John Cornyn enters critical window to change trajectory of Texas Senate primary against Ken Paxton

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WASHINGTON — With the Senate shutting down for the month, Sen. John Cornyn jetted from Washington to Texas for the 22nd August recess in his career last weekend, trying to ensure it’s not one of his last.

The interlude is the last prolonged break in the Senate calendar before the end of the year, creating a critical window for Cornyn, locked in a battle for his political survival, to make up ground in his primary against Attorney General Ken Paxton. Voters throughout the state are now seeing millions of dollars worth of positive Cornyn ads from allied groups as the might of the Cornyn machine — including the Republican establishment in Washington — kicks into gear.

Cornyn’s campaign is testing the theory that Paxton’s polling lead — a double-digit margin in most public surveys — can be closed through making voters aware of Paxton’s legal and ethical baggage. The eyes of the GOP apparatus will be on Texas this summer as he puts that plan in motion ahead of a December filing deadline and early March primary — the first in the nation.

It’s not just voters that Cornyn hopes to move. While the contest will be decided by the millions of Republicans who go to the polls in March, both candidates — as well as Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, who is considering entering the race — have in many ways been competing for an audience of one. The specter of an endorsement from President Donald Trump, whose imprimatur is perhaps the most powerful tool in GOP politics, has loomed over the primary from the outset.

Trump has yet to weigh in, but is reportedly following the race closely. Cornyn is one of just three sitting Republican senators who have announced reelection campaigns and have yet to draw the president’s endorsement.

Down in the polls, numerous operatives said Cornyn and his allies need to show Trump he can narrow his deficit. Cornyn himself has acknowledged as much, saying he hopes Trump will be ready to back him once his advertising blitz helps tighten the race. Paxton, a longtime Trump ally who challenged the 2020 election results on his behalf, is aggressively pursuing the president’s endorsement as well, according to a source in his camp.

“All I know is, [Trump’s] not ready to make one,” Cornyn said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “In fairness, we’ve got some work to do, and we're doing what we need to do.”

Groups supporting Cornyn have spent about $8 million on advertising thus far, in both Texas and Washington, with a wave of ads displaying Cornyn and Trump together and promoting Cornyn as Trump’s loyal partner in the Senate.

“They're not doing it to try to win voters over,” an unaffiliated GOP consultant said. “They're trying to do it to, frankly, keep the White House and the president from throwing Cornyn overboard.”

Both men have embraced Trump in an attempt to appeal to the GOP base. Pro-Cornyn ads have heavily featured the president and noted the senator’s record of voting with Trump’s stated position 99% of the time, while Paxton recently went as far as a Scottish golf course in search of time with Trump, CNN reported.

Cornyn, drawing on his decades-long history in the state, is consolidating the Republican establishment, rolling out a series of endorsements from Texas institutions like the National Border Patrol Council, Texas Alliance for Life, a coalition of agriculture groups like the Texas Farm Bureau, and former Gov. Rick Perry.

And while groups affiliated with Senate Republicans always protect their own, the level of vitriol that the National Republican Senatorial Committee — the Senate GOP’s campaign arm — has unleashed against Paxton has been notably intense. The NRSC, fearing Paxton could put the seat in play for Democrats or at least redirect funds away from other states, has gone after the attorney general over everything from his wife’s recent divorce filing to mortgage fraud allegations to his European travel.

Paxton, a MAGA darling who has gone to war with the Texas GOP old guard, lacks institutional support but has a polling lead to work with. And his camp believes Cornyn’s reputation among Trump’s core base is damaged beyond repair. Paxton has attacked Cornyn over his support for a bipartisan gun safety bill in the wake of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting and comments casting doubt on Trump’s electability ahead of the 2024 presidential contest.

“Republican primary voters are smart enough to know in Texas that just because every six years Cornyn comes and gets real conservative for a year and a half, he has a 30-year record,” a Paxton strategist said.

But Cornyn’s team believes the primary is a matter of educating voters — on Cornyn’s conservative voting record and Paxton’s ethical liabilities — and that they have the resources to do it. As Cornyn allies batter the airwaves, the coming months will serve as a test of that theory.

“I need to remind people about what I've done in my record, and we also need to remind people about my opponent's record,” Cornyn said. “And if we do that successfully, which is going to entail paid media, then we'll win.”

The Cornyn offensive

Outside groups backing Cornyn have begun deploying their war chests in recent weeks.

Through the end of July, One Nation, a group affiliated with Senate Republican leadership, had spent over $4 million in advertising. Texans for a Conservative Majority, a pro-Cornyn super PAC, has pumped another $3.2 million in, while another Cornyn outside group, Conservative Majority Project, has added about $500,000.

Nearly $3.7 million of that money has been spent on pro-Cornyn broadcast and cable television ads.

The Cornyn campaign itself has only spent about $250,000, likely holding its powder for the run-up to the primary, when TV stations offer discounted rates to campaigns, but not PACs or outside groups.

A national GOP operative backing Cornyn acknowledged that Paxton has a floor of diehard supporters, but believes there is a large enough universe of undecided voters to power a Cornyn win. The senior senator has appeared on Texas statewide ballots seven times, always emerging victorious.

“Voters who may not be supporting Cornyn right now have voted for Cornyn in the past and very well could vote for Cornyn again, as long as they are convinced that they don’t like Ken Paxton more,” the operative said.

Neither Paxton’s campaign nor the main super PAC supporting him — Lone Star Liberty PAC — have gone up on the air yet. From their perspective, spending now, when primary voters are not paying close attention, would be a waste.

“Unlike Cornyn and Hunt, we don’t have to spend and waste money in July of an off year to try to raise our name ID or improve our image,” said the Paxton strategist, who noted that Paxton has high favorability ratings and near-universal name recognition with Republican primary voters.

In ads, Cornyn and his allies have attacked Paxton over an array of moral, ethical and political issues, including his wife Sen. Angela Paxton’s recent divorce filing, an alleged extramarital affair and allegations of mortgage fraud. Cornyn has also accused Ken Paxton of not being aggressive enough toward Texas Democrats who recently left the state to block a GOP redistricting effort.

Despite those liabilities, voters have twice returned Paxton to his statewide post. He was most recently reelected in 2022 by a 10-point margin, amid felony securities fraud charges and an FBI investigation that have since been dropped or fizzled.

Many of those charges were laid out publicly — including Paxton’s alleged infidelity — in his 2023 impeachment trial, after which he was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Texas Senate.

Cornyn’s team believes the bulk of GOP primary voters are still unaware of his challenger’s record.

“Really highly engaged people, people that work in politics, know some or a lot of these things,” a source close to Cornyn said. “We think most voters don't. And the reason we think that is that Paxton’s never had a TV ad or radio ad or a mail piece run against him that’s negative at scale on a statewide basis. Obviously, this will be the first race where that's the case.”

In addition, some Paxton scandals — like his claiming multiple homes as his primary residence on mortgage records, first reported by The Associated Press — are new. But the notion of him being dogged by ethics issues is not. And some Republican operatives think Paxton’s scandals are already priced in — and he’s leading regardless.

Shelby Williams, the former GOP chair in Paxton’s native Collin County, noted this was one of the contentions during Paxton’s impeachment trial: that voters already knew about his alleged wrongdoing and elected him regardless.

“For the most part, it's already baked into the cake,” said Williams, who is running for a county commissioners court seat and staying neutral in the Senate primary.

To the extent there are portions of the electorate unaware of Paxton’s record, Williams said, those same voters may also not be up to date on charges from Paxton and other right-wing activists — including those in the state GOP organization — that Cornyn is insufficiently conservative.

“That goes both ways as well,” Williams said. “There are people within the Republican Party of Texas who are trying to educate people about Senator Cornyn's voting record, which they may take exception to.”

GOP establishment goes nuclear

In Washington, Senate Republican leaders have deployed their two biggest political organizations to aggressively boost Cornyn, who is a former member of Senate GOP leadership and the upper chamber’s fifth-most senior Republican.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s communications director Joanna Rodriguez has excoriated Paxton in a series of public statements. After news of his wife’s divorce filing broke, Rodriguez said, “What Ken Paxton has put his family through is repulsive and disgusting.” On the mortgage fraud allegations, she said, “A lot of people who trust Ken Paxton get lied to.” And the NRSC has repeatedly referred to Paxton’s “incompetence” on issues including his response to Democratic legislators fleeing the state.

The NRSC could find itself in the awkward spot of having to boost Paxton’s candidacy next fall if he emerges from next year’s primary. But half a dozen operatives told the Tribune that the group is rightfully motivated by fears of Paxton’s general election liabilities, which they argued would put Texas’ Senate seat in play for Democrats. Those strategists pointed to GOP Sen. Ted Cruz’s narrow margin of victory in 2018 — 2.6 percentage points — the last midterm election during a Trump presidency. Paxton was reelected as attorney general that year by 3.6 points, a tighter margin than in most other statewide contests.

Even among those who believe Paxton would win — just by a smaller margin than Cornyn — the fear is that outside Republican groups would need to spend significant money in Texas to hold the seat. Republicans will be defending an open Senate seat in North Carolina and the one held by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, both of which are expected to be competitive. They are also looking to target vulnerable Democratic Senate seats in Michigan and Georgia, contests expected to generate massive spending.

The specter of Trump

The biggest looming question in the primary is when Trump puts his thumb on the scale — if he does at all — and for whom. Cornyn, Paxton and Hunt have each run ads outside Texas, hoping to get the attention of a certain viewer in Washington and Palm Beach.

“They’re both friends of mine,” Trump told reporters in April. “They’re both good men. We don’t know who else is running, but these two — Ken, John — they’re both friends of mine. So I’ll make a determination at the right time.”

Multiple Republicans familiar with the race have said Trump is waiting to see how things develop. Cornyn told NBC News in mid-July that he hopes Trump will be ready to weigh in once Cornyn’s campaign begins advertising and closing the polling gap.

“The president’s obviously very apt at understanding the political environment and that polling can change pretty quickly,” a GOP strategist involved in the Senate race said. “A lot of polling we’ve seen shows that there’s ample room for the primary electorate to move around.”

Potential dark horse candidates Hunt and Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Amarillo, have also spoken to White House aides about the primary, according to sources familiar with the meetings. The White House declined to comment on the president’s thoughts surrounding a possible endorsement.

Paxton has long been an ally of Trump, who rewarded the attorney general’s loyalty with an endorsement in Paxton’s 2022 primary.

But an unaffiliated GOP consultant said Trump’s silence on the race indicates his political operation is aware of Senate Republicans’ hang-ups about Paxton.

“That just speaks to everything about where the White House is,” the operative said. “If they wanted to see Paxton as the nominee, the easy time to get behind him was when he was up 18 points and before Cornyn and the D.C. establishment started spending millions.”

Disclosure: Texas Farm Bureau has been a financial supporter 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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