John Cornyn is facing a serious primary challenge from Texas AG Ken Paxton, who combines MAGA populism with sordid personal and financial scandals.

There are a lot of angles to discuss on the effort by Texas Republicans to redistrict the state’s congressional map in advance of the 2026 elections. Our editorial and Jeff Blehar’s Carnival of Fools cover a lot of the waterfront. Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman at the Crystal Ball have a detailed rundown of the electoral expectations.

There’s one more variable in this equation: the Senate race. While it has gotten more competitive in recent years, Texas is typically still safe Senate turf for Republicans, even when it’s a bad Republican year that trims the margins to their minimum, as happened to Ted Cruz in 2018. For now, 2026 looks unfavorable for the GOP, but it’s not a disaster environment. If that holds, John Cornyn would ordinarily be expected to safely beat Colin Allred (who lost to Cruz in 2024 and is favored for the Democratic nomination again) for reelection. Cornyn won a Texas Supreme Court seat by a 52–46 margin in 1996, and was last reelected in 2020 by just under a ten-point margin, 53.5 to 43.9 percent, running ahead of Donald Trump’s 52–46 statewide margin. In each of Cornyn’s other statewide races (his 1998 election as Texas attorney general and his Senate victories in 2002, 2008, and 2014), he won by double digits. In a dismal environment in 2008, he and John McCain each carried Texas by twelve points. Cornyn is respected enough among his Senate colleagues that he fell just three votes short of beating John Thune to be Senate majority leader.

But there’s a wild card: Cornyn is facing a very serious primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. It’s early, and many of the polls thus far have been taken by less than Grade A outlets, but Paxton has led Cornyn in more polls than not, suggesting that it will be a dogfight for Cornyn to get nominated. His strength with elements of the primary electorate was illustrated in 2022 when he crushed George P. Bush by 35 points in a runoff, although Paxton was the incumbent in that race. The divisive, scandal-tarred Paxton is a completely different animal electorally from Cornyn. He won his current job by just three points in 2018 after the tide of scandals began to rise around him but was reelected by nine points in 2022. He would doubtless make the Senate race a very high-profile pickup target for Democrats in 2026; if he’s nominated, Texas could easily be the race on which control of the Senate turns.

Elections are about turnout and persuasion. With his combination of MAGA populism, hard-edged social conservatism, and various and sordid personal and financial scandals, Paxton isn’t going to be doing much persuading. But the turnout puzzle can go a couple of different ways, starting with the chicken-and-egg question: Will a high-profile Senate race with vast oceans of advertising drive turnout in House races, or will newly contested House seats bring out voters who might otherwise have sat out the Senate race? (The latter could be good for Republicans if it means some traditional Republican voters who are unenthused about Paxton.) The risk for Republicans is that running a key Senate race and a bunch of competitive House contests side by side in a bad environment with a potentially radioactive Republican nominee could be a recipe for supercharging Democratic turnout, maybe even more so than what we saw in Texas in 2018. On the other hand, Republicans in the Trump era struggle in off-year elections to motivate low-propensity MAGA voters, and it’s possible that the pugilistic Paxton could bring out some people to the polls who would not be excited by the staid, conventional Cornyn.

Either way, Texas may be about to get a lot more interesting in ways that Republicans could live to regret.