There have been numerous developments in Texas politics since my post last month on the MAGA vs RINO US Senate primary between incumbent John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton.
There has even been a bit of action from the nominal opposition party.
Before we dive in, let’s review why Naked Captalism readers should care about Texas politics:
It’s a huge state
It’s closer than it appears
It’s a national money magnet
It’s on the front lines of a GOP civil war
With that out of the way, let’s look at what’s happened in the last month.
The catastrophic July 4th floods in Central Texas killed at least 132 people. Perhaps because Texas is a MAGA state, a narrative rapidly emerged in the MSM of local, state, and federal malfeasance that contributed to the scope of the tragedy.
Both Cornyn and Paxton have managed to comment on the floods while avoiding the embarrassing gaffes that have dogged Governor Greg Abbott and Cornyn’s US Senate colleague Ted Cruz.
Abbott made a speech full of football cliches saying “only losers point fingers”…while pointing his finger at the camera.
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— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 14, 2025
Ted Cruz managed to (once again) be out of the country when disaster struck and was accused of touring the Parthenon in Athens in July 5, after the disaster struck.
Unfortunately for Paxton, his long-suffering wife, Texas State Senator Angela Paxton filed for divorce, citing “Biblical” reasons.
pic.twitter.com/PTy8qWh1Cl
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 14, 2025
pic.twitter.com/FU8g0zk2Ip
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 14, 2025
The rumored “Biblical” reason pic.twitter.com/vgv3VsSsYF
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 14, 2025
Fortunately for Paxton, he has an almost unbelievable track record for surviving scandals that would derail any other political career.
The chair of the Texas GOP offered a structural explanation for Paxton’s ability to survive allegations of felony securities fraud, taking bribes and other favors from a disgraced real estate magnate, and previous incidents of adultery:
Matt Rinaldi, the chair of the Texas GOP who opposed Paxton’s impeachment, said Paxton has been able to weather controversy for so long for two reasons: He continues to deliver on campaign promises and GOP voters are considering the source of allegations.
“People don’t trust the allegations against him because people don’t trust institutions anymore,” Rinaldi said.
Rinaldi pointed to the trial, where the credibility of the FBI was a major topic and multiple House witnesses expressed faith in the agency, which Republicans have increasingly come to view with suspicion.
“That encapsulates why people distrust all these allegations in the first place,” Rinaldi said
Paxton also has a track record of crushing opponents in Republican primaries:
As Paxton’s problems worsened, he tied himself closer than ever to Trump. He filed a failed lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Trump’s reelection loss in four battleground states, and he spoke at a Washington, D.C., rally before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The Texas Bar Association has since sued alleging professional misconduct related to his effort to delegitimize the president.
The whistleblower claims were enough to earn Paxton a serious primary challenge in 2022 from three high-profile candidates: Land Commissioner George P. Bush, former state Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler. Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the powerful tort reform group, and its donors got behind Guzman, showing a new willingness by the GOP establishment to try to stop Paxton.
Bush forced Paxton to a runoff, but it was not even close as Paxton took two-thirds of the vote. Paxton leaned on an early reelection endorsement from Trump, and in the runoff, he promised to “end the Bush dynasty.”
Cornyn can’t be enjoying polling results like this:
…when it comes to Cornyn, a majority (54%) of GOP primary voters believe “it is time for a new Republican to be elected U.S. Senator” compared with 27% who say, “the U.S. Senator has done a good enough job to deserve re-election.”
While the 2026 GOP primary continues to be a long way off, John Cornyn currently trails Ken Paxton in a head-to-head race by more than 20 points. In a one-on-one trial heat, Paxton leads Cornyn 50%-28% among GOP primary voters. Paxton currently leads Cornyn among veryconservative GOP primary voters (60%-22%), high propensity 3/3 GOP primary voters (57%-27%), MAGA voters (58%-23%), Seniors (47%-35%), as well as among voters across every media market in the state.
Cornyn loses even more ground on an informed ballot test. In an effort to “fast forward” the race among voters in our survey, voters were given a second ballot test after having them assume that A.) President Trump would endorse John Cornyn; B.) Ken Paxton would attack Cornyn for his past comments on Trump, saying that Trump’s “time has passed him by”; and, C.) Ken Paxton would attack Cornyn for, in the past, siding with Democrats on a gun control bill. Following this information, Ken Paxton’s lead over Cornyn widens to 62%-21%.
The Hill provided some context for the Cornyn-Paxton race:
…the Texas GOP is very different than it was in the days of dynastic Bushism when Cornyn himself was elected attorney general in 1998 or his first Senate campaign four years later. But Texas is getting less like Alabama when it comes to politics generally. No Republican presidential candidate has gotten less than 60 presidential vote in Alabama since 2000, while no Republican has done better than 60 percent in Texas since favorite son George W. Bush in 2004.
The real warning sign for Texas Republicans was in 2018, when Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke got close enough to Sen. Ted Cruz (R) to make them really sweat down in Houston. It ended up at a margin of a little less than 3 points, but it was the best proof yet of Democrats’ long and usually exaggerated claim of blue Texas rising. While Cruz fared substantially better against then-Rep. Colin Allred (D) in 2024, this is a midterm cycle, and whoever the Republicans nominate for Senate will face a smaller, more Democratic electorate than the one that came out for Trump last year.
That explains why the same polls that show Cornyn getting brained in the primary keep showing Ken Paxton faring the worst in the general election. If the attorney general does advance to the next round, national Republicans will have to spend potentially $200 million to win a race Cornyn would win handily. And if Allred makes another run for it, he could be the first Democrat since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988 to win a Senate race in Texas.
So that’s where we find Cornyn stuck between the two electorates, with only one way out: He has to change the first one.
Cornyn has Trump messaging guru Chris LaCivita ready to unleash what we can expect to be a prairie fire of a negative campaign against Ken Paxton. That will go a long way to persuade those lightly attached Ken Paxton backers. But what Cornyn really needs is to get lots and lots of voters who didn’t usually participate in Republican primaries to come in and water down the hardcore Ken Paxton vote.
That sounds a little like a 2014 contest in Mississippi when then-Sen. Thad Cochran found himself in a primary runoff with a proto-MAGA challenger, or maybe even a little like how Sen. Lisa Murkowski won in 2010. He’s an underdog for sure, but if Cornyn can rally the independents and even Democrats who have been voting for him for Senate in general elections since 2002 to vote in an open primary while simultaneously torching Ken Paxton’s reputation with negative ads, it’s a possibility.
And that’s the tight spot where he will find himself between now and March: staying in good enough graces with MAGA to keep Trump out of the race on Ken Paxton’s side while simultaneously courting the non-Republicans he will need to join a primary stampede.
That dilemma goes a long way to explain why “Texans for a Conservative Majority, the outside group supporting Cornyn in his primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, will have over $12 million cash on hand after the current fundraising quarter.”
As for the hapless Democrats, they have four (or maybe five) potential contenders for the nomination, only one of whom has officially announced.
The four who are openly considering the race, former U.S. Reps. Colin Allred and Beto O’Rourke, along with U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro and state Rep. James Talarico met virtually in a Zoom meeting earlier this month.
Dallas County Democratic Party Chairman Kardal Colemansummed up the four contenders thusly:
“O’Rourke is center-left,” while Castro or Allred “are a little bit more moderate.” He called Talarico a “TikTok sensation who can reach a number of people online.”
I’m not really sure on what basis Castro or Allred are described as being “more moderate” than Beto O’Rourke.
With the possible exception of Talarico, they are all standard issue neoliberals whose idea of “moving to the left” entails engaging in identity politics and culture war issues rather than making left-leaning arguments on economic issues.
Talarico at least puts an interesting twist on the culture war stuff by leaning on his own religious background:
Sitting in a drab committee room last month, Texas Rep. James Talarico, among the youngest members of the statehouse now at 34, was slowly getting fed up as he sat through a hearing for a bill that would mandate putting the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state. A week prior, he’d sat through a committee hearing on a bill that would allow chaplains to replace guidance counselors. He was already dreading another floor debate scheduled for later in the day for a bill denying gender-affirming health care. So by the time the Ten Commandments came up that morning, Talarico had had it.
He looked squarely at the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Candy Noble, whom he acknowledged as a fellow “devout Christian,” before letting loose a two-minute and nine-second exchange that would go viral on TikTok and Twitter, racking up more than 1 million views on Twitter alone.
“This bill to me is not only unconstitutional, it’s not only un-American, I think it is also deeply un-Christian,” he told her, as she stood motionless. “And I say that because I believe this bill is idolatrous. I believe it is exclusionary. And I believe that it is arrogant, and those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.” He cited Matthew 6:5, in which Jesus urges his disciples to not pray publicly like the hypocrites.
Six days later, he went viral again for calling out Texas lawmakers after a mass shooting in Allen, Texas, that left eight dead. “There is something profoundly cynical about asking God to solve a problem that we’re not willing to solve ourselves,” he said on the house floor.
David Axelrod, the veteran Democratic strategist, praised Talarico on Twitter. “WATCH THIS:” California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted. “Preach,” former Education Secretary Arne Duncan cheered. After both videos went viral, he received 12,000 calls and emails in a week’s time, a volume that would typically be closer to 300.
“The thing that warms my heart the most,” he told me, “is people who say, ‘I’m an atheist, agnostic, or I left the church or I left religion. But this is the kind of Christianity I can believe in.’”
The day after the Democratic Zoom summit, Allred formally entered the race. Allred’s meh performance against Ted Cruz was anything but inspirational, but he excels at fundraising and is out there early.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) helpfully inserted themselves into the discussion with a poll claiming that all four men trail lightning rod U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett:
Rep. Jasmine Crockett didn’t rule out running in the Texas Democratic Senate primary next year, saying that she has not formally taken steps to that end but that she will make a decision “depending on how many people reach out.”
Crockett addressed the possibility in an Instagram post after the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) published a survey that has her leading the party’s field in a hypothetical primary. Concretely, she leads the pack with 35% of the support, compared to former Senate candidate Colin Allred’s 20%.
High-profile Texas Democrats Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro both come in third with 13% of the votes, while an additional 18% chose not to pick a candidate. The survey was conducted among 566 likely Democratic primary voters and has a margin of error of +/- 3.03%.
Crockett rose to fame for exchanging trash-talk with mega-MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:
Speaking to Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, the Georgia Republican suggested that Crockett’s “fake eyelashes” were getting in the way of her reading and understanding the point of last week’s hearing.
In response, Crockett called out Greene for having a “bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body.”
It’s easy to see why the Republicans want to make Crockett the face of Texas Democrats, but they may find themselves putting the corrupt Ken Paxton up against James Talarico, a preacher with the ability to go viral.
