PLANO, Texas — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton swept past four-term Republican Senator John Cornyn on Tuesday night, winning the GOP nomination for the United States Senate in what became the most expensive Senate primary in American history. Paxton took 63.8 percent of more than 1.38 million votes cast, a margin that rattled the party establishment but thrilled the MAGA base that had rallied behind him for months.
The result, called by the Associated Press shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern time, ended the Washington career of a senator who first won his seat in 2002 and built a reputation as one of the chamber’s most methodical legislative deal-makers. It also handed President Donald Trump his most striking primary-season scalp yet, following the defeat of Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy earlier this month. Cornyn becomes the first Republican senator from Texas to lose his party’s nomination for reelection.
Standing before a roaring ballroom crowd in Plano, Paxton offered a brief olive branch to the senator he had just dismantled. “I want to thank John Cornyn for his service to this state,” he said. “John has dedicated much of his life to serving Texans.” He then turned his fire entirely on his November opponent, Democratic state Representative James Talarico, labeling him a threat to Texas and warning that no Senate seat in the country would attract more Democratic money in the fall. “Tonight we just sent a Texas-sized message to Washington,” Paxton told supporters. “Today, change was on the ballot. Change won.”
Trump endorsed Paxton just one week before Election Day, describing him on social media as a “true MAGA warrior” and effectively throwing the institutional weight of the Republican Party into turmoil. The endorsement shifted polling almost overnight, with surveys in the final days showing Paxton surging to a lead of more than 20 points. Senate Republican leaders and their allied super PACs had already spent roughly $90 million defending Cornyn, making the primary the costliest in Senate history, and the investment produced nothing. Paxton’s own fundraising was a fraction of Cornyn’s, yet he entered election night holding a lead that never narrowed.
The victory carried a complicated trail of legal baggage. Paxton has been under criminal indictment on securities fraud charges since 2015, a case that has never come to trial. His own senior staff members reported him to the FBI in 2020, alleging he had used his office to benefit a major donor, Austin real estate developer Nate Paul. The Republican-controlled Texas House voted overwhelmingly to impeach him in May 2023, and the Texas Senate tried him on 16 articles of impeachment that September before acquitting him on all counts. His estranged wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on what her court filing described as biblical grounds. Through every chapter, Paxton survived, and his supporters came to see his capacity for survival as proof of exactly the kind of fighter Texas needed in Washington.
“He’s had his flaws, but so have we; we all make mistakes,” said Daniel Vega, 18, at the Plano watch party, as reported ahead of the vote when Trump officially threw his support behind Paxton. “He’s repented; let’s move on.” That sentiment was broadly shared in a Republican primary electorate that views Paxton not despite his battles but because of them, seeing in his clashes with prosecutors, House Republicans, and the Washington establishment an echo of the president himself.
Senate Republicans were not hiding their concern. Operatives within the National Republican Senatorial Committee had spent months producing opposition research on Paxton, including press releases calling him “crooked” and pointing to a controversial deal his office struck with an alleged sex trafficker that, according to the NRSC’s own materials, kept the man out of prison and off the sex offender registry. By Wednesday morning, the committee had begun quietly deleting those releases from its website. The party, having lost its fight in the primary, was now in the business of winning the general.
The general election opponent waiting for Paxton is formidable by any recent Texas standard. Talarico, a 35-year-old Austin state representative, defeated Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary and has emerged as one of the party’s leading fundraisers this cycle, pulling in more than $27 million in the first three months of 2026 alone. Paxton raised $2.2 million in the same period. A Democrat has not won a statewide office in Texas since 1994, and the party has not taken a Senate seat in the state since 1988, but most polling conducted ahead of the November general has shown Talarico running marginally stronger against Paxton than he would have against Cornyn.
Political analysts in Texas are watching two risks simultaneously. The first is whether enough Cornyn voters, who skew older, suburban, and college-educated, will either abstain or drift toward Talarico in November rather than ratify a candidate they spent months and tens of millions of dollars trying to stop. The second is structural. “Paxton’s real challenge in November is the fact that what’s helped him in the primary probably creates a bit of an uphill climb for him in the general,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist, noting that Trump’s approval rating has softened even in Texas as tariffs and federal spending cuts weigh on the electorate.
Paxton is also the first primary challenger to knock off an incumbent United States senator from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen defeated Ralph Yarborough in 1970, a historical footnote that underlines just how extraordinary Tuesday’s result was. Cornyn, speaking in a spare ballroom in Austin, declined to mention his conqueror by name while pledging to support the Republican ticket in November. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz issued statements calling on the party to unite. Paxton, for his part, said he was confident that would happen. “We need to come together as a Republican Party,” he told Fox News immediately after leaving the stage. “I think John Cornyn will be a part of that. I think his voters will be too.”
Whether that unity materialises will determine whether Texas, long the bedrock of the Republican Senate majority, becomes a genuine battleground for the first time in a generation. Democrats insist the answer is already clear. “The guy who was impeached, indicted, and helped lead Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election just became the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas,” California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on social media shortly after the race was called. “Everything is on the line this November.” The White House, meantime, has signalled it is not focused on the midterms as a strategic priority, a posture that could complicate Paxton’s effort to nationalize the race around Trump’s agenda.
The November 3 general election is the next marker. Texas will spend the summer discovering whether the coalition that made Paxton the Republican nominee is large enough, or elastic enough, to make him a United States senator as well.
