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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a primary challenge against longtime Sen. John Cornyn on Tuesday night, setting the stage for a battle between two politicians representing different parts of the Republican Party.
Both Paxton and Cornyn have won multiple statewide elections. Paxton, a GOP hard-liner, was first elected in 2015, while Cornyn — a deputy to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky when he was the Senate Republican leader — has held his seat since 2002.
“I’m announcing that I’m running for U.S. Senate against John Cornyn, who apparently is running again for his fifth term, which would put him there three decades. It’s definitely time for a change in Texas,” Paxton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on her program.
“We have another great U.S. senator, Ted Cruz, and it’s time we have another great senator that will actually stand up and fight for Republican values, fight for the values of the people of Texas and also support Trump, Donald Trump, in the areas that he’s focused on in a very significant way,” Paxton added.
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A campaign spokesperson for Cornyn, 73, defended his voting record and said on X that Texas needs “a battle-tested conservative” like Cornyn.
“This will be a spirited campaign and we assure Texans they will have a real choice when this race is over,” the spokesperson said, calling Paxton a “fraud.”
Paxton was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives in 2023 on corruption charges, but he was acquitted in the state Senate. The next year he reached a deal that included a $300,000 payment in restitution to avoid a securities fraud trial stemming from a 2015 indictment on three felony charges. He had pleaded not guilty.
Paxton, 62, has been a staunch Trump ally since Trump’s first term. After the 2020 election, Paxton played a lead role in supporting Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden. Paxton later used his office to wage numerous court battles against the Biden administration on a variety of issues.
The GOP primary field for next year’s election now includes Paxton, Cornyn and Rennie Mann, the president of an independent school board in Texas.
On the Democratic side, only former Rep. Colin Allred has jumped into the race. Allred, a former NFL player, drew national attention last year when he sought to unseat Cruz, who won by nearly 9 percentage points.
Cornyn won his last Senate primary, in 2020, in a landslide, collecting 76% of the vote and beating his closest opponent by more than 1 million votes.
Before he was elected to the Senate, Cornyn held Paxton’s current job, serving as state attorney general from 1999 to 2002.