Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn is running to keep his seat in a March 3 Republican primary that places him in direct competition with Ken Paxton and Wesley Hunt—two candidates who both market themselves as more aligned with Donald Trump than Cornyn is. The race is unfolding as Trump’s influence reshapes Republican politics in Texas and beyond, and Cornyn is trying to demonstrate he can still win inside the party’s most energized base.
At a campaign event near the U.S.-Mexico border wall, Cornyn did not match the sharper illegal-immigration rhetoric that has helped fuel Trump’s rise, according to the account of the event. Instead, Cornyn thanked Trump for billions in federal dollars intended to reimburse Texans for work on the wall and praised Trump as “the president of the United States, to whom I am very grateful.”
Cornyn’s effort is also taking place against the backdrop of the kind of intraparty fight he has not often faced in Texas, with two challengers presenting themselves as closer to Trump and to his MAGA movement. Now in a long career’s worth of testing moment, the 73-year-old former Texas Supreme Court justice could also become, if he loses, the first Republican Texas senator to fail to win renomination—a prospect his supporters and Senate Republican leadership are working to prevent.
The primary is structured so that it could move to a runoff in May, depending on how many voters choose each candidate. The campaign is set up as a three-way contest, and the AP account said Hunt’s entry in the race in the fall made it more likely that no candidate would win at least 50% of the vote, sending the top two finishers to a May runoff against the winner of the Democratic primary between Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico.
Paxton entered the contest in April after legal troubles that had shadowed his political rise, including surviving a 2023 impeachment trial on corruption charges and reaching a deal to end a long-running securities fraud case. In the AP account, Paxton has framed the investigations against him as persecution by the political establishment in a way he compared to Trump, while also portraying Cornyn as out of touch with Texas.
Hunt, a two-term U.S. House member, has focused on raising his profile in Texas and has emphasized his early endorsement of Trump’s 2024 comeback campaign. The AP account also cited Hunt’s recent comment about Cornyn, saying Hunt’s view was that Cornyn’s “moment has passed,” as the challengers aim to present a clear generational and political contrast to Cornyn’s style.
Cornyn’s campaign messaging includes an attempt to argue that effective governance matters more than attention-grabbing politics. In the AP account, Cornyn told The Associated Press, “We’ve got enough performance artists here in Washington,” and described the people he criticized as those who he said believe that being loud, being active on social media, and getting attention qualifies them for the Senate.
Some Republican voters, according to the AP account, want more “aggressiveness” than what Cornyn projects, and some also view him as insufficiently conservative. A former Texas Republican Party executive director, Wayne Hamilton, said Cornyn “plays the part of the distinguished statesman,” but that the political environment now rewards candidates who are willing to be more confrontational about the opposition—an approach Hamilton said is “just not him.” The AP account also included criticism that Cornyn has not been consistent enough in conservative voting, with Robyn Richardson of suburban Dallas saying Cornyn “hasn’t been consistent in his conservative representation in his voting.”
Cornyn has also faced anger from some conservatives tied to his record and past votes, including his work as a GOP negotiator on a 2022 law involving gun restrictions in the weeks after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed. The AP account said some activists booed Cornyn around the time of the bill, and it added that some conservatives point to Cornyn’s dismissive posture toward Trump during Trump’s 2016 campaign and to Cornyn’s response to Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud after Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020.
More recently, the AP account said Cornyn has sought to show areas of agreement with Trump while also defending positions that drew fire from Trump-aligned conservatives. The account described Cornyn as having called Trump “naive” in proposing a border wall before Trump had secured the Republican presidential nomination, and it said Paxton has used that history to portray Cornyn as opposing the wall. Cornyn’s campaign, the AP account said, has promoted the wall with ads featuring him with Border Patrol agents and messaging that highlighted support for securing $11 billion for Texans’ work on it.
Despite that pushback, Cornyn also appears to be trying to avoid a strategy built entirely around personal attacks or a constant focus on Trump-aligned culture-war messaging. The AP account said Trump was not expected to endorse ahead of the Senate primary, based on people familiar with White House thinking who were not authorized to speak publicly, and it noted that Cornyn acknowledged he is “not somebody who cries out for attention at every opportunity.” In the final weeks, Cornyn told The Associated Press he is hoping voters weigh which candidate would be the most effective at getting things done, comparing “workhorse” and “show horse” roles and describing himself as the workhorse rather than the showhorse.
Across the campaign trail, those judgments are also being filtered through fatigue with long tenure. Vinny Minchillo, a veteran Republican consultant in the Dallas area, referred to Cornyn as “an old George W. Bush Republican, which is now a bad thing” since Trump’s rise, and said he also sees “John Cornyn fatigue” because Cornyn has been “on the ballot in Texas for a long, long time.” For some voters, that longevity is offset by personal assessments of character and experience, like the 80-year-old retired sales manager Mike Fleming, who told the AP that Cornyn is a good man but has spent “a lot of his time trying to run for head of the Senate.”
In the end, the AP account framed Cornyn’s fight as a test of how Republicans define success inside a Trump-influenced primary environment—whether steadiness and institutional experience still translate into winning votes, or whether voters increasingly reward candidates who project the most aggressive alignment with Trump’s priorities. If Cornyn cannot hold that coalition together, the party’s March primary could still decide his fate even before the general election implications arrive.
Sources: Associated Press (Thomas Beaumont).