In late April, a group of women with jangly earrings and effervescent energy sat in a beer garden in San Antonio with plastic cups of red wine in front of them. They introduced themselves as Carol, Mona, and Susan. “We call each other the Golden Girls, because we do so much together,” Susan said. The evening’s entertainment was a meet and greet with Republicans running for elected office. The women had already checked out Brandon Herrera, a congressional candidate, in more ways than one. (“This might be the one time I vote for somebody by the way he looks,” Mona said.) But the night’s main draw was the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, the far-right agitator who hopes to wrest a Senate seat away from the incumbent, John Cornyn. Earlier this spring, Cornyn eked out a win in the primary, but, because neither candidate earned a majority, the two men will compete in a runoff, on May 26th. On Tuesday, Trump endorsed Paxton, giving him a significant boost. But prolonged Republican infighting, combined with growing anti-Trump sentiment, has resulted in a Senate race that seems more competitive than anyone would have predicted a year ago. Texas Democrats, wary after years of predictions that a blue Texas is just around the corner, are allowing themselves to hope again, cautiously.

Cornyn, who is currently serving his fourth term in the Senate, has the kind of voting record you’d expect from a Texas Republican: anti-abortion, anti-immigration, pro-gun. In 2012, the National Journal listed him as the second most conservative member of the Senate. But, according to the Golden Girls, Cornyn was a “RINO”—Republican in name only. “I’m very anti career politician, and especially, I’m sorry, but I feel like he’s not one hundred per cent behind our President,” Carol said.

That may technically be true—according to Cornyn’s campaign, he has voted with President Donald Trump only 99.2 per cent of the time. The Golden Girls dismissed Cornyn’s showy embrace of Trump—he recently called him “the most consequential President of our lifetime,” and proposed renaming an around seventeen-hundred-mile stretch of road “Trump Interstate”—as “just talk.”

Although the Golden Girls were more enthusiastic about Paxton, they were aware that he wasn’t a perfect candidate, either. Carol held up her phone to show me that she had just been asking ChatGPT about the attorney general’s controversies. Since riding the Tea Party wave to prominence in Texas politics, Paxton has been plagued by financial allegations, personal scandals, and whistle-blower complaints from his employees. In 2023, after being accused of abusing the power of his office to support a donor, he was impeached by the Texas House. The majority of Republicans there voted to oust him, but he was acquitted by the Texas Senate. Paxton’s wife, Angela, a state senator, listened to the proceedings, which included testimony about her husband’s alleged extramarital affair, but was barred from voting. Then, last year, Angela—who once snuck her husband out of their house to avoid his being served a subpoena—announced that she was divorcing him “on biblical grounds.” (Paxton has also been accused of having an affair with an aspiring Christian influencer.) The Golden Girls were bothered, but not overly so. “That’s not a good decision that he’s made, but what matters is what he’s doing for the state and for the country,” Carol said. “That outweighs his personal indiscretions.”

The Republican primary has been one of the most expensive in recent history, with both sides spending freely on attack ads. (“Ken Paxton has the ethics of a strip club owner”; “John Cornyn wants to take our guns.”) The runoff has prolonged the conflict, with one pundit calling it a “bloodbath” and a “civil war.” Meanwhile, the Democrats have settled on an appealing candidate, the fresh-faced state legislator and seminary student James Talarico. All of this made the Golden Girls nervous. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I am terrified of James Talarico,” Mona said.

Onstage, a man introduced Herrera, calling him Mr. YouTuber—he gained fame as a firearms influencer before turning to politics—and Herrera, in turn, introduced Paxton. “It’s a little embarrassing when we have some of the least conservative so-called conservatives in the entire country,” Herrera said. “It is my pleasure here to present the man who is going to finish this RINO-hunting venture, and get John Cornyn out of the Senate, and actually represent Texas the way it deserves.”

The Republican race has played out as a face-off between the power structures of conservative Texas politics. “Paxton has his ear to the ground with the activist base. He’s more in tune and connected with the right-wing-podcast influencer types,” Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican political consultant based in Austin and Washington, D.C., said. “Cornyn is much more comfortable with, and supported by, the donor class, the Republican women’s groups. Those are his people.” (Steinhauser ran Cornyn’s 2014 campaign, and has also worked for Angela Paxton.)

Cornyn is tall, long-faced, and dignified, with the mien of an aging cowboy. (He is seventy-four.) He has characterized the race in ethical terms. “Mr. Paxton has a checkered background. He is a con man and a fraud, and I think the people of Texas know that,” he has said. “I am not going to turn over the Senate seat that was once held by Sam Houston to someone like him.” He has referred to Paxton’s campaign as “a con man’s vanity project.”

The Center for Effective Lawmaking, a nonpartisan research group, has consistently rated Cornyn as among the Senate’s “most effective” members: his bills often address high-impact issues, and they become law at a notably higher rate than many of his colleagues’. But Cornyn’s willingness to work with Democrats to get legislation passed is increasingly seen as a liability within his party. It didn’t help that, in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Cornyn signalled openness to a mild form of gun control, or that he didn’t vote to overturn the 2020 election. “Cornyn’s supporters among the professional political class have had a hard time really taking to heart that, whatever they might think about it, Paxton resonates more with the Republican base right now,” James Henson, the director of the nonpartisan Texas Politics Project, at the University of Texas at Austin, said.

Paxton’s declaration of war against a capable, if not beloved, senator might have felt like a canny move in the first months of 2025, when Trump’s election seemed to portend a sustained MAGA moment. But now that support for the President is flagging, even in Texas, it’s looking more like Paxton has pushed a sure Republican win into uncertain territory. A few months after he announced his candidacy, the Cook Political Report moved the Senate race from “Solid Republican” to “Likely Republican.” If Paxton wins the nomination, Cook noted, that designation will shift again, to “Lean Republican.”

Paxton’s disruption of the established order, in a state where things had been working out quite well for Republicans, reportedly angered some of his long-term backers, including the West Texas oil tycoon Tim Dunn. Dunn, a longtime Paxton donor who has been credited with helping to shape (and fund) the state’s hard-right turn, has apparently been sitting this race out, according to Texas Monthly. Cornyn has raised much more money than Paxton, and has racked up many more prominent endorsements, including from the former governor Rick Perry. (The state’s current leading Republicans, including Governor Greg Abbott, Senator Ted Cruz, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, have not endorsed either man.) Paxton has attempted to frame the financial disparity as evidence of his grassroots bona fides. “He spent a hundred million dollars, and I spent five-point-eight,” he claimed, after the primary. (In the first quarter of 2026, Talarico significantly out-raised both Cornyn and Paxton.)

After Cornyn came out ahead in March, Trump promised that he would endorse a candidate “soon.” The prevailing wisdom at the time was that the President would endorse Cornyn, Paxton would drop out, the friendly fire would stop, and Republican donors could conserve their funds for the general election in November. But Paxton schmoozed with Trump at a Mar-a-Lago gala, and MAGA hard-liners applied pressure on his behalf. Paxton was expected to have an edge in the runoff, where a small fraction of highly partisan voters could sway the outcome. Then, on Tuesday, Trump endorsed Paxton, writing on social media that Paxton was “someone who has always been extremely loyal to me and our AMAZING MAGA MOVEMENT.” Cornyn, Trump added, was “a good man . . . but he was not supportive of me when times were tough.”

The situation—a midterm Senate election during an unpopular Trump Presidency, with Democrats running a charismatic young unknown who’s captured the attention of the national press—may call to mind 2018, when Beto O’Rourke came within three points of unseating Ted Cruz. Texas has become more conservative in the intervening years, but Talarico is better positioned than O’Rourke was. A recent poll conducted by the Texas Politics Project showed Talarico beating both Cornyn and Paxton in head-to-head matchups, by seven and eight points, respectively; in 2018, O’Rourke never led Cruz in T.P.P.’s polling. Henson attributed Talarico’s strong showing to the lack of consensus in the Republican electorate.

It remains to be seen whether the effects of this spring’s skirmishes will still be felt in the fall. Most Republicans will likely support whichever candidate comes out ahead, but around four in ten currently say that they won’t vote for their non-preferred candidate. The Republican polling firm Ragnar Research recently wrote about a “troubling pattern” in its data: reliable Republican voters were “showing signs of disengagement, either sitting out this cycle or, in some cases, shifting their partisan affiliation entirely.” Henson echoed this sentiment: “I think there’s a real fear, this time, that a significant share of Republican voters will stay home, and that number doesn’t have to be that big, because of the anticipated enthusiasm among Democratic voters.”

Common wisdom among Democrats is that Talarico would stand a better chance against Paxton than against Cornyn. It’s true that it would make for a stark contrast, the minister-in-training and the philanderer. But Cornyn is not necessarily the stronger candidate. Paxton voters are more intense in their contempt for Cornyn than vice versa. As odious as Paxton may be to his opponents, he is more in alignment with the heart of his party, and he may be better positioned to mobilize voters. Texans, on the whole, have broadly negative feelings about Democrats, and trying to win over Cornyn supporters may end up being a fool’s errand. The best-case scenario for Democrats may instead be for Republicans to stay home in November, and Cornyn looks like the candidate who is more likely to leave them disengaged.

At the San Antonio event, Paxton made for an unlikely firebrand: he was dressed in khakis, and spoke with a mild, lulling voice. He touted his record suing the Obama and Biden Administrations and his fight against what he characterized as an election stolen from Trump in 2020. (“He deserves another term,” a man near me grumbled.) After twenty minutes, he thanked his audience for being “true patriots.” In the front row, a table of baby-faced young men in sports coats listened intently. “We, a small group of us, can literally change this country,” Paxton said, and the Golden Girls gave him a rousing round of applause. ♦