Trump’s iron grip on the Republican party has never been stronger. What about the country?
The US president’s backing of Maga extremists turns off the very voters Republicans need to win over in the midterms
Donald Trump gave it a minute.
At 9.01pm it was confirmed that the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton – a hardliner backed by the US president – had triumphed over the incumbent John Cornyn in the state’s Republican primary runoff for the US Senate. By 9.02pm, Trump had started celebrating on social media.
“I will do some nice, big, beautiful rallies for Ken,” the president wrote this morning. “Texas, this will be FUN!”
But James Talarico also wasted no time. At 9.03pm, Paxton’s Democratic rival for the seat reached out to Cornyn’s supporters. “You have a place in our campaign,” he wrote.
Paxton’s clear victory – the widest primary defeat of an incumbent US senator in almost five decades – highlights the extraordinary loyalty Trump continues to command over his base. But Democrats are still optimistic that Paxton’s extremism and scandal-riddled past will bring disenchanted Cornyn voters to their camp.
Paxton’s confirmation has bolstered Democratic optimism that the party is in with a shot of winning statewide office in Texas for the first time in more than three decades, with the help of old guard Republicans and Latino voters switching back from the GOP.
Those hopes were further validated by a fundraising boost last night. Having already raised $27m – the largest-ever sum for a US Senate candidate in the first quarter of an election year – in the first three months of 2026, Talarico’s campaign told Politico it raised $600,000 in two hours after Paxton’s win was confirmed on Tuesday.
The Cook Political Report shifted its rating for the seat from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican”.
“Though polling shows the general election close or even tied, we don’t give Talarico an even chance just yet”, said Jessica Taylor, the Cook Political Report’s US Senate and governors editor, “though the contest could eventually shift into the Toss Up category”.
While with most votes counted Paxton had won the Republican primary runoff by a margin of 64% to 36%, Democrats are confident the wider electorate will respond differently to the proposition of a hardline Maga candidate.
Paxton is “too extreme and he’s too tied to Trump” to appeal to independent voters, Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman who in 2018 narrowly failed to unseat Ted Cruz, the Republican senator for Texas, told the New York Times.
Some establishment Republicans, too, fear the price of Trump’s iron grip around the party may well be its control of US Congress, as his backing of more extreme candidates turns off the very voters they need to win over.
After Trump’s 11th-hour endorsement of Paxton last week, party senators on Capitol Hill did little to hide their frustration. “Oh boy,” John Hoeven of North Dakota told reporters, adding that he supported Cornyn. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said she was “supremely disappointed”.
“He made his decision,” said John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader. “That doesn’t change the way that I feel.”
After a decade under Trump, the Republican party is now a machine primed around one man. The old guard, no matter how long they have been around, require his support. In Texas, and across the country, the question facing the voters is not whether the Republican party has transformed from what it used to be – but whether it has changed so much they will consider switching their vote.
But there’s also a lesson for both Democrats and moderate Republicans in November after Tuesday’s results.
Almost 1.4 million Texans cast a vote in Tuesday’s runoff, about 800,000 fewer votes than in the March primary. Paxton won about 886,000 votes this week, according to the Associated Press, a few thousand more than he received in March, during the initial primary vote. But Cornyn, who received about 910,000 votes in the spring, attracted just shy of 502,000 this time around.
Over the coming months, both the Paxton and Talarico campaigns will focus just as much – if not more – on who stayed at home. Which party can get voters to show up?
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