John Cornyn goes scorched earth to try to save his Senate seat

By Manu Raju, Alison Main, Sarah Ferris, CNN

Houston (CNN) — Sen. John Cornyn stood before TV cameras in Houston recently and issued a warning to Ken Paxton, the man threatening to take the seat he’s held for nearly two dozen years: Things were about to get a whole lot uglier.

“After we get through with the attorney general” in a potential runoff, Cornyn said, “he’s going to be unelectable.”

Cornyn and his allies had already poured tens of millions of dollars in attack ads accusing the three-term state attorney general of corruption and personal enrichment. Cornyn’s closing message, in the final days of the primary, blasts Paxton for infidelity, accusing him of “sleeping around with a married mother of seven,” a claim CNN has not verified.

“We are just getting started,” Cornyn said in an interview after the event last week. “By the time it’s over, Texans will know everything they need to know about the candidates, including Ken Paxton.”

But the campaign has revealed something about Cornyn too. After more than two decades in the Senate, cordially climbing the rungs, backing conservative policies but also working on bipartisan deals, Cornyn is putting aside that history. He’s presenting himself as a stalwart ally of President Donald Trump — despite periodically breaking with him over the years — and spending furiously to try to drag Paxton down.

Yet those attacks haven’t done much to dent Paxton’s standing so far.

Polls show Paxton leading a three-way race that also includes GOP Rep. Wesley Hunt. The Tuesday primary is all but certain to end up in a May runoff with the top two vote-getters, setting up a long battle that Republicans estimate could cost $200 million on top of the roughly $100 million already spent mostly by Cornyn and his allies.

Paxton is closing the primary with a statewide TV ad narrated by his daughter, aiming to rebut Cornyn’s character attacks. Paxton predicted that Cornyn’s push would backfire with voters, saying in a statement, “Unlike John Cornyn, who’s become a desperate shell of a man clinging to power, my campaign is not about attacking someone else’s family.”

Speaking to CNN, Paxton echoed claims from Trump of being a victim of vindictive prosecutions.

“Trump went through the very same thing, and look where he’s at,” he said at a campaign stop packed with voters in “Make America Great Again” hats. “It’s going to be the same way for me. We overcame all of them. You can make up whatever you want to make up, but the allegations are the allegations. But the truth is the truth.”

One bipartisan deal is following Cornyn on the campaign trail

When then-President Joe Biden hosted a group of lawmakers at the White House for an event in summer 2022, he thanked them for helping to pass the first nationwide gun-safety bill in decades.

Among them was Cornyn, who pushed hard for the bill in the weeks after the elementary school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. It was one of many bipartisan deals Cornyn has pursued in his four terms while also voting for Republican priorities consistently.

“I hope it doesn’t get you in trouble, mentioning your name,” Biden quipped to Cornyn at the time.

It did. Years later, Cornyn’s support for the Biden-brokered gun compromise remains one of the top issues his opponents hammer.

He was booed at the Texas Republican convention as the deal was being finished and labeled a “RINO” — a Republican in name only — by Trump at the time.

“I’ve never been thanked by Joe Biden,” Paxton recently told a group of supporters in Magnolia — a city in one of the most conservative parts of Texas — after accusing Cornyn of facilitating the “most restrictive gun bill in probably decades.”

Hunt, speaking the same week about 200 miles away in Tyler, Texas, accused Cornyn of forgetting “what Texans actually want” after two decades in Washington — because that’s the only reason someone would “pass gun-control legislation in Texas,” to chuckles in the crowd.

Pressed by CNN on whether the gun-safety law is a liability, given that he rarely mentions it on the trail, Cornyn suggested his rivals were being disingenuous and defended his role in passing the legislation.

“No law-abiding gun owner or citizen has been denied access to firearms,” he said. “I think we’ve saved lives.”

He denied that he had any regrets about backing the legislation, which tightened background checks and includes funds for school safety and mental health initiatives, asserting his opponents had misled fellow Republicans about its merits.

“Unfortunately, it’s too easy to tell lies about what we did and what we didn’t do. … There’s a bipartisan consensus, I hope there is, that guns should not be in the hands of people who are mentally ill or who are criminals,” Cornyn said, adding that he’s a gun owner and hunter himself. “I will zealously protect the Second Amendment rights.”

Trump stays out of the race

The battle for the president’s endorsement has been the central feature of the three-man race. But despite months of pleading — and even a trip by Paxton to Scotland for a brief brush with Trump on the golf course — the president has intentionally stayed out, citing his friendship with all three.

Cornyn, along with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his chief deputy, Sen. John Barrasso, have made many appeals to Trump about the potential ramifications of nominating Paxton. They’ve told the president they would have to spend massive amounts of money to help the attorney general against the eventual Democratic nominee, either James Talarico or Jasmine Crockett. Cornyn says Paxton’s candidacy would hurt down-ballot Texas Republicans, effectively making it easier for Democrats to take the House and pursue an impeachment of Trump.

“So I think we’ve made the business case to him,” Cornyn told CNN of Trump. “It’s not based on emotion. It’s not about me, but I think Republicans and the president and his agenda will be much better off if I’m the nominee. If Ken Paxton is the nominee, it will be a disaster.”

As Trump entered the House chamber for his State of the Union speech last week, dozens of Republicans thronged the aisles for a quick embrace or selfie. Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas used his precious seconds with the president for a different reason — to promote Paxton, his longtime friend, one week before the state’s big primary.

“Ken’s here, and he’s going to win,” Nehls told the president, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Paxton flew to Washington for Trump’s address, in part to help lawmakers get formally acquainted with the man many in the Capitol are trying to defeat. The same week, Paxton used interviews to discuss working with GOP leaders in Washington, a far cry from his constant campaign attacks on the “DC establishment.”

What happens in a runoff?

Cornyn’s goal: convince GOP voters and donors that backing him in a runoff will spare enormous sums the party would have to put behind Paxton to save the seat and maintain the Senate Republican majority.

Cornyn, who has been married for nearly 50 years, is banking that a potential runoff would turn on character. He plans to go all-in on the highly public breakup of Paxton’s marriage with state Sen. Angela Paxton after she filed for divorce citing “biblical grounds,” accusing him of infidelity. (A court has ruled that future filings in the divorce will be made public, which Cornyn allies have warned will make it fair game for the runoff.)

“If his own family can’t trust him, you can’t trust him either,” Cornyn said in Houston last week. “I can’t trust him.”

Even if the race heads to a runoff, Tuesday’s final tallies will be critical for Cornyn’s future. If he comes in a distant second place, there will be enormous pressure on top Republicans in Washington to consider pulling resources to deploy them to other battleground states.

“Yet to be determined,” Thune told CNN on Thursday when asked how much money national Republicans would spend in a runoff to push Cornyn through. “It’s kind of one of those scenarios we were hoping to avoid.”

Both Hunt and Paxton blame GOP leaders for burning cash to help a struggling incumbent.

In an interview at a campaign stop in East Texas, Hunt said the money spent to boost Cornyn amounts to “insanity.”

“You have literally spent a Powerball ticket on John Cornyn already and you’re going to spend more,” Hunt said of GOP leaders. “You have a 24-year incumbent. It is obvious that the base has left him.”

Hunt added: “If you’re struggling this much to get out of the primary, how are you going to survive a runoff? That’s even further right than the primary.”

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CNN’s Casey Riddle contributed to this report.