Texas Republicans have spent decades insisting their state is not, in fact, trending purple. Ken Paxton's landslide victory over John Cornyn in Tuesday's Senate runoff is about to test that proposition in the most expensive way imaginable.
The impeached attorney general—who avoided conviction in the state Senate only through raw partisan loyalty, who remains under federal investigation for bribery, and who fled his home in 2020 to avoid being served with a subpoena—will now carry the GOP banner in November against Colin Allred, the former NFL linebacker turned congressman who has been methodically building a statewide operation for precisely this scenario.
The Cornyn collapse
John Cornyn was supposed to be untouchable. A three-term senator, former majority whip, and reliable conservative vote, he represented exactly the kind of establishment Republican that Texas has rewarded for half a century. His sin, in the eyes of the MAGA base, was insufficient fealty: he negotiated a bipartisan gun safety bill after Uvalde, he occasionally acknowledged reality regarding the 2020 election, and he failed to grovel adequately when President Trump endorsed his opponent.
Trump's endorsement of Paxton came late but landed with devastating effect. In the final three weeks of the runoff, Cornyn's internal polling showed a fifteen-point swing. The senator's decades of constituent service, his $40 million war chest, and his endorsements from every living Republican governor of Texas meant nothing against a single Truth Social post.
Why Democrats are cautiously optimistic
Allred's campaign has been preparing for Paxton since January. The congressman raised $28 million in the first quarter alone, an astonishing figure for a Texas Democrat, and his team has already reserved $85 million in fall television time. More importantly, Allred has been running a disciplined campaign focused on abortion rights, public education, and infrastructure—issues where Paxton's record is not merely conservative but genuinely extreme.
Paxton has called for criminalizing abortion with no exceptions, supported voucher programs that would gut rural school districts, and spent more time fighting federal oversight than fixing the state's power grid. In a midterm year with a Republican president, these positions might not matter. In a presidential year with Trump on the ballot energizing both bases, they become liabilities.
The math is daunting but not impossible. Beto O'Rourke lost to Ted Cruz by 2.6 points in 2018, a midterm with lower Democratic turnout. Trump carried Texas by 5.6 points in 2020, but the state's Hispanic population—which has been trending slightly more Republican in recent cycles—may not extend the same enthusiasm to a candidate who built his career on border-state grievance politics aimed at their communities.
Our take
Ken Paxton is the logical endpoint of a Republican Party that has made loyalty to Trump the sole criterion for advancement. He is also, quite possibly, the only Republican in Texas who could lose a Senate race in 2026. Democrats have been waiting for the state's demographic transformation to deliver them a statewide victory for twenty years; they may finally get one, not because the transformation arrived, but because Republicans nominated a man so compromised that even Texas suburbanites cannot stomach him. Colin Allred should send Trump a thank-you note.
