The Republicans Are Messing with Texas
The political prospects for Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, could hardly have looked worse on May 27, 2023, when the state’s House of Representatives, dominated by Republicans, voted 121–23 to impeach him. After an investigation that lasted months, fuelled by eight whistle-blowers on his own staff, the legislators concluded that Paxton had taken bribes from a real-estate developer, improperly fired aides who reported his conduct, and obstructed justice. Following the impeachment vote, he was immediately suspended from office.
Undaunted, Paxton, who has denied any wrongdoing, called his accusers “corrupt politicians,” won acquittal in a state Senate trial, and returned to the offensive, filing dozens of lawsuits against the Biden Administration and what he called “woke” targets across Texas. He urged Texas schools to set aside time for prayer and directed that “any public or secondary school” display in every classroom the Ten Commandments—“the moral foundation that shaped our nation.” He persisted even after his wife of thirty-eight years, Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on what she called “biblical grounds,” an apparent reference to an alleged extramarital affair (which he denied) that was central to his impeachment trial. His wife’s name was subsequently removed from his official biography.
In Trumpian fashion, Paxton is wearing the attacks on his character and his record like a victory sash, declaring himself “the fighter they couldn’t cancel,” as he tries to deny Senator John Cornyn a fifth term in office, by challenging him in the March 3rd Republican primary. Paxton’s campaign website frames his story this way: “They tried to take him down. Now, he’s taking a sledgehammer to the D.C. Establishment.” Most recent polls show him with a narrow lead. Cornyn has several other challengers, and it appears likely that no candidate will win a majority, which would prompt a runoff on May 26th.
Cornyn is surely aware that Paxton is popular among the MAGA faithful, while he is often branded as an establishment figure too long in the saddle. Yet, he, too, is trying to portray himself as close to Donald Trump, who is seen favorably by more than eighty per cent of Texas Republicans. The opening image on Cornyn’s website is a photo of the two men together, both of them giving a thumbs-up. The text proclaims, “SEN. JOHN CORNYN VOTES WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP 99% OF THE TIME.” Cornyn, who called Paxton “Crooked Ken” and a “wife cheater and fraud” in a recent ad, has also been saying that Paxton’s “blatant record of corruption” would be devastating to the G.O.P. in the midterms, which historically favor the party out of power. At a recent campaign event with the former Republican governor Rick Perry, Cornyn predicted an “Election Day massacre” if Paxton is the nominee.
Watching closely are the Democrats, who haven’t won a U.S. Senate seat in Texas since Lloyd Bentsen was elected in 1988. They last came close in 2018, when Beto O’Rourke trailed Ted Cruz by just 2.6 points, or about two hundred and fifteen thousand votes out of more than eight million cast. Joshua Blank, who designs and conducts polls for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed to Trump’s declining popularity since his reëlection as a liability for the Republicans heading into the general election. Studying numbers from 2018, when Democrats picked up forty seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, he told me, “I see an electorate here that is more dissatisfied with the President than they were then, and significantly more dissatisfied with the economy.”
But a win by one of the leading Democrats running for Cornyn’s seat—Representative Jasmine Crockett and state legislator James Talarico, who face off in their own primary on Tuesday—is still viewed as a longshot, at least by Republicans. “If I had a dollar for every time someone talked about turning Texas blue, I could buy Fox News,” Governor Greg Abbott, who is favored to win a fourth term in November, said the other day. “There’s no chance they’re going to win the election.”
The Senate race is just one drama in a particularly lively campaign season in Texas, where Republicans are laboring to make good on their effort to carve five more Republican congressional seats out of the state’s thirty-eight districts—a bid pushed by Trump. The President was in Corpus Christi on Friday to discuss energy policy and to boost the Republican candidates. Cornyn flew with him from Washington on Air Force One and posted a photo from the cabin, but Trump, in remarks delivered just hours before he announced the attack on Iran, did not offer any endorsement. “You’re in a little race together,” he said, introducing Paxton and Cornyn. “It’s going to be an interesting one, right? They’re both great people, too.”
Whether the mid-decade gerrymandering will work is an open question. Blank noted that the maps were drawn on the basis of the 2024 election, when Trump was leading the G.O.P ticket against a waning Democratic Administration in Washington. Elections since then have shown Democrats outperforming expectations in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida. Latino voters have swung back toward the Democrats in a number of districts, a fact that drew attention in Texas, where about one in three registered voters is Latino, a demographic that delivered key support to Trump in 2024.
On January 31st, a small blue wave hit North Texas, where, in a special election to fill a state Senate seat vacated when the incumbent resigned to become the Texas comptroller, the Democrat Taylor Rehmet defeated a much-better-financed, Trump-supported opponent by fourteen points in a district that Trump had won by seventeen. No Democrat had won the seat in nearly fifty years. There, too, surveys indicated a strong Democratic swing in Latino precincts, compared with the vote in 2022, the previous time the seat was contested. I asked Mike Madrid, a Republican political strategist in California who co-hosts “The Latino Vote Podcast,” what he was seeing. He believes that Latinos, a diverse group largely untethered to one political party, are voting their frustrations with Trump. In 2024, it was Democrats who had failed to deliver, as they saw it, particularly on the economy and the border. Now that the Republicans are in power, it seems that they are the ones coming up lacking. “There’s no other way to splice the data,” Madrid said. “Does that hold through November? I don’t know.”
One voter I spoke with, whose views seem to support Madrid’s analysis, is Mario Guerrero, a thirty-three-year-old construction-company owner in Edinburg, Texas, about twenty miles north of the border with Mexico, where trade between the two countries has long been an essential component of the region’s economic well-being. He has always voted a straight Republican ticket, and he voted for Trump in 2024, calling the Biden Administration’s approach to immigration “ridiculous.” But he told me that he is done with Republicans: “I am not going to vote Republican, and I can guarantee you that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people that feel the same way.” He continued, “Nothing that is happening has actually helped our economy. Money doesn’t stretch as far anymore.”
Guerrero, who is the C.E.O. of the South Texas Builders Association, said that raids and detentions by ICE and Border Patrol agents in the area have caused fear not just among Latinos but among Asian Americans and other immigrants who are in the country legally. The building business has slowed because of fear among workers, uncertainty among developers and buyers, and the rising prices of materials resulting from Trump’s tariffs. He is indignant that federal agents are not focussing on violent criminals, as he thought Trump had promised to do. “They’re stopping people because they’re brown. They’re stopping people because they have a work truck. That’s not the America we know, man. That’s not the America that we love. This is not what I voted for.”
In the border city of Laredo, I heard something similar from Angel Garcia, a firefighter who voted for Trump in 2024. He was seated under a canopy near an early-voting site, dressed in a Gold’s Gym T-shirt, urging voters to support a down-ballot Democratic candidate. “I was all for tightening the border, but not this much,” Garcia said. He added that tariffs are hurting the region. Reflecting on his 2024 vote, he said he was tired of Joe Biden and was dismissive of Kamala Harris. And now? “Same hell under new management. Different devil.”
As for the Senate primary, Garcia acknowledges that Cornyn has useful seniority, while Paxton has “too much baggage.” If the November race were to be Paxton versus Crockett, Garcia would choose Crockett. He’s not sure if he’d choose Talarico, because he doesn’t know much about him.
The area’s longtime representative in the House is another Democrat, Henry Cuellar, who represents the Twenty-eighth District, one of the five that Republicans aim to flip. His territory stretches more than two hundred miles north of the border to a portion of San Antonio and its suburbs. Born in Laredo, he served in the Texas House and, briefly, as secretary of state, before winning a seat in Congress in 2004. Considered a conservative Democrat, he opposes abortion rights and, in February, was the only Democrat in the House to vote for the SAVE America Act, which would impose strict new proof-of-citizenship requirements during voter registration. Opponents say that the measure is thinly disguised voter suppression.
I met with Cuellar at the Laredo Country Club, where he had just attended an event celebrating Senator Ted Cruz as Mr. South Texas, particularly for his work in delivering money to expand bridge traffic across the Rio Grande. (Laredo is the third-busiest port of entry in the United States, having recently dropped from the first. On a busy day, twenty thousand trucks cross the border there.) When I asked Cuellar about the newly redrawn maps, he smiled and said that he’s not worried.
Cuellar has beaten previous challengers, most recently in 2024, after federal prosecutors charged him with bribery and money laundering, alleging in a fifty-four-page indictment that he had accepted six hundred thousand dollars from an Azerbaijani energy company and a Mexican bank. Prosecutors said that the money was routed through shell companies controlled by Cuellar’s wife, Imelda, who was also charged. The congressman’s former campaign manager and a consultant pleaded guilty to helping the Cuellars launder more than two hundred thousand dollars. Cuellar denied the charges against him and his wife. “I have always made decisions guided by ethics, the law, and what is right for my district,” he said, adding, “the way this case was initiated and pursued reflects troubling missteps that should concern anyone who values fairness and due process.” Cuellar’s lawyer said that his actions were lawful and “entirely consistent with the actions of many of his colleagues.” In December, the Cuellars were unexpectedly pardoned by Trump, who said that they had been badly treated by Biden’s “weaponized” Department of Justice. But, after the pardon, Trump accused Cuellar of “Such a lack of LOYALTY,” suggesting that he had hoped the congressman would switch parties to help preserve the G.O.P.’s majority.
Cuellar is confident that he will be reëlected, because of three economic negatives that he blames on Trump. He pointed to the impact of tariffs, which have slowed trade with Mexico; doubts about the President’s intentions regarding a new trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada; and ICE activity. “We’ve got extra winds at our back,” he said, of the Democrats, after visiting earlier that morning in Laredo with Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader. (Jeffries was there for the annual El Abrazo celebration of unity with the city’s Mexican neighbors, in which officials from both countries meet in the middle of a bridge on the Rio Grande.)
Trump won Webb County, home to Laredo, in 2024, becoming the first Republican Presidential nominee to do so in more than a century. But, Cuellar pointed to Democratic victories in every other race in the county. “It’s not a paradigm shift,” he said. “Hispanics voted for Trump and then they voted for Democrats down-ballot—the sheriffs, the county commissioners.” He also argued that the new map for his district, which is designed to add enough Republican voters to make it three points more favorable to the G.O.P., is actually slightly more Democratic by another measure, called the Texas Partisan Index, which projects how voters in each district are likely to cast their votes based on the past three federal-election cycles.
Across town, Jorge Tovar, the pastor of the Jordan River Church and the vice-chair of the Webb County Republicans, was thinking about the Senate race as he put up a lawn sign that read “Vote Biblical Values” in front of three wooden crosses outside the church. Tovar is a former Democrat who switched parties during Trump’s first term. He has faith in Trump, whom he calls “a repented person” who has “filled his Cabinet with godly people. He declared this nation again is a Christian nation.”
Paxton, Cornyn, and the third leading Republican candidate in the Senate race, Representative Wesley Hunt, have all injected religion into their campaigns, emphasizing the primacy of Christianity, in part by targeting Muslims in their rhetoric. Abbott fuelled this narrative in November, by declaring that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the country’s most prominent Muslim-advocacy organizations, is a foreign terrorist organization that aims to impose Sharia law on Americans. A CAIR official called the allegations “defamatory” and said the order “has no basis in law or fact,” adding that Abbott’s office “has spent months stoking anti-Muslim hysteria.” Muslims make up about two per cent of Texas’s population.
Under the motto of “protecting Texas values,” Cornyn has been particularly vociferous, fighting what he calls “political Islam” and “Islamic front groups.” In February, his campaign’s X account posted “Stand against radical Islam and vote John Cornyn for Texas!” (Soon after, Laura Loomer, the MAGA influencer, who supports Paxton, attacked Cornyn, unearthing a video where he wished Muslims a “good fast” during Ramadan. She called it “totally disqualifying” and wrote, “a great way to stop Sharia Law from spreading in Texas is to make sure John Cornyn isn’t re-elected.”)
As Joshua Blank, the pollster, sees it, a reason the candidates are attacking Muslims is that border issues have lost their potency. The share of Republican voters who once listed immigration and border security as their most important state issues has been nearly cut in half since Trump took office, with inflation, the economy, and “moral decline” now rating highly. “It’s a way to raise the same issues that are raised by immigration, about culture and changes and the primacy of Christianity,” Blank said. A similar strategy seemed to be at work when Trump renewed his attacks on Somali Americans, who are predominantly Muslim, during his State of the Union address last week. “Importing these cultures,” Trump said, means that “it is the American people who pay the price.” He vowed, to sustained applause, “We’re going to take care of this problem. We are not playing games.”
It remains to be seen, of course, how voters’ assessments of Trump’s policies and tactics will play out in November, in races at all levels. At a rally in support of postal workers, in San Antonio, I asked Gina Hinojosa, a state representative who is the front-runner in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, what the battle between Paxton and Cornyn might signal for the general election. She sees an opportunity for Democrats, but said she has no theory about which Republican would help them more: Paxton with his tarnished record, or Cornyn, who may not be able to count on support from the G.O.P. base. “In 2026, theories mean nothing,” she said. “Everything is upside down.” ♦