Texas primary shows that MAGA loves a villain
On paper, John Cornyn should be unbeatable in a Republican primary race. Since he first took office in 2002, the senior senator from Texas has been a right-wing stalwart. He swiftly made a name for himself in 2004 by comparing same-sex marriage to a “union of man and box turtle.” In the Donald Trump era, Cornyn has been a loyal MAGA soldier, backing every ridiculous Trump nominee to the Cabinet and voting in line with the president’s agenda over 99% of the time.
The lone exception was the 2020 presidential election. Cornyn accepted Joe Biden’s victory as legitimate, and he pushed back — “gently,” in the words of the Texas Tribune — in the weeks after the election when Trump fired Chris Krebs, an election security official at the Department of Homeland Security who called the president’s claims of fraud were “unsubstantiated.” Still, Cornyn voted against Trump’s impeachment following Jan. 6. But three years later, after the president declared his candidacy for president in 2024, he said “President Trump’s time has passed him by.” (He later admitted he was wrong about that.)
The Texas senator has since been a devoted foot soldier — and a tremendous help to Trump. As one of the most powerful members of the Senate, Cornyn is prolific at passing bills and raising money. He’s been the majority whip and very nearly became the majority leader in 2024, losing only to Sen. John Thune of South Dakota by 5 votes. If Texas Republican voters wanted an effective, strong leader who has been successful at pushing right-wing policy, they could not do better than Cornyn.
As it turns out, that is not what the Lone Star State’s GOP primary voters wanted. On Tuesday, a slim plurality of Republican voters picked Cornyn as the nominee in November’s Senate race, a dismal result that sends the contest into a run-off against MAGA firebrand Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. As of Wednesday morning, with 93% of votes counted, Cornyn had received 41.8%, with Paxton trailing close behind at 40.8. Rep. Wesley Hunt, a latecomer to the race who was an early backer of Trump in 2024, earned 13.5% of the vote and will not advance to the run-off. The election, which will take place May 26 with early voting beginning six days earlier, promises to get ugly.
Were Paxton to prevail in May, he would be a nightmare candidate for the GOP in such an important election. He’s a bundle of red flags and, at a vantage point from outside the reality distortion field that is the MAGA movement, Paxton has no discernible upsides. But as we have learned, in today’s Republican Party, scandal and corruption don’t hurt candidates. To the contrary: Being the worst has become a selling point to GOP voters, who conflate odious behavior with being a “fighter” on behalf of their increasingly tribalistic interests.
Paxton frequently brags about being an evangelical Christian, and he has even argued that his faith should be imposed on students in public classrooms. He also had a messy public divorce that involved a confession of adultery. This became the focus of his 2023 impeachment trial — which was led by other Republicans — due to accusations that he broke the law and abused his office to cover up the affair and get his mistress a job. But that episode is just one in a staggeringly long list of corruption scandals dating back to his time in the Texas statehouse in 2008 and includes an indictment over securities fraud and an FBI investigation of potential bribery.
On top of the relentless odor of scandal emanating from Paxton, his actions in office would likely alienate swing voters in a general election.
On top of the relentless odor of scandal emanating from Paxton, his actions in office would likely alienate swing voters in a general election. He loves wasting taxpayer money on go-nowhere lawsuits that excite bigots and conspiracy theorists, but that annoy everyone else. He targeted Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue over false claims that Tylenol causes autism. He went after a school district for not forcing the Ten Commandments on students. He sued to overturn the 2020 presidential election by block swing states from having their votes for Joe Biden counted. He’s repeatedly filed suit against out-of-state doctors for prescribing abortion pills to women in Texas. He tried to stop community organizers from registering people of color to vote.
Paxton often loses these lawsuits, but that’s not the point. His apparent aim is to stir up the MAGA base and please an extensive network of far-right billionaires who have spent the past two decades turning the Texas GOP into a fascistic, Christian nationalist party.
State Rep. James Talarico, the winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, will no doubt be pleased if he’s pitted against Paxton in November, and so will many down-ballot Democrats. (Talarico’s opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, has not conceded amid legal challenges after telling supporters Tuesday night that Democratic voters had “been disenfranchised” in Dallas County.) The attorney general would likely energize Democratic voters to turn out against him. Cornyn spent a record-setting amount of money reminding Republican voters of that problem, but his efforts weren’t enough. The very qualities that will hurt Paxton in a general election — his reported corruption and his belligerent personality — are what endear him to the people who turn out to vote in Republican primaries.
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Last month, Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark posted the findings of a focus group of Texas Republican voters illustrating that Paxton’s aura of scandal is his main selling point to the party’s MAGA base. Most of these voters didn’t want to say that they like it when politicians are hypocritical. But as Longwell explained, Paxton’s bad behavior gets interpreted as evidence that he’s a “fighter” who is willing to cut corners to “get things done.”
“If I was voting on deacons for our church, definitely Ken Paxton wouldn’t be part of it, would not have my vote,” one woman explained. Instead, she backed the attorney general because “politically, I thought he would represent us.”
The entire MAGA base, but especially evangelical Christians, have spent years inhaling propaganda painting them as victims of an oppression campaign at the hands of a woke mob. They’re told by fundamentalist preachers and religious leaders that they’re engaged in “spiritual warfare” with a powerful cabal of progressives who want to destroy Christianity and steal their children’s hearts, minds, bodies and souls. These claims are validated by Trump, who falsely asserts that children are being forced to change genders behind their parents’ backs and releases nonsense “reports” claiming that Christians are the targets of rampant religious discrimination.
Despite his personal behavior, Paxton has endeared himself to conservative Christians by deploying the same lies about MAGA’s alleged persecution. With Trump’s assistance, Paxton portrayed Republicans who were prosecuting him during his impeachment trial as “RINOs” — Republicans In Name Only — who were secretly working for Democrats to destroy him because of his success at advancing the right-wing cause. This was all nonsense; Republicans who opposed him were just as conservative as his supporters, but they held a residual desire for the state’s top enforcement agent to be an ethical, law-abiding citizen.
But MAGA voters love villains, foolishly convincing themselves that a candidate who demonstrates a professed willingness to break laws or flout ethics will redound to their benefit. This dubious quality is framed as a form of self-defense against those dastardly liberals. They don’t want to be the bad guys, they tell themselves, but the evil Democrats gave them no choice but to fight dirty.
There’s not a shred of evidence that people like Paxton or Trump are actually warriors for any cause outside of their own ambition. The great irony is that Cornyn, and others like him, has done far more to advance conservative policies than Paxton, with his flashy but groundless lawsuits, ever has. But the results of Tuesday’s primary show that Texas Republican voters are divided. Paxton’s style ran neck and neck with Cornyn’s substance. If the former trumps the latter in May’s runoff, it could easily benefit Talarico and Democrats.
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