The campaign no one asked for.
Still a crook any way you look
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday he will challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s midterm elections, setting up a barnburner clash of two Republican titans that is poised to reverberate across state and national politics.
The contest, teased by Paxton for months, promises to be among the most heated and expensive Republican primaries in the country and in recent Texas history. It also marks the latest flashpoint in a power struggle between the Texas GOP’s hardline, socially conservative wing — which views Paxton as a standard-bearer — and the Cornyn-aligned, business-minded Republican old guard.
Appearing on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s show, Paxton said it was “time for a change in Texas” as he announced his Senate bid and blasted Cornyn’s “lack of production” over his 22 years in the upper chamber.
“We have another great U.S. senator, Ted Cruz, and it’s time we have another great senator that will actually stand up and fight for Republican values, fight for the values of the people of Texas, and also support Donald Trump in the areas that he’s focused on in a very significant way,” Paxton said. “And that’s what I plan on doing.”
Paxton’s candidacy poses the most serious threat to Cornyn’s political career in decades. It would mark a watershed moment in the Texas GOP’s factional struggle if Paxton — not long removed from an array of career-threatening legal battles and impeachment by his own party — managed to topple Cornyn, a mainstay of Texas politics who had an early hand in the state’s Republican takeover and reached the upper rungs of Senate GOP leadership.
Wasting no time framing himself as the outsider in the race, Paxton wrote on social media he was running to “take a sledgehammer to the D.C. establishment,” while calling for voters to “send John Cornyn packing.”
Okay sure, some people want this. Mostly, they’re the most fanatical of the Republican primary voters – the more MAGAfied you are, the more you also like Ken Paxton and the more likely you are to prefer him to John Cornyn. There’s nothing we can do about that. But that race is going to be fought mostly on the turf of who is the biggest lickspittle sycophant to Donald Trump, and there is something we can do about that.
Mostly, we – and by “we” I mean “the Democratic nominee for Senate”, whether that is Colin Allred or somebody else – can hammer on the need for there to be someone in statewide office who is capable of standing up to Trump. Specifically, someone who is capable of standing up to Trump on the issue of tariffs, which are broadly unpopular and even before the latest round started wrecking the economy were causing havoc for a lot of pro-Trump constituencies, from the oil patch to farmers to the business community in general. Even Ted Cruz doesn’t like the tariffs. But of course Cruz will never do anything other than grumble about them on his podcast. If you want someone who won’t be a bootlicker, you can’t vote for either Paxton, whose whole raison d’etre is Trump fealty, or Cornyn, who will have to demonstrate his Trump loyalty in this campaign.
That’s the argument. I believe it will peel off some votes if done well. Please remember, Ken Paxton has been the worst performer among Republicans in the last two elections. In both 2018 and 2022, he had the fewest votes and the lowest percentage among Republicans – yes, even lower than Ted Cruz in 2018, getting 50.57% to Cruz’s 50.89%. (His margin of victory was slightly larger than Cruz’s mostly because of a larger Libertarian vote in the AG race.) If 2026 is a good Democratic year – and please lord let it be so – then Paxton is the lowest hanging fruit, and either he or Cornyn will have this as a big potential liability.
Obviously a campaign can’t be just about one issue, and the candidate matters, and so on and so forth. I’m just saying this is a way in with voters who are not now on our side but who could be. And yes, we need to persuade some folks to switch teams, even if just for this one race. The tariffs – the absolutely incoherent rationales for them, the destruction they’ve already caused, the imperviousness of Trump and his minions to any argument or reason about them – provide both a strong issue and a way to expand on it to other matters of great importance that are illustrated by the tariff regime. You know, things like not wanting to be ruled by a dictator and stuff like that.
Of course there’s risk to this. Trump could back down, or make some “deals”, and in doing so blunt the disastrous economic effects of the tariffs. (He’s not going to back down, no matter what dodging and weaving he may do in the short term. He loves tariffs and has spouted them as his One Big Idea for decades.) Maybe Cornyn runs a more old-school Republican campaign, which among other things emphasizes more rational economic policies and his record of being business-friendly in more than name only, and wins on it. But so what? It’s not like there’s some tried-and-true Democratic playbook for winning statewide that we’d be throwing out to take this path.
Anyway, that’s my reaction to this announcement. Let them smear each other on the campaign trail for the next year, but let us see that as the opportunity that it is and start acting on it now. We have a salient issue and a clear message about it. We need to take it from there.
UPDATE: And like an hour after I drafted this Trump sort of paused the tariffs for 90 days so “negotiations” can begin. But prices are still going to increase across the board, and the sheer inchoate chaos of this all undermines the whole idea of “negotiating” anyway. Point being, the premise of my post still very much stands.
The tariff “pause” absolutely reeks of market manipulation.
A lot of things the grifter has been doing stink of corruption.
May vote for Paxton if it gives the D a better chance to win.