Texas runoffs test importance of turnout and Trump’s endorsement

HOUSTON (CN) — Voter turnout, as in any election, will be a major factor as both Texas Democrats and Republicans head to the polls once again on May 26 to decide several notable runoff elections for Congress alongside countless local election runoffs.

The Republican Senate primary race between Senator John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton will signal whether committed Republican voters want to reign in President Donald Trump or drive out incumbents deemed insufficiently loyal to him.

And on the Democratic side, without as notable of a runoff at the top of the ballot, the local areas with key congressional runoffs will drive the stance of the party statewide heading into November.

“On the Republican side, the cross-ballot effects will be top-down, while the Democrats’ side will be bottom-up,” Keith Gåddie, a professor of political science at Texas Christian University, told Courthouse News.

“The big Senate race between Cornyn and Paxton, especially with Trump’s endorsement, will be the thing driving Republican turnout statewide,” Gåddie said. “And that will ripple down into the congressional runoffs and into statewide races like the Railroad Commissioner runoff, where Jim Wright and Bo French are mirroring Cornyn and Paxton respectively as an establishment candidate versus a disruptor.”

Turnout on both sides for the May runoff has been especially low so far. While Democratic voters broke records for early voting turnout in February and March, the lack of a high-profile race at the top push turnout down, Gåddie said. But on the Republican side, Trump’s endorsement could be the key.

“For that core Trump primary voter, they are there for their guy. We’ve had southern populists like this before, and they could count on a core voter base no matter what. Trump’s base is like that, a personality faction, not partisan or ideological,” Gåddie said.

Cornyn v. Paxton

The highest-profile decision on the May 26 ballot is, easily, the extremely hostile contest for the Republican primary for Senate, between four-term incumbent Cornyn and embattled Attorney General Paxton.

Cornyn won 42.5% of the primary vote back in March, while Paxton won 40.3%. But new polling released Tuesday, from the Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center at Texas Southern University, showed the two candidates in a dead heat against Democratic nominee James Talarico, who polled 44% against Cornyn and 45% against Paxton.

Cornyn has been in the Senate since 2002, and has shown himself to be an ardent conservative in that time. During the George W. Bush administration, Cornyn emerged as one of the president’s key allies for the policies of the Global War on Terror. And under the Obama administration, Cornyn stood as one of the staunchest opponents of the Affordable Care Act, later leading one of many failed charges to repeal the policy once Trump first came to power in 2017.

In any other time, Cornyn could easily pitch himself as a thoroughly-credentialed Republican without much pushback. But against the Trump-endorsed Paxton, that will be a harder sell to the Republican base.

Paxton became attorney general in January 2015, just in time for Trump’s rise to political power, and Paxton has been in lockstep with the two-time president ever since.

Where Cornyn worked as a staunch senatorial conservative who would compromise and work with Democrats when he deemed it necessary, Paxton has rejected any such compromise and has instead pursued near-total opposition to just about every Democratic policy imaginable.

Paxton helmed many of the GOP-led-states’ lawsuits against the Biden administration on countless policies, from abortion to LGBTQ+ rights to vaccines, and acted as one of the big state-level leaders in the campaigns to overturn the 2020 election.

Now with Trump’s eleventh-hour endorsement, Paxton has planted himself as the more faithful supporter of Trump and his MAGA movement. But that endorsement is a much-needed boost to Paxton’s campaign.

Cornyn’s campaign and supporters have reportedly outspent Paxton’s camp by a 4-to-1 margin since the March primary — though it’s a much closer spending margin than the 17-to-1 Cornyn held before the first round of voting.

Brian Smith, professor of political science at St. Edward’s University, told Courthouse News that the result of this election will send a clear signal to the rest of the country.

“If Cornyn loses, it signifies that the midterms are likely to be a change election where incumbents are going to be in jeopardy nationwide. If Cornyn loses by a landslide, it means that the Trump endorsement had a large effect in demobilizing his supporters.”

Meanwhile, Smith said that if Paxton loses, “it means that people were unable to forgive him for his personal flaws, and they did not think he matched up well with Talarico in the fall.”

Talarico, the Democrats’ rising star in Texas, cleared his primary without a runoff. And Smith told Courthouse News that the runoff result won’t shift Talarico’s strategy for November too much.

“If Cornyn wins,” Smith said, “Talarico says Trump is bad, Cornyn is out of touch, and we need change in D.C. If Paxton wins, Talarico says Trump is bad and Paxton is not a good human being.”

But Talarico not facing a runoff means the Democrats lack something the Republicans have: a big race at the top to drive turnout.

Redistricting and runoffs

As the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais has let Republican-held states cut down on the number of majority-Black districts even further, some key districts face new battles.

Redistricting now pits veteran progressive congressman Al Green, 78, and former Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, 37 — two Black progressives and two incumbents — against one another, for the district Green’s home got moved into. The 18th District is considered a longtime Democratic stronghold comprising both a core of urban Houston and some Harris County suburbs to the north.

The latest polling from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs ahead of the runoff has Menefee leading Green by 7 points, 50% to 43% with seven percent undecided.

And up in the north in the state, redistricting brings Colin Allred and Julie Johnson together in a tight race for the newly-redrawn 33rd District.

Given that the new 33rd District contains a much higher share of Democratic voters than many of Dallas’ old districts — the new 33rd’s residents favored Kamala Harris in 2024 by 33 points — whoever wins the May runoff will more than likely win in November.

Allred, a former NFL linebacker, civil rights lawyer and three-term congressman for Dallas’s 32nd District, hopes to start the second act of his political career with a return to Congress, following his failed Senate bid against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz.

Johnson is the first openly-LGBTQ+ Congresswoman from a southern state and the woman who took over Allred’s seat in 2024 in the May runoff. Johnson hopes to secure a second term in Congress despite falling 11 points behind Allred in the March primary and despite a $4 million lag in spending compared to Allred’s campaign.

Johnson has focused heavily on Allred’s shifting stance on immigration and congressional voting record in her campaigning, touting her own stance as more consistently progressive and emphasizing her membership on the House Homeland Security Committee. She is also on the Foreign Affairs Committee, just as Allred was for much of his tenure.

But Allred has fired back by focusing on Johnson’s investment in the controversial tech firm Palantir, whose name has become permanently associated with the second Trump administration’s increased surveillance of immigrants.