt said.
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