Texas AG Ken Paxton officially joins U.S. Senate race challenging John Cornyn

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday he will challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s midterm elections, setting up a barnburner clash of two Republican titans that is poised to reverberate across state and national politics.

The contest, teased by Paxton for months, promises to be among the most heated and expensive Republican primaries in the country and in recent Texas history. It also marks the latest flashpoint in a power struggle between the Texas GOP’s hardline, socially conservative wing — which views Paxton as a standard-bearer — and the Cornyn-aligned, business-minded Republican old guard.

Appearing on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s show, Paxton said it was “time for a change in Texas” as he announced his Senate bid and blasted Cornyn’s “lack of production” over his 22 years in the upper chamber.

“We have another great U.S. senator, Ted Cruz, and it's time we have another great senator that will actually stand up and fight for Republican values, fight for the values of the people of Texas, and also support Donald Trump in the areas that he's focused on in a very significant way,” Paxton said. “And that's what I plan on doing.”

Paxton’s candidacy poses the most serious threat to Cornyn’s political career in decades. It would mark a watershed moment in the Texas GOP’s factional struggle if Paxton — not long removed from an array of career-threatening legal battles and impeachment by his own party — managed to topple Cornyn, a mainstay of Texas politics who had an early hand in the state’s Republican takeover and reached the upper rungs of Senate GOP leadership.

Wasting no time framing himself as the outsider in the race, Paxton wrote on social media he was running to “take a sledgehammer to the D.C. establishment,” while calling for voters to “send John Cornyn packing.”

Cornyn has easily fended off competition from the right even as his party has taken a sharp turn in that direction. But now, the four-term senator is facing more serious heat over his support for military aid to Ukraine, his public skepticism about Trump’s electability ahead of the 2024 election, and his role leading Senate negotiations on a bill aimed at limiting gun violence that included a provision to tighten access to guns for those convicted of domestic abuse.

Still, Cornyn has remained defiant in the face of Paxton’s long-expected challenge and after losing his bid to become the next Senate majority leader — the first defeat of his political career.

Since then, he has taken on new committee assignments, putting himself on several key panels that will oversee major priorities of President Donald Trump. He ended last year with $4.1 million cash on hand, then launched his reelection bid last month with a video touting his time as Senate GOP whip “delivering the votes” for Trump’s “biggest wins” in the first years of his presidency. Those included Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

During Trump’s first term, Cornyn voted more than 92% of the time with the president’s agenda and voted for every one of Trump’s executive and judicial appointees. He has followed a similar pattern since Trump won back the White House, again backing all the president’s nominees, including controversial picks who attracted skepticism from GOP lawmakers.

A spokesperson for Cornyn’s campaign responded to Paxton’s announcement by labeling him a “fraud.”

“This will be a spirited campaign and we assure Texans they will have a real choice when this race is over,” the spokesperson said, adding that Texas needs “a battle-tested conservative” who “won’t be outsmarted by Chuck Schumer,” the Democratic minority leader.

As the Cornyn-Paxton clash gets underway, perhaps the biggest looming question is whether Trump will throw his support — and considerable clout in primaries — behind either candidate. The president’s endorsement has helped boost numerous GOP candidates in crowded Texas primaries since he became entrenched as the party’s most popular figure nearly a decade ago.

Paxton has long been a close ally of Trump, famously waging an unsuccessful legal challenge to Trump’s 2020 election loss in four battleground states. He also spoke at the pro-Trump rally that preceded the deadly U.S. Capitol riot in January 2021.

Paxton’s loyalty was rewarded with an endorsement from Trump in the 2022 primary, which helped the attorney general fend off three prominent GOP challengers, including then-Land Commissioner George P. Bush — who, like Cornyn, went to great lengths to court Trump.

Trump also came to Paxton’s defense when he was impeached in 2023 for allegedly accepting bribes and abusing the power of his office to help a wealthy friend and campaign donor. After Paxton was acquitted in the Texas Senate, Trump claimed credit, citing his “intervention” on his Truth Social platform.

The impeachment case was one of several political and legal storms Paxton has weathered within the last two years. Last year, prosecutors agreed to drop nine-year-old felony securities fraud charges against Paxton that had loomed over nearly his entire tenure as attorney general. In exchange, Paxton had to perform 100 hours of community service and pay restitution to those he was accused of defrauding when he allegedly solicited investors in a technology company without disclosing that the firm was paying him to promote its stock.

In January, the Texas Supreme Court dismissed the State Bar of Texas’s case against Paxton over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Lawyers from the bar’s Commission on Lawyer Discipline had sought to sanction Paxton for falsely claiming to have uncovered major evidence of election wrongdoing and, the bar lawyers argued, forcing battleground states “to expend time, money, and resources to respond to the misrepresentations and false statements.”

Paxton also closed the door recently on a federal investigation into corruption allegations lodged with the FBI by former Paxton aides, who reported Paxton over his alleged relations with Nate Paul, a friend and Austin real estate investor. The whistleblowers accused Paxton of abusing his office to do favors for Paul, including by hiring an outside lawyer to investigate claims made by Paul and providing him confidential law enforcement documents. The Department of Justice quietly decided in the final weeks of the Biden administration not to prosecute Paxton, the Associated Press reported last week.

Those same allegations formed the basis of Paxton’s impeachment, in which House investigators also claimed that, in return for favors from Paxton, Paul paid for renovations at an Austin home owned by Paxton and his wife and also employed a woman with whom Paxton was having an extramarital affair.

A final case remains unresolved: the whistleblower lawsuit from four deputies who said they were illegally fired for reporting Paxton to law enforcement. A Travis County district court judge awarded the aides $6.6 million last week; Paxton slammed it as a “ridiculous judgment that is not based on the facts or the law,” and vowed to appeal the “bogus ruling.”

Cornyn’s campaign spokesperson took aim at Paxton over the latter episode, saying, “Ken claims to be a man of faith but uses fake Uber accounts to meet his girlfriend and deceive his family.” The statement added that Paxton “says his impeachment trial was a sham but he didn’t contest the facts in legal filings,” a reference to Paxton’s effort to end the whistleblower lawsuit by stating he would no longer contest the facts of the case — despite the fact that the allegations by the whistleblowers were similar to the ones his lawyers had vigorously disputed during the impeachment trial.

Early polling points to a competitive race between Cornyn and Paxton. A January statewide survey by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs found that 36% of GOP primary voters “definitely would consider” pulling the lever for Paxton, compared to 32% for Cornyn. More voters said they “might consider” voting for Cornyn than Paxton, however, and a higher percentage said they “would never” vote for Paxton — 19%, compared to 15% who said the same about Cornyn.

Paxton is starting with stronger approval than Cornyn among conservative voters, according to a February poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. The survey logged 62% approval and just 12% disapproval for Paxton among those voters, compared to 45% approval for Cornyn and 26% disapproval. The attorney general was in especially good standing with voters who identified as “strong Republican,” a group that wields outsized clout in Texas’ low-turnout primaries; just 5% of them said they disapproved of Paxton, compared to 18% for Cornyn.

Cornyn has been vocal about Paxton’s legal troubles over the years. In 2022, days before Paxton’s primary runoff against challenger George P. Bush, Cornyn said he was “very disturbed” by Paxton’s then-unresolved indictment on felony securities fraud charges.

“This is the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Texas. And it’s a source of embarrassment to me that that has been unresolved,” Cornyn told reporters at the time.

Paxton doesn't have to give up his seat to run against Cornyn, but his congressional bid means he can't run for reelection as attorney general, since that election is also next year.

Katharine Wilson contributed to this report.

Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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