With One Week To Go, Texas GOP Senate Primary Is Heating Up

With one week to go before Texas Republicans go to the polls — and days after early voting began — the three-candidate Senate primary is heating up.

A just-completed University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs poll of likely voters shows controversial Attorney General Ken Paxton leading four-term Sen. John Cornyn 38% to 31%, with Rep. Wesley Hunt in third place at 17%.

Should no candidate secure a majority, the top two vote-getters will compete in a runoff May 26.

So far, the three contenders have been waging a political holy war against one another.

At 73, Cornyn has compiled a conservative record and supported President Donald Trump on nearly every major issue — from abortion to tax policy to his three Supreme Court nominees.

But Cornyn now faces two close allies of Trump as he seeks his fifth term: Paxton, who is in his third term, and Hunt — a West Point graduate, one of four Black House Republicans, and a Trump campaigner nationwide in 2024.

Paxton, 63, and Hunt, 44, slam the incumbent for his 2022 vote following a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a gun measure that tightened scrutiny of buyers under 21 and expanded background check requirements.

In addition, both charge that the senator supports amnesty for illegal aliens because he long advocated increasing the business community's access to foreign workers. He co-sponsored the Global Competitiveness Act of 2008, which expanded H-1B visas for employers.

Cornyn, who points to his long record opposing illegal immigration, has hit back hard at Paxton, who survived impeachment in the Texas Senate on corruption charges and is now in the midst of a divorce filed on grounds of adultery. Cornyn ads highlight the allegations — including claims he used an alias to visit an alleged girlfriend — and a parody "dating site" created by the senator's campaign brands the state's top law enforcer a "serial cheater."

Nomination of Paxton would be "an absolute disaster," Cornyn warned. His campaign has spent more than $60 million on the primary — about 60% of the estimated $100 million spent by all three candidates combined.

On social media, the senator needles Hunt for missing 44 of 48 House votes this year. Hunt's office countered that no "bills, resolutions, or GOP priorities have been delayed or stopped because of Rep. Hunt's priority of barnstorming Texas to retire John Cornyn."

Assuming Cornyn advances to a runoff with either Paxton or Hunt, former Texas GOP Executive Director Wayne Thorburn told us, "Cornyn has the money and the traditional support, but the state party leadership has gone strongly behind Trump and will give a good deal of support to a candidacy [by one of the challengers] in that either is perceived as more completely right-wing — which is where the party leadership is now located."

Thorburn, also the author of the critically acclaimed "Red State," a book about Republicans dominating modern Texas politics, characterized the hotly contested Democratic primary for Senate as "a choice between ideological and demographic purity and a more pragmatic path to possible competitiveness."

Providing the purity lane is the congresswoman often likened to self-styled "social Democrat" and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who decided to make the Senate run after newly drawn lines made her U.S. House district more competitive.

A fierce foe of President Donald Trump and a bare-knuckled campaigner (she once called GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, "Gov. Hot Wheels"), Crockett embraces left-of-center causes and rhetoric with vitriol.

Most recently, she declared "[W]hat I see from ICE right now looks like slave patrols. As an African American woman, what I am doing is I'm framing things in the frame of thought that I can associate them with… They are turning us into Nazi Germany because they're going door to door."

More moderate Democrats believe the candidate who can win against Cornyn — and especially against Paxton — is state Rep. James Talarico. At 36, the former school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian has a calm, unthreatening demeanor that has invited comparisons to former President Barack Obama.

Late last year, Talarico drew national attention when Obama hailed him as "terrific" and a "really talented young man" in an online interview. (Obama mispronounced the Texan's name as "Ter-rico," leading the proud Talarico to post on X, "President Obama can pronounce my name however he wants.")

But low turnout on March 3 — not to mention the January announcement that liberal billionaire Karla Jurvetson backed Crockett — could easily scramble the race.

The Hobby poll showed Crockett leading Talarico 47% to 39% among likely voters. But the survey was conducted before Talarico's celebrated moment last week, when his interview on CBS' "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" was pulled, with the network citing concern about upsetting regulators appointed by Trump.

Twenty-four hours after the interview was pulled, Talarico's campaign reported raising $2.5 million.

In her epic novel "Giant," Edna Ferber described Texas as "exhilarating, exasperating, violent, charming, horrible, delightful, alive." Ferber's adjectives could easily sum up the politics and the upcoming primaries in the Lone Star State this year.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.