From The Downballot (scroll to the bottom of the “Senate” section).
Big John Cornyn
Republican Sen. John Cornyn has long been a loud and proud supporter of Donald Trump, but his occasional apostasies have drawn the ire of MAGA purists and could land him a primary challenge in 2026.
Cornyn’s most prominent would-be rival is Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said last year that a campaign against the incumbent was “on the table.” The two engaged in trash talk earlier this year when Paxton knocked Cornyn’s chances of succeeding Mitch McConnell as the GOP’s Senate leader by calling him “anti-Trump” and “anti-gun” and saying he’d be preoccupied with “a highly competitive primary campaign in 2026.”
Cornyn fired back by snarking, “Hard to run from prison, Ken,” a retort that lost its bite a few weeks later when federal prosecutors reached an agreement with Paxton on long-simmering fraud charges that did not include jail time. Cornyn also lost his bid to replace McConnell last month, though Paxton, once praised by Trump as a possible choice for U.S. attorney general, seems to have been passed over for a Cabinet post himself.
Even if Paxton, who’s also up for reelection in two years, decides to stay put, there are others who might give it a go. Tarrant County GOP chair Bo French recently issued a statement attacking Cornyn for expressing some mild hesitation about some of Trump’s nominees, saying he was “not ruling anything out.” (Tarrant is home to Fort Worth and is the third-largest county in Texas.)
Two years ago, Patrick Svitek, then at the Texas Tribune, reported that Rep. Ronny Jackson was considering a bid as well. At the time, Jackson didn’t rule anything out, but he doesn’t appear to have spoken publicly about the race since then.
It’s hard being in a position of having to sympathize with John Cornyn, but here we are. Cornyn’s bad, but he at least occasionally tries to do govern-y things that are intended to benefit society as a whole. Those other three…yeah, no. But that’s the March of 2026 we might have in store for us.
There was a time when I’d have openly cheered for the worst candidate to win in a race like this, on the theory that they’d be easier to beat. I do think Cornyn would be the strongest candidate of the four, but that’s not the same as saying the others would be vulnerable in the general election. I’d like for that to be true, and maybe by then things will have gone sufficiently off the rails to make it plausible, but we’ve all been burned way too many times to put any faith in the proposition. Let’s wait and see if any of them, or any other equally ridiculous but dangerous loonies take concrete steps towards a primary challenge.
Texas voters didn’t want to toss out the people who didn’t fix the power grid, so I am also pessimistic here.