Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ended John Cornyn’s 24-year Senate career Tuesday night, defeating the incumbent 62 percent to 38 percent in the Republican primary runoff and setting up what both parties expect will be the most competitive Texas Senate race since Lloyd Bentsen’s final reelection in 1988.
The Associated Press called the race shortly after 8 p.m. Central, roughly an hour after most Texas polls closed. Final results showed Paxton winning approximately 505,700 votes to Cornyn’s 303,300. The margin was not close.
Paxton, who has served as Texas attorney general since 2015 and walked out of a state Senate impeachment trial acquitted in September 2023, now faces Democrat James Talarico in November. Talarico has raised more than $40 million since entering the race last fall and leads Paxton in every independent poll conducted this spring.
A Long Night for a Senate Institution
John Cornyn first won the Texas Senate seat in November 2002 and was never threatened again. Over two-plus decades, he climbed to the top of the chamber’s internal ladder: he chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee from 2009 to 2013, served as Senate Republican Whip from 2013 to 2019, and in November 2024 ran to succeed Mitch McConnell as Senate Republican Leader — losing a close race to John Thune but remaining a significant figure in the chamber’s daily operations.
None of that survived Tuesday.
In his concession, Cornyn was measured. “I’ve said throughout this race that I trust the voters of Texas, and they made their decision, and I must respect it,” he told supporters, pledging to back the Republican ticket in November.
He will finish his Senate term through January 2027. After that, he will be the first Texas senator retired at the ballot box in memory.
Pre-election surveys suggested a tighter race. A University of Houston poll from early May had Cornyn narrowly ahead among likely Republican runoff voters. Trump’s endorsement of Paxton on May 19 — one week before election day, after early voting had already begun — appears to have broken the contest open in its final stretch.
How the Endorsement Came Late, and What It Cost Cornyn
The day after the March primary, Trump told reporters he would weigh in on the Texas Senate race “soon.” That soon stretched to nearly ten weeks. Trump explicitly tied his endorsement to the SAVE America Act, a sweeping federal voting-law overhaul, in a message that put Cornyn on notice about what was expected of Republican senators in a Trump-led party.
When the endorsement arrived on May 19, it came via Truth Social. “Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate,” Trump wrote.
Cornyn had the stronger fundraising operation throughout the runoff, raising roughly $9 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone and carrying nearly $8.2 million in cash into the final weeks. Paxton’s comparable filings showed a considerably thinner treasury. The total primary spending in the race exceeded $120 million, making it one of the costliest Senate primaries in Texas history.
It did not matter. Trump’s signal to Republican primary voters was worth more than the money, and Tuesday’s 25-point margin showed how thoroughly that signal moved the electorate.
Paxton marked the result with the populist framing he had built the campaign around. “Today, change was on the ballot and change won,” he told supporters. “We just proved that this Senate seat doesn’t belong to Washington, it belongs to you.” He closed with the line he had been building toward for months: “Texas is not for sale.”
The dynamic echoed the outcome just one week earlier, when Trump’s backed challenger ousted Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District — another case where an incumbent with institutional credentials and a commanding fundraising advantage fell to an opponent whose principal qualification was the president’s endorsement.
Paxton’s Legal Record on the Way Into November
Paxton arrives at the general election carrying a legal history his primary supporters largely chose to overlook and his Democratic opponent will not.
He has been under a state securities fraud indictment since 2015 — more than a decade — without facing trial on the charges. Eight of his own former employees filed formal misconduct complaints accusing him of misusing his office to benefit a political donor; the DOJ and FBI opened investigations based on those allegations.
In May 2023, the Republican-majority Texas House impeached Paxton on 20 articles. The Texas Senate then put 16 of those articles to a final vote, with conviction requiring 21 of the 30 eligible senators. Not one article received the necessary threshold. Paxton was acquitted across the board.
He and his allies described the impeachment as a politically motivated attack by establishment Republicans. For the Republican runoff electorate, the acquittal settled the matter. For a five-month general election campaign bankrolled by a $40 million Democrat, it will be a constant topic.
Paxton also brought the December 2020 lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to invalidate presidential election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — a case the Court rejected without oral argument. Talarico’s campaign has signaled it intends to put both the impeachment and the post-election lawsuit at the center of its November case against Paxton.
The Race That Could Reshape the Senate Majority
Texas has sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate in every election since Bentsen’s final reelection. Democrats have spent years trying to break that hold — most visibly in Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 near-miss against Ted Cruz — without closing the deal.
This cycle looks structurally different.
The state representative from the Austin area is a former middle-school English teacher who earned a Master of Education at Harvard and a Master of Divinity at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He entered the Senate race in September 2025, and within two quarters had built one of the most remarkable small-donor operations in Senate history.
In the first quarter of 2026 alone, Talarico raised $27 million — the largest first-quarter total by any Senate candidate in any state in a midterm cycle. More than 98 percent of his donations came in at $100 or less, and none came from corporate PACs. His total fundraising since entering the race has exceeded $40 million.
Talarico leads Paxton in every independent poll conducted after the March primary. A Texas Public Opinion Research survey from late April found him ahead 46 to 41. A University of Texas poll showed a 42-to-34 advantage. Neither candidate has cleared 50 percent in any survey, meaning a significant share of the electorate remains genuinely persuadable.
His coalition runs strongest with voters of color — he leads Paxton by 27 points among Latino voters in one survey — college-educated Texans, and independents, who break for the Democrat by more than 20 points in both polls. That coalition overlaps with communities most directly affected by the Supreme Court’s April ruling sharply limiting the Voting Rights Act’s redistricting standards — a decision that has elevated minority voting power as an active legal and political issue in Texas heading into the fall.
Republicans remain favored. The Cook Political Report rates the seat “Likely Republican,” a structural lean backed by decades of Texas electoral history and a well-organized state party that will support Paxton with its full infrastructure.
But the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee read Tuesday’s result with unusual directness. “Paxton’s win puts us one step closer to winning a Senate majority,” the committee said.
That framing reflects what is genuinely at stake. Senate Republicans hold a narrow majority, and every contested amendment vote on the Big Beautiful Bill as it moves through the Senate’s procedural gauntlet illustrates how little cushion the party has. A Texas seat flipping would not merely cost Republicans one vote — it would flip the chamber.
Whether Talarico can complete what O’Rourke could not in 2018 will depend on turnout models, the national midterm environment, and whether Paxton’s legal record proves as disqualifying with general-election voters as it once was with the Texas House Republicans who impeached him.
The general election is November 3, 2026.
Sources 6 cited · 2 primary
- Ken Paxton defeats John Cornyn in Texas U.S. Senate GOP runoff
- Ken Paxton defeats GOP Sen. John Cornyn in Texas primary runoff
- Trump endorses Ken Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn in Texas Senate primary runoff
- Cornyn concedes to Paxton in U.S. Senate race in Texas
- James Talarico raises record-breaking $27 million in 2026
- Talarico leads both Cornyn, Paxton in new Texas Senate polls
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