Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just obliterated 23-year Senate incumbent John Cornyn in the Texas GOP Senate primary runoff on Tuesday, opening up a roughly 25-point lead that turned "election night" into "election fifteen minutes." Paxton's win shows that the era of RiNO's who don't want to put Americans first in every way is officially dead.
The March primary saw no Republican candidate crack 50%, sending the race to a runoff. That's when things got interesting. President Trump threw his endorsement behind Paxton on May 19, posting on Truth Social that Cornyn had been "slow to sign on" to Trump's agenda, specifically the voting rights law "Save America" that Trump championed. That's Trump-speak for "this guy dragged his feet on everything we care about and now he's going to pay for it." And pay he did.
Cornyn spent 23 years in Washington collecting titles and accumulating the kind of establishment credibility that impresses Beltway cocktail party guests and absolutely nobody in actual Texas. He voted for amnesty bills, helped Democrats write new anti-gun legislation, refused to vote for the "Save America" election reform bill, and spent his final weeks desperately trying to convince primary voters he was secretly MAGA all along. Texas voters saw right through his RiNO BS.
Paxton, meanwhile, built his reputation the old-fashioned way — by actually fighting. As Attorney General, he launched lawsuit after lawsuit against the Biden administration on immigration and became one of the most aggressive conservative legal warriors in the country. You know, the kind of thing Republican voters actually want their elected officials to do.
Both campaigns spent their final day buying up airtime rather than holding public events, according to Townhall. But no amount of last-minute TV ads was going to save Cornyn from the freight train headed his way. When the MAGA Voice account posted mid-count that "This reporter is blown away by how bad Ken Paxton is CRUSHING John Cornyn," it was already over.
Paxton now advances to face Democrat James Talarico — a state representative who has made headlines for claiming God is "nonbinary" and invoking the Virgin Mary in defense of abortion. The last Democrat to win a Texas Senate race was in 1988. So good luck with that strategy, James.
A Texas Public Opinion Research poll had Talarico at 46% and Paxton at 41% with 9% undecided, which the left will wave around like a participation trophy. But we've seen this movie before. The same pollsters who said Beto was going to flip Texas have been wrong so many times they should be selling used cars instead of survey data.
Here's the bottom line: the populist wing of the Republican Party just scalped one of the most entrenched establishment figures in Washington, in the biggest red state in the country, by 25 points. This wasn't a squeaker. This wasn't a "both sides can claim victory" situation. This was a public execution of the old guard. The era of Republicans who talk conservative at home and vote moderate in D.C. is over. Texas just made that crystal clear.
