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By Alex J. Rouhandeh
National Political Correspondent
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Atop a red-carpeted stage before some 400 supporters on a sunny, 78-degree day, the president of the United States rallies the crowd like no other politician can today—“360,000 barrels of Venezuelan crude are right now sitting in the tanker on my left,” he says to thunderous cheers as the crowd affixes their eyes to the massive red and black ship occupying Texas’ Port of Corpus Christi.
He beckons further left to the group of individuals seated closely to the stage within the mostly standing-room-only crowd. Their relatively formal dress stands out in the wave of red, white and bedazzled attire. “We have a great attorney general, Ken Paxton,” the president says during his February 27 speech, to which Paxton rises, outfitted in a sweat-stained, light blue button-up and Wayfarer sunglasses. He vigorously waves to the cheering crowd.
“And we have a great senator, John Cornyn,” the president follows. To this, the wispy white-haired Cornyn, also wearing Wayfarers plus a navy blazer and tie, waves less vigorously. He mostly gets cheers but also some loud boos. “They’re in a little race together. You know that? A little bit of a race. It’s going to be an interesting one, right? They’re both great people too.” The two stare directly ahead, potentially grateful they’re wearing sunglasses.
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Despite being a near-constant force in party politics for nearly a decade, the president initially chose not to endorse in Texas’ GOP Senate primary race and instead allowed the candidates—including a third contender, Representative Wesley Hunt who represents the Houston suburbs—to fight it out themselves without the leverage of his coveted stamp of approval. Trump’s non-decision—“I like all three of them, actually,” he said at a press conference earlier in February—has led to one of the bloodiest intramural GOP fights of the midterm season and a kind of natural experiment: What happens to Republican politics when Trump exits the political stage?
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As of March 9, per the Associated Press, the first round of voting gave Cornyn an edge of 41.9 percent to Paxton’s 40.7 percent with 99 percent of votes counted, forcing a runoff vote on May 26. While Hunt was eliminated, the key remaining political question is whether enough of his 13.5 percent of the primary vote will switch to Paxton to give him a shot of passing Cornyn. After the primary, Trump posted on Truth Social that he intended to endorse one of the two remaining candidates and ask the other one to drop out.
Rifts in the Republican Party are often described as battles between MAGA populists and the conservative establishment that dominated the Beltway and beyond until Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign went down in flames in 2016. But, as the Texas contest shows, that split has become outdated. While Texas is the home of the Bush family and more Fortune 500 companies than any other red state, “Never Trumpers” have long been rooted out of the Texas GOP, making this campaign a Trump loyalist-on-loyalist battle and exposing a new fault line in the party.
If Cornyn was a Bush-era moderate, he is no longer: He has voted with Trump 99.3 percent of the time, pushing through Trump’s judicial nominees and tax cuts. What he represents is something different—a post-Trump GOP establishment defined not by ideological heterodoxy but by a belief that Republican power flows from governing capacity, institutional infrastructure and general election viability. On the other side, Paxton represents an opposing view: The party’s power flows from ideological commitment and grassroots mobilization—and the idea that boasting about the ability to negotiate with Democrats is, in itself, disqualifying.
This distinction matters because it will define every Republican primary fight that follows Trump. When the president isn’t on the ballot and isn’t handing out endorsements, Republican voters will have to decide what kind of party they want to be—and Texas, with its uniquely bottom-up party structure and its decade-long project of purging anyone to the left of the grassroots’ definition of conservative, is the sharpest possible test case.
Fixin’ to Win
While most people can’t define what the “establishment” is, they know it when they see it. No intra-party competition today better puts on display the visual differences than the rivalry between Cornyn and Paxton.
On the Saturday before the election, Cornyn held his Get Out the Vote rally at a high-priced seafood chain in The Woodlands, one of Houston’s wealthiest suburbs. There, a mostly 60-plus-year-old crowd, outfitted in slacks, heels and blazers, sat at white-tableclothed tables in a high-ceiling, nautical-decorated room, enjoying salads as they listened to Cornyn speak at a podium in his measured and authoritative tone about his track record.
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“He’s been great for us, great for business,” Martin Jasso, 58, of ABC Professional Tree Services, told Newsweek of Cornyn. “He’s been great for the state. He’s been great for the country, and we need to keep a good senator.”
Two days later, inside a neutral-colored Waco banquet room— with a ceiling so low, the fans almost hit this reporter’s head—a mostly 60-plus-year-old crowd sat at white and navy-tableclothed tables eating fried shrimp and charcuterie off plastic plates that they washed down with big, plastic cups of iced tea. Their attention was affixed to Paxton, who in his calm, conversational tone spoke about his record as a conservative fighter taking on the forces that have screwed people like them over.
“I want someone who will talk to me like a regular, normal person,” Linda Johnson, a 77-year-old Waco resident, told Newsweek. “The controversies don’t bother me because look at the controversy around Trump—that didn’t bother me, and I’d vote for him again.”
Paxton—whose political career started in the state House—is firmly MAGA and has used his statewide position as attorney general to establish himself as a culture warrior, suing to overturn the 2020 election results, restricting transgender care, cracking down on abortion access and assisting with the immigration crackdown.
The controversies that Johnson referenced include a 2023 impeachment attempt by the GOP-controlled Texas House for allegedly misusing the attorney general’s office to assist a donor. Before that, Paxton was the subject of a near decade-long security fraud case, which finished in March 2024 with him agreeing to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution under a deal to end charges. He said in a statement at the time: “There will never be a conviction in this case nor am I guilty.”
In April 2025 he saddled the state with $6.6 million in court ordered payments owed to four former aides who say they were wrongfully fired after reporting Paxton to the FBI. On the more salacious side, last July Paxton’s wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, announced she filed for “divorce on biblical grounds.”
All Cattle No Hat
The Republican Party of Texas State Convention is one of the biggest gatherings of conservatives in the country. For a powerful and accomplished lawmaker like Cornyn, it should be a perfect forum for celebration and reverence. Instead, when Cornyn took the convention stage on June 17, 2022, he was met with a chorus of boos.
The issue that put him there: the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two teachers died. In the weeks afterward, Cornyn was instrumental in the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act gun legislation—a deal with Democrats the grassroots have never forgiven. The deal had been in keeping with Cornyn’s reputation of a mild-mannered “work horse” in the Senate. He had been crucial to passing the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 to revitalize American semiconductor manufacturing. In 2023, the Center for Effective Lawmaking named him the most effective Republican Senator for the 117th Congress. That effectiveness could be his undoing.
Getty Images/Newsweek Illustration
Cornyn is often quick to point out that he has voted over 99 percent of the time with Trump. As Senate whip from 2013 to 2019, he played a crucial role in blocking the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland—which set the stage for the currently sitting conservative supermajority—and pushing through Trump’s judicial nominees, as well Trump’s signature first-term legislation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And for many years, he only trailed his mentor, former Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, as the upper chamber’s top GOP fundraiser.
The Republican Party leadership in Washington, D.C., and Texas are well aware of Cornyn’s effectiveness and are going to bat for him. He has the endorsements of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, U.S. senators, members of Congress, an array of state politicians, the National Border Patrol Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Texas Farm Bureau. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and Senate Leadership Fund are together spending tens of millions of dollars to uplift his campaign and warn a Paxton victory makes the seat vulnerable to a Democratic pick-up come November.
“John Cornyn is a dedicated conservative with a record of showing up to secure President Trump’s agenda in the U.S. Senate, and he remains the only candidate in this race who will easily beat whichever radical Democrat emerges from their primary,” NRSC Communications Director Joanna Rodriguez told Newsweek.
“We’ve had a good relationship with Senator Cornyn for many, many years,” Farm Bureau President Russell Boening said in a Newsweek interview. “He’s been accessible to us, and he’s been responsive to our leadership and to our staff.”
Still, even with all that, the boos at the state party convention continue to haunt Cornyn, as he knows that’s the constituency that could not only cost him the race but also risk a Democratic pick-up come November.
Cornyn elaborated on his concerns about the state party in a 10-minute exclusive interview with Newsweek. Paxton’s team declined Newsweek’s interview request.
“I think there are a lot of reasons why party structure, nationally and statewide and locally, [has] suffered, and that’s because candidates really don’t have to go through the party anymore. If you decide you want to run for office, and you got somebody with a big checkbook who can contribute to a super PAC, you don’t need the political party. And I think that’s been a problem. I think having the party strong at the local level, at the precinct level, the county level, at the state level, is the best, the best guarantee for being able to vet candidates,” Cornyn said.
So while Cornyn may have money and institutional backing, he said those things “don’t necessarily encourage people to actually vote,” and in this era, people often don’t trust their advice either, Cornyn added. Being a Washington-based politician, he said, “you don’t have as much opportunity to interact with your constituents, and that is clearly a liability.” It’s that liability Paxton has pounced on to vault his campaign.
A Proper Gun Show
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Multiple state political leaders told Newsweek the structure of the Texas Republican Party is uniquely activist-driven. Unlike other state parties, the Texas structure flows from the precinct up, with no automatic governing power granted to elected leaders and major donors.
“The Texas GOP set itself up to be more grassroots-driven than, as far as I know, any other political party in any state,” James Dickey, who served as party chair from 2017 to 2020, told Newsweek. “It truly is a bottom-up organization.” In 2020, Dickey was running for another term as chair but came up against the populist former Congressman Allen West, who unseated him to become the first overtly MAGA state party chair. His term only lasted a year after he resigned to pursue an unsuccessful bid for governor. He was replaced in 2021 by Matt Rinaldi, who made it his mission to recast the Texas GOP from the party of Bush to the party of Trump.
“Political parties can wield power on behalf of grassroots Republicans, and they never tried to do that before,” Rinaldi told Newsweek. While his term started out relatively quiet, Rinaldi found his moment amid the 2023 effort to impeach Paxton. During that period, every member of the Texas legislature as well as Paxton were put under a gag order.
“There was no public support for him coming from the legislature or its staff or him,” Rinaldi said. “Somebody had to speak on his behalf, and the Texas GOP spent several hundred thousand dollars getting the word out to voters in the state of Texas.”
Ultimately, the State Senate went the opposite direction of the House and acquitted Paxton on all accounts, with only two Republicans joining all Democrats in voting for impeachment. This only inflamed tensions within the state GOP.
“That struck me as the worst of all possible outcomes,” Dickey said. “Either there [should have been] a rock-solid case that could and should and would have been made, in which case conviction would have been a more likely outcome. Or, if there was not, the impeachment probably should not have happened.”
From there, the state party under Rinaldi went on a purge to rid itself of those who targeted Paxton. Enemy number one was House Speaker Dade Phelan who was censured in February of the following year and hit with a Paxton and Trump-endorsed challenger.
Though Phelan won his primary that year, 13 of the 60 who voted to impeach Paxton did not, and four declined to seek another term. Phelan believes, without the advantage of being speaker, most candidates would not be able to endure the onslaught he faced. Trump was reelected later that year and so was Phelan.
While Phelan was confident he had the votes to remain speaker, he did not want his Republican members to have to choose between him and Trump’s agenda throughout the session—which he said he was not going to fully support—so he chose to not seek the gavel and retired at the end of his term.
“They would have to choose between me and him, and I did not want to put them in that position,” Phelan told Newsweek. “Most of my colleagues would not have been able to weather that storm. I won, but I would not recommend the experience.”
The purge of the Texas House wasn’t a warning shot, it was a proof of concept: Stray from the MAGA line, and the state party’s infrastructure will be turned against you. What makes that infrastructure so powerful is the financial and ideological machinery operating behind it.
A Knife to a Gunfight
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Much has been written about the billionaire duo Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. A 2024 exposé by ProPublica, summed up the two oil magnates’ power in writing, “the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas—a network of think tanks, media organizations, political action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on.” Texas State Senator Robert Nichols, the chamber’s most senior Republican and one of the two who voted to impeach Paxton, has seen their power at work. A self-described “Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Rick Perry, kind of Republican,” Nichols insisted he hasn’t changed, yet the 527 organization Texans for Fiscal Responsibility ranks him as the least conservative Republican in the Texas Senate.
That organization is backed by Dunn and Wilks, who also fund Texas Scorecard, an influential conservative news website. Though Rice University’s Mark P. Jones analysis in the nonpartisan Texas Tribune also ranks Nichols at the least conservative, the state senator argues these evaluations don’t adhere to a traditional definition of conservatism.
He said by respecting rule of law under the constitution and valuing local control of government, he adheres to traditional definitions of conservatism but not the definitions that TFR prefers. Newsweek contacted TFR for comment.
It’s meeting those preferences that Nichols argues has had a corrosive effect on state Republican politics.
“If you want to be ranked as very conservative, every single day at the legislature, that organization sends you where they are on each bill,” he told Newsweek. “Now you can read the bill and you cannot read the bill, but if you want to score real good, all you have to do is vote the way they tell you to do.”
Through exercising this influence, Nichols said the Texas Republican Party has been bent in a direction that favors Paxton. And under current state party Chair Abraham George, Rinaldi’s endorsed successor, the party continues to remain in that ideological direction. A spokesperson for the state GOP said the party cannot speak to individual candidates, declining comment.
Asked about the influence of Dunn and Wilks, Rinaldi said the hyper-focus on the duo undermines the will of the GOP grassroots, whose policies have not traditionally seen this level of financial support and mobilization. “You got to come up with your evil straw man to attack,” Rinaldi said.
Cornyn doesn’t blame the duo for pushing the GOP in a direction that created an environment favorable to Paxton, yet spoke with a tone of disappointment about the circumstances around their efforts which have resulted in the current situation.
“It’s nothing that other people, if they had the similar commitment, couldn’t do,” Cornyn said. “Whether it’s super PACs or whether it’s people who are committed to pursuing their goals through politics, if the party structure is weak then that provides them an opportunity to assert themselves, and I think that strikes me with what Tim [Dunn] has done.”
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The Stakes
In a state with a highly diverse and increasingly metropolitan population where Democrats are increasingly mobilized, the natural experiment playing out in Texas has a concrete answer: Without Trump as referee, the structural advantages built up over a decade favor Paxton, and the Republican establishment—new or old—has no obvious counter. Phelan predicts that the current political headwinds, an enthusiasm gap, the economy and a Paxton victory could result in a “bloodbath” down ballot and possibly the first statewide loss for Republicans in 30 years.
The structural risks compound the electoral ones. With the state Supreme Court mulling a case brought by the state GOP to close Texas primaries, Cornyn warns of a situation where “a very small minority of registered voters are the ones who determine who the candidates are”—which could result in Texas putting up candidates out of step with the electorate. He cites New York City and its selection of the Democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a cautionary example of what happens when a party’s primary electorate drifts too far from the general election mean voter.
The question isn’t just what kind of party Texas Republicans want to be, it’s whether the answer they arrive at is compatible with winning a general election in a state that is no longer as safely red as it once was.
In an age of polarization where what it means to be a Republican, a Democrat and a political party are ever changing, these questions are being answered in real time. How things play out in Texas will determine the fate of not just the state party but also how these dynamics could play out as America enters its next political chapter come 2028.
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