Texas Republican Ken Paxton is stepping up his Senate bid against GOP Sen. John Cornyn
DALLAS (AP) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton He’ll be in an unusual setting Monday night: He’ll lead the Republican’s first campaign rally since announcing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate 10 months ago.
Paxton’s planned appearance is part of his stepped-up campaign to unseat the four-term Republican Party Senator John Cornyn and adding a MAGA devotee to the Senate, a proposal that sets up one of this year’s most contentious GOP primaries.
Until Monday, Paxton had run a lower-voltage campaign, spending relatively little money and gaining attention as state attorney general by pursuing primarily conservative causes. But with early voting for the March 3 primary election scheduled to begin Tuesday, Paxton is scheduled to make a stop in Texas this week. He also began running ads associating himself with President Donald Trump as he battled Cornyn. Representative Wesley Hunt.
Despite being the target of millions of dollars in attack ads from Cornyn and his allies and opposition from Senate Republican leaders who say Cornyn is a stronger candidate in the general election, Paxton enters the GOP primary looking like his party’s front-runner.
“I wish they would stop sending money out of Washington, D.C.,” Paxton told Fox News Sunday. “They’re sending the money from D.C. and they’re helping John Cornyn. And it’s … a lot of money that’s going to be spent and he’s going to end up losing it.”
Paxton’s political survival looks set to defy convention, just as Trump has. Paxton defeated an impeachment trial on fraud charges in 2023, overshadowed today by allegations of marital infidelity from his wife, State Sen. Angela Paxton.
The three-term attorney general is betting that challenging his own party’s leaders and aggressively making the case for conservative priorities will help him overcome ethical and personal issues that voters in the Republican-leaning state have at least so far forgiven.
Campaigns accelerated with the start of early voting
Paxton on Monday will kick off a four-day series of rallies organized by Lone Star Liberty PAC, a super PAC supporting him, to remind people that early voting in Texas begins Tuesday.
Previous campaign stops were lower-profile events, including county GOP meetings with other candidates. He traveled to five college campuses in Texas to speak to Turning Point USA chapters in the fall after the conservative Christian group’s national founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated.
But until this week, that was all Paxton’s public campaign efforts, except for a handful of podcasts with friendly hosts.
By Friday, the only television ad for Paxton in Texas was one that cost $674,000 to run, according to ad tracking service AdImpact.
This point attacked not Cornyn, but Hunt, a two-term House member from the Houston area. Like Paxton, Hunt is trying to appeal to primary voters looking for an alternative to Cornyn. By criticizing Hunt, Paxton’s allies are trying to fleece some of his voters in hopes of winning 50% of the primary vote; that’s the threshold needed to win the GOP nomination outright. If no candidate receives 50 percent of the votes, the top two candidates will advance to the second round on May 26.
Paxton’s campaign began running an ad on Friday featuring video clips of Trump praising Paxton and photos of them together. Trump had not endorsed any of the three Republicans in the race as of Monday.
Paxton’s office supports conservative causes
Paxton relied on his office in Austin to stay at the center of conservative efforts.
Last year, she sued Texas doctors for allegedly violating the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors; This confirmed an important priority for social conservatives in their opposition to what they called gender ideology.
In October, just weeks after Trump repeatedly implored pregnant women to “don’t take Tylenol,” Paxton sued the companies behind the painkiller, accusing them of deceptively marketing to pregnant women specifically and citing unproven claims that early exposure to its active ingredient increases the risk of autism.
Most importantly, Paxton led and often succeeded in numerous legal challenges against the previous Joe Biden administration over immigration and border policies, burnishing his reputation as a conservative crusader. Paxton, who was first elected attorney general in 2014, also regularly sued Barack Obama’s administration during the last two years of his two-term Democratic administration.
“I think Ken Paxton is a fighter,” said U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas. Nehls said Paxton prosecuted then-President Joe Biden more than any other U.S. attorney general.
Cornyn and his allies spend more than $50 million
A steady stream of lawsuits has kept Paxton in the headlines in Texas as Cornyn and his allies spend big money to tarnish his image with Republican primary voters.
As of Friday, Cornyn’s campaign and allied super PACs had spent more than $54 million on television ads since last year, according to AdImpact. Many of these reminded voters of Paxton’s impeachment and his wife’s alleged divorce “on biblical grounds” over alleged extramarital affairs. The groups also attacked Paxton, spending millions more on digital ads, text messages and direct mail.
In an ad sponsored by Texans for a Conservative Majority, a narrator says at the beginning: “Ken Paxton is not only corrupt, he’s weird.”
Republican strategists not affiliated with either campaign say the spending and months of warnings have not done serious damage to the reassuring Paxton. No senator in Texas’ long political history has served more than four terms. And Paxton believes he is better known in Texas than nearly every other statewide elected Republican, including Cornyn.
Speaking on a December podcast hosted by attorney Tony Buzbee, who represented the attorney general during the impeachment trial, Paxton said the “other people with name ID” in the state were Gov. Greg Abbott, who is seeking re-election, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Sen. Ted Cruz.
Senate GOP leaders worried
Senate Republican leaders in Washington had been sounding the alarm about Paxton for months. They say Paxton will need hundreds of millions of dollars more than Cornyn to defend himself in the general election as the GOP nominee, given the expected attacks. And they say that’s money the party shouldn’t be spending in Texas, where Trump has more than 13 percent of the vote.
Democrats need to win a total of four seats to overtake Republicans’ Senate majority in November. The minority party is expressing renewed confidence in competing for Republican-held seats in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
In Texas, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and State Rep. James Talarico are seeking the Democratic nomination. In a memo obtained by The Associated Press in early February, strategists for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a campaign group led by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, said Paxton would perform worse than Cornyn against Democrats in the November elections.
“Cornyn won the general election,” the statement said. “Paxton is risking the seat.”
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Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti contributed from Washington.
