Paxton’s landslide win signals end of Bush-era Texas GOP

Little more than an hour after the polls closed in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton was declared the winner of the runoff election to determine the Republican nominee for Senate. It wasn’t close; Paxton defeated four-term incumbent John Cornyn by 28 points. The pre-election polls had pointed to a Paxton victory, but his margin of victory exceeded their estimates.

What happened? Put simply, Paxton’s voters showed up, and Cornyn’s didn’t. In the first round of the primary, conducted in early March, Cornyn beat Paxton by 1 point, with 910,000 votes to Paxton’s 883,000. In the runoff, however, Paxton received about as many votes as he had in round one, while Cornyn’s total fell by more than 400,000 (45%) from the first round.

Cornyn needed to run up large margins in urban areas to counterbalance Paxton’s strength in rural areas, small towns, and many suburbs. Instead, his share of the city vote fell sharply as Paxton’s surged. Compared to the first round of voting in March, Paxton gained 30 points in Houston, 19 in Dallas, 27 in Fort Worth, 25 in San Antonio, 19 in Austin, and 40 in El Paso, results show.

Many commentators will add this to the recent string of victories for President Trump-endorsed primary candidates in Indiana, Kentucky, and Louisiana. But Texas presents a more complicated example. The president’s decision to endorse Paxton a week before the primary runoff certainly helped the attorney general, but it probably wasn’t decisive. In April, polls indicated a close race, with Paxton’s lead averaging 2 points. By the first two weeks of May, however, polling data show, Paxton had lengthened his lead to 7 points. His widening edge over the incumbent senator may well have influenced the president to intervene on his behalf late in the runoff contest.

Whatever the effect of Trump’s late intervention in the race, the outcome represents a historic shift in the Texas Republican Party. John Cornyn was the last remaining representative of Bush-era Republican conservatism, and the ease with which Paxton dispatched him signals that the state’s party is now firmly in the hands of Trump’s MAGA base. Indeed, one of Paxton’s aides describes him as “Trump before Trump was Trump.”

The conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Senate nominee, James Talarico, will have a better chance against Paxton, who was nearly impeached for financial fraud and is embroiled in a messy divorce, than he would have had against Cornyn, a respected political veteran with some appeal to Hispanics. But Paxton has demonstrated his strong appeal to the Republican base, and he will run a no-holds-barred race against his Democratic opponent who, as a liberal by Texas standards, has some vulnerabilities on cultural issues.

Still, the results of the runoff are likely to move Texas up the list of Democratic targets in their efforts to gain a Senate majority, and Talarico, who has already demonstrated his ability to raise money for his campaign, is likely to receive all the funds he needs to run an expensive statewide race. By contrast, Paxton has proved to be an ineffective fundraiser, and national Republican strategists fear that they will be forced to divert tens of millions from other close races to hold the Senate seat in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994.

Everything about Texas is large, and its potential effect on the contest for control of the U.S. Senate is no exception.