Paxton wins Senate runoff, setting up difficult contest with Talarico

HOUSTON, Texas (CN) — Ken Paxton will be the Republican nominee for one of Texas’ two seats in the U.S. Senate, placing the far-right attorney general up against a progressive Democrat in the November general election.

Paxton defeated four-term incumbent Senator John Cornyn by a 27% margin, leading by about 380,000 votes with 1.38 million total cast in the Republican Senate runoff, according to the latest tallies.

But this dramatic victory may be difficult for Paxton to translate into a general election win. If Paxton wants to win, he needs to do three things: get enough Republicans behind him, get them to only look at the parts of his record he wants them to, and overcome Democrats’ opposition to him.

And in a contest with James Talarico, the Democrats’ progressive rising star, all three of those could be quite tricky.

Rallying the Republicans

Paxton’s first key hurdle is garnering the necessary support within the Republican party.

He will get plenty of support in a state that Republicans have dominated for decades, and which Trump won in 2024 by 14 points. But will it be enough?

“Ken Paxton hits the sweet spot of the GOP base in Texas, and he’ll be able to mobilize them,” Keith Gåddie, a professor of political science at Texas Christian University, told Courthouse News. “But that only gets you about 30 points out of the 50 you need.”

Many of those around the party have already begun to patch up the wounds of the primary fight. Cornyn himself has already said he will support Paxton in November, that he has always supported the Republican ticket no matter who, and will continue to do so.

But other big-name Republicans in the state might not be so quick to make amends with Paxton.

Even if he goes to vote for him, Cornyn could help pull a lot of traditional Republicans away from Paxton during his last few months in the Senate.

“With his background as a former attorney general and state Supreme Court justice, Cornyn will land a cozy job in a D.C. law firm. So he can be something a Republican isn’t usually: a truly independent political voice."

Fellow ousted incumbent Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have both shown more willingness to go against Trump since their ouster, with Cassidy prominently switching his vote on a War Powers Act resolution after his primary loss earlier in May. Gåddie said if Cornyn follows their same path, “you’ve broken the thin control Republicans have on the Senate.”

As Gåddie put it, “What can be more Texan than standing up for your principles and telling the president to go to hell?”

Trump’s endorsement

The four Trump-endorsed Republicans in congressional races, Paxton and three House candidates, won their runoffs by double-digit margins.

And Paxton himself seemed confident that Trump’s endorsement was the key: “President Trump is the leader of our party, and his endorsement is the most powerful force in politics," he said in his victory speech Tuesday night. “And I am honored to have his support.”

But Gåddie argues Trump’s endorsement wasn’t nearly as big of a factor in the Senate race as people think.

“The D.C. punditry will misread this contest,” Gåddie said. “Here’s why: They’ll see this as being some kind of Trump muscle flex in the GOP primary. The fact Cornyn was pandering so long for the endorsement will only feed that.”

“But here’s the thing: Typically when you have a Senate runoff, turnout drops about 10-12 points from primary, if not goes up. But this year, turnout dropped 35-40 points. A lot of the other voters who didn’t vote for Paxton or Cornyn in March just did not bother to show up again in May.”

Why did turnout drop so much? Gåddie points to two reasons: time and historical patterns.

When it comes to time, the longer the gap between a primary and a runoff, the more turnout drops. And this gap was more than two months.

But more importantly, Gåddie said, historical patterns were never in Cornyn’s favor.

“If you look at the history of Senate runoffs in general, the leader in the initial round will win 75% of the time. When the initial primary is very close, it can be a coin flip. Except, when an incumbent senator gets thrown into a runoff, and cannot win the primary outright, they will lose the runoff. Senators almost never come back from that. Cornyn losing is no shock; indeed, it fits the form.”

Talarico’s wide appeal

Talarico does anything but fit the form that Texas Republicans expect from their Democrat opponents.

“Talarico can pivot on anything that gets thrown at him,” Gåddie commented. “Republican ads are resorting to calling him a vegan now, but I expect him to be seen at a lot of campaign stops eating a lot of beef the next few months.”

“And while they can’t get into his head, because he can play Bible as well as anyone out there, for the thinking Christian or Evangelical voter, he’s gonna get in their head,” Gåddie continued, referring to Talarico’s background as a Presbyterian minister.

Democrats are also more enthusiastic to support Talarico than any other recent statewide Democrat. And even worse for Paxton, Talarico has what it takes to excite more traditional Republicans, too.

“The Dems had more initial primary votes than Republicans. You won’t wonder if the swing or left vote will show up for Talarico, because for them, the alternative is just so unacceptable," Gåddie remarked. “But Talarico is acceptable to mainstream Republicans as an alternative to Paxton, because he sounds like a 55-year-old mainstream Republican’s 30-something kid. The race is a coin toss now, but Paxton will emerge as the poster child of the Senate candidates the Democrats want to defeat.”

Talarico summed up how many Democrats view the state’s attorney general in the video statement he released Tuesday night.

Talarico’s remarks opened with a swift and simple indictment of Paxton: “Something just happened in Texas. The most corrupt politician in America just became the Republican nominee for the United States Senate.”

Talarico pressed directly at Paxton’s 2023 impeachment — he was “impeached by his own party for using his public office to enrich himself and his donors" — the largest of a litany of scandals Paxton has faced over the years. But he used that reference to tie Paxton in with the larger force that the progressive Democrat’s campaign has focused on.

“That kind of corruption is the rot at the core of this broken system,” Talarico continued. “It’s why we can’t afford anything. It’s why we can’t get ahead no matter how hard we work.”

Down the Democratic ballot

On the Democratic side of the aisle, newcomer Christian Menefee handily defeated veteran U.S. Representative Al Green in the primary for the 18th House District, a longtime Democratic stronghold in the core of Houston.

Menefee won the race for the redrawn district by more than 39%, with just shy of 49,000 votes cast.

Green, 78, has represented the 9th District for 20 years, but got redistricted into the 18th. Democratic voters there favored the 37-year-old Menefee, who came to office earlier this year in a special election after two back-to-back incumbent deaths in the district.

And up in Dallas, Colin Allred won reelection to Congress in the newly redrawn 33rd District, defeating incumbent representative Julie Johnson, the woman who had taken over Allred’s former seat after he left to make a failed bid for Senate.

Allred won by just 8%, with just under 21,000 votes cast.

Allred’s margin of victory stood as one of the lower margins of the night for either party. But his repeated attacks on Johnson’s previous Palantir investments kept enough people in his camp to maintain the momentum from the March primary, which he won by 11%.

As for Allred’s future, Gåddie told Courthouse News that with this win in a secure Democratic district, Allred will be able to stay in Congress for as long as he likes. But Gåddie also speculated that Johnson is far from done with her time in politics.

In contrast, in the 35th District, primary winner Maureen Galindo lost by 21%. The abrupt reversal of fortune stemmed from the rapid denunciations of Galindo’s antisemitic comments from up and down the Democratic Party.

The 18th and 33rd District runoffs will not be the last time Texas voters feel the fallout of Governor Greg Abbott’s redistricting from last year. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais**may not have directly impacted the boundaries for May, but voters will definitely have it on their minds in the months to come.