Cornyn and Paxton entered Monday with few public-facing campaign events as they looked ahead to the GOP runoff Tuesday, their more-than-yearlong push for the nomination increasingly playing out through broadcast and other advertising. The Associated Press reported that the candidates had no public campaign events scheduled for the final day of the race, while their messages continued in the airwaves rather than on the trail.
Cornyn’s Monday schedule included an annual, non-campaign event in San Antonio recognizing high school graduates attending the nation’s service academies. The senator seeking a fifth term held his last public campaign event Friday in Corpus Christi ahead of Tuesday’s voting.
Paxton headlined events Thursday in the Austin area and in San Antonio, with his campaign message centered on Trump’s endorsement. The Associated Press reported that Paxton’s campaign activity was largely focused on the claim that President Donald Trump endorsed him on May 19, and that Trump’s announcement also included a dismissal of Cornyn.
The endorsement fight became more prominent during the final stretch of early voting, which ended Friday, after Trump announced his support for Paxton and targeted Cornyn. According to the report, Trump’s comments on Sunday reaffirmed his support for Paxton and disparaged Cornyn as insufficiently loyal; the report also described Trump’s earlier reaction to Cornyn’s relationship with him as awkward.
As Monday’s event schedule continued, Cornyn leaned into Trump support just before the San Antonio ceremony. The Associated Press reported that Cornyn told reporters that 99.3% of his votes aligned with Trump, said he “wants him to be successful,” and referred to Trump’s earlier comments calling him “a good man and a friend.” Cornyn also said that endorsing his opponent was ultimately Trump’s right, while adding that Texans would “be making their own choices,” as quoted in the report.
The report described how Paxton and groups supporting him moved to emphasize Trump’s endorsement midweek, transitioning to advertisements that highlight Trump’s backing. At the same time, Cornyn’s network continued airing spots attacking Paxton on ethical and personal questions that have shadowed him throughout the campaign, with Cornyn’s case to voters tying Paxton’s perceived “flaws and the baggage” to what Cornyn argued could happen in a general election.
The Associated Press also reported that the volume and imbalance in advertising spending has been a major feature of the runoff. It said the combination of Cornyn’s campaign and supporting super PACs has far outspent pro-Paxton groups over the past year by almost nine-to-one, and that in the final week the pro-Cornyn ad spending was less than twice that of Paxton’s group, while still keeping the ads widely visible.
Cornyn’s side also continued to air ads that the senator’s campaign said were aimed at highlighting his alignment with Trump’s agenda in the Senate. The report quoted Cornyn telling reporters that Paxton’s “flaws and the baggage” would be “going to be exploited to the fullest by James Talarico,” before he went to the Monday ceremony and gave a speech focused on the graduates.
Wayne Hamilton, a former executive director of the Texas Republican Party, described the overall dynamics of the runoff as increasingly dominated by outside spending rather than direct candidate campaigning. “It’s just a slug fest, with the campaigns and third-party groups slugging it out,” Hamilton said, according to the report.
For a contest expected to draw a fraction of Texas’s 18.7 million voters, the advertising race is also occurring amid an endorsement-driven pattern that has appeared in other GOP contests. The report said Republican voters in Indiana and Kentucky also chose GOP primary challengers over incumbent GOP officeholders who have crossed Trump or opposed his agenda, underscoring how endorsement battles and messaging discipline are shaping the final choices in multiple states.