For months, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn battered each other in a nasty and expensive race for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Texas.
Now that Paxton has emerged victorious, GOP leaders from Texas to Washington are urging intraparty peace and unity, warning that a divided GOP could lose the seat. But some Cornyn voters aren’t ready to move on — or look past Paxton’s history of scandals.
State Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, wasted no time courting those voters after Paxton won the May 26 GOP runoff. The next day, the Austin lawmaker hit the road for a five-city bus tour that he spent attacking the attorney general over allegations of corruption and extramarital affairs, punctuated by his new refrain, “I have a legislative record. Ken Paxton has a criminal record.”
Whether that message will prove effective in peeling off right-leaning moderates may help decide the election. Now that the dust has settled on the primary, recent polling has found most Republican voters have moved on and plan to vote for Paxton, with a clear shift from earlier surveys conducted in the heat of the bruising primary. Still, Talarico has held on to a chunk of support from moderate Republicans.
In interviews with The Texas Tribune in the weeks after the runoff, a handful of primary voters who backed Cornyn described a range of emotions, with varying plans for how they would vote. Some have decided they are supporting Talarico. Others said they would skip the top of the ticket or are still unsure what to do. Others still are embracing Paxton out of party loyalty.
Todd Shade, a 62-year-old who moved to the Austin area in 1995 after growing up in South Dakota, said he has been “very happy” with Cornyn. The self-described traditional conservative said he favors letting the free market flourish with minimal business regulations, yet is opposed to some of the socially conservative priorities that have dominated the Texas GOP as insurgents like Paxton rose to lead it.
Shade also believes at least some of the accusations against Paxton are true, including the charge from his former deputies that he abused his office to help a friend and campaign donor. Paxton has denied wrongdoing in these matters, which were the subject of his impeachment — he was acquitted by the GOP-controlled Texas Senate — and a federal investigation that fizzled when the Department of Justice declined to prosecute him.
Still, Shade said he plans to vote for Talarico.
“I think Ken Paxton is probably guilty of the things that he’s accused of,” Shade said. “It’s more of an anti-Paxton vote.”
Paxton, for his part, has moved to shore up GOP support by casting Talarico as a wildly progressive “threat to everything we hold dear,” calling up his past comments on race and gender and calling him “too radical for California, let alone Texas.”
Wayne Thorburn, who was executive director of the Texas Republican Party when the GOP won its second statewide election since Reconstruction in the 1970s, said Talarico will have to distance himself from many of the social issues he and other Democrats have championed if he is to win over enough of the Cornyn coalition.
“This is a conservative state, and if you want to represent the people of Texas, you can’t be of just one strong ideological position — especially one that is in the minority,” he said, adding that, if the blue team plays it right, “we may be at a point where the Democrats have an opportunity to become a competitive force in state politics again.”
The Tribune spoke to nine Cornyn voters, who provided a sample that, while not statistically significant, offers a window into how the senator’s diverse array of supporters — spanning self-described moderates to more Trump-aligned Republicans — are thinking about November. Here are their stories.
David Reitz
Photographed by Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune
Ronald Reagan was in the White House during David Reitz’s formative political years. To this day, Reitz defines himself as a Reagan Republican.
Soon after Reagan left office, Reitz, now a 62-year-old living in Granbury, discovered the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. He found the pioneering conservative radio personality both funny and informative. Reitz’s loyalty to the GOP and its characters cemented over the years, until it began to crack when, on the 2016 campaign trail, Trump quipped that former Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona was only popular “because he was captured” while serving in the Vietnam War.
Trump added, “I like people that weren’t captured.” Reitz, a veteran who admired McCain, could not stand it.
Still, as the Texas Republican Party lurched to the right in the decade since, Reitz continued to identify with some of its leaders — like Cornyn, who he felt shared his political views and respect for public office. The incumbent senator’s 28-point trouncing at Paxton’s hands was disappointing to Reitz, though he said he was not entirely surprised because of the runoff’s low turnout.
He said there’s no chance he votes for Paxton in November and is puzzled by the GOP support for a man accused by his former top employees of using burner phones. “That is so against what much of the Republican Party should stand for,” he said.
Reitz said he plans to vote for Talarico. But he also singled out other Republican leaders on the ballot who he once admired, or at least felt connected to through shared values and policy. He said he used to love Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, less so after he “drank the Kool-aid” on Trump. Abbott? “Whatever,” he said. Sen. Ted Cruz? “You can say disrespectful things about my wife and I will still cheer for you?” he asked rhetorically.
Reitz did not say how he’ll vote in Abbott or Patrick’s contests, but he did single out two other Democrats who will have his support this fall: state Sen. Nathan Johnson and state Rep. Jon Rosenthal, the respective nominees for attorney general and a seat on the oil-and-gas-regulating Railroad Commission.
“I guess that is where we are at,” Reitz said.
Benito and Toni Treviño
Photographed by Gabriel V. Cardenas for The Texas Tribune
Shortly after Benito and Toni Treviño married four decades ago, Toni asked her husband why he voted as a Democrat if his views were largely conservative.
“I thought about it for five minutes,” Benito recounted. “Almost instantly I became aware of what I was — I was a conservative and I was a Republican.”
Ever since, the two have been reliable Republican voters. That support solidified as Benito served as the Starr County GOP chair for 15 years, until 2001, and as Toni, upon retiring from her career as a federal prosecutor, dipped into GOP activism. Toni has since succeeded her husband as chair of the local GOP in Starr County, where Donald Trump achieved massive gains in 2024 on his way to carrying the Rio Grande Valley.
One day, during her current tenure, Toni was sitting at an island bar in her kitchen when a call from a Washington area code illuminated her phone. She answered reluctantly, figuring it was someone calling to ask for a political donation.
On the other end of the line, Cornyn greeted her. That call was the first of numerous exchanges, Toni said, as the senator or his team would always notify county party chairs ahead of a visit to South Texas.
“That really impressed me,” Toni said.
That and other interactions with the Treviños during trips to South Texas ensured Cornyn had two loyal supporters in Toni and Benito in recent years, even as the senator faced backlash from within his own party. They voted for him in the March and May primaries.
But now that Paxton defeated the state’s senior senator, the Treviños are prepared to vote for Paxton, they said. Anyone who does otherwise is not a Republican, despite what they might call themselves, Toni opined, adding that defecting voters “should leave the party and let the true Republicans continue.”
Their staunch support for the party ticket is fueled by their desire to see more economic opportunities in their region, which they believe will come from GOP policies, as well as their support for Republicans’ approach on immigration. Across the aisle, the Treviños see a Democratic Party trying to advance what they described as a radical socialist agenda.
Toni said she recognized Texas was losing seniority in Congress and may not be represented as well initially. But she is a Republican, she said, and Republicans vote for Republicans.
Ron Kolb
Photographed by Pete Garcia for The Texas Tribune
Through and through, Ron Kolb considers himself a Republican.
He voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980 and now thinks of it as a “mistake.” Ever since, he’s been a reliable GOP voter and has occasionally brought his musings to the conservative blogosphere, training his fire on Democrats from the Clintons to Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary, and placing Republicans he admired, like Rush Limbaugh, on a pedestal.
On the good side, in Kolb’s eyes, was John Cornyn. The 70-year-old Corpus Christi resident said he supported the senator for years and found him to be an “honorable, accomplished guy.”
“He is everything that Paxton is not,” Kolb said.
Though the attorney general’s positions are closer to his own, Kolb said, he can’t stand what he sees as blemishes staining Paxton’s conservative record. He ticked through the list: There’s the felony securities fraud indictment, there’s the impeachment and there’s the divorce, he said. (Prosecutors dropped the fraud charges in exchange for Paxton paying a six-figure restitution sum and taking legal ethics courses. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, accused her husband of adultery in filing for divorce last year.)
“I look at it like: There’s a crooked guy against a far-left…,” Kolb said, his voice trailing off into a pause. “Talarico is, like, a little bit crazy. I’m being honest. I could never support either of them.”
Thus, Kolb said he likely won’t vote in the U.S. Senate contest. Should Democrats flip the seat or control of the entire chamber, he said he will blame Trump, a man he has rarely disagreed with but whose judgment he questioned with the Paxton endorsement.
“He could have avoided this by endorsing Cornyn,” Kolb said. “It would not be much of a race.”
Mark Terry
Photographed by Aiden Gonzalez/The Texas Tribune
Mark Terry grew up in a tiny town about an hour outside of Waco called Hico. After three decades as an educator, first in rural and later suburban Texas, he now serves as a deputy executive director for the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association, a group that advocates for grade school administrators at the Capitol.
He found a home in the Texas GOP long ago thanks to his conservative views on social issues, like a hard stance against abortion, and his shared concerns with party hardliners about socialism and gender fluidity among kids.
But Terry said he also believes in cooperation and conversation and has some more moderate tendencies, believing, for example, that gender transition should be fair game for adults. (“If you are of age and want to think about things of that nature, great,” he said in an interview.) He described frustration at the “my way or no way” attitude among elected officials of both parties.
“It’s like, who do I vote for?” Terry said.
Every six years this century, when his name appeared on the ballot, the answer was John Cornyn. But after Paxton defeated Cornyn, Terry said he is unsure about what to do come November.
His reservations about Paxton crystallized three years ago when, amid frequent visits to the Capitol for his job, Terry decided to sit in on the attorney general’s historic impeachment trial.
Day after day in the Texas Senate, Terry said he heard a lot of remarkable evidence leveled against a sitting elected official by members of his own party. Paxton, who called the process a “sham” upon his acquittal, followed by waging war in the primaries against House GOP lawmakers who had led the effort.
The revenge tour was a turnoff to Terry, who said it is “real difficult” to envision supporting Paxton. But he also sees it as borderline impossible to see himself voting for Talarico.
“That’s just not me,” he said of the Democratic Party, adding that he might skip the Senate race and vote for other Republicans down the ballot, as he has done before.
For now, he said, he plans to pray on it.
Phil Grennan
Ninety-nine percent of the time, I think, ‘You go boy.’
Phil Grennan usually likes what he reads out of the press shop in the Texas attorney general’s office. Monitoring the agency’s press releases, he’s kept up with news about Paxton taking on Big Tech and what the office describes as protecting children.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time, I think, ‘You go boy,’” said Grennan, a 61-year-old retiree from Tarrant County.
But as he contemplated who to vote for in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate this spring, he thought about the 1% of instances when he disagreed with Paxton because he felt the attorney general’s position was too extreme. He instead voted for Cornyn in the primary.
In Cornyn, Grennan found a candidate he considered more in line with his own political identity: a right-of-center Republican who does not subscribe to the hard-right ideology embraced by Paxton.
And to be sure, he said he does not always vote Republican — he voted twice for Barack Obama, though he sort of regrets the second vote.
But this cycle, Grennan said, there is “no possible way I am voting for Talarico.”
Grennan’s reservations about Paxton have largely dissipated, and he said he plans to vote for the attorney general. He said he is not too familiar with Paxton’s impeachment or any other accusations of wrongdoing that have trailed him. Even if he was, Grennan said he does not care much about an elected official’s morality. What matters above all else to Grennan, he said, is personal liberty — and he believes Paxton will fight to protect it.
Sarah Stogner
Photographed by Callie Cummings for The Texas Tribune
As a candidate, Sarah Stogner is perhaps best known as the Railroad Commission hopeful who sat atop a pumpjack in pasties and underwear for a video promoting her campaign.
Four years later, now serving as a district attorney in one of the westernmost corners of Texas, Stogner is likely unknown to many — as are her aspirations of sparking a revolution of independents to take on the state’s establishment. Such a disruption of the two-party system, would bring about yet higher voter turnout, Stogner’s theory goes, by rooting out the hyperpolarization she sees as ostracizing those in the middle, who are then discouraged from participating in politics.
Stogner calls herself a “recovering Republican,” describing herself “eight days sober” to mark the time elapsed between Trump’s endorsement of Paxton and her conversation with a Tribune reporter.
Though elected as a Republican barely a year and a half ago, Stogner, the top prosecutor for the arid, oil-rich expanse of Loving, Reeves, and Ward counties, sees a broken electoral system that needs to be blown up before it can be fixed. She voted for Cornyn, in a contest she says encapsulated the Republican Party’s dysfunction; Rep. Chip Roy, the hardline conservative running for attorney general, because she said he had asked for her support; and Bo French, the right-wing activist and provocateur running for the Railroad Commission, because she saw him as a more beatable opponent for Rosenthal, who she will back in November. (“I want chaos,” Stogner also said in explaining her vote for the hard-right French.)
In continued pursuit of her blow-it-up mission, Stogner plans to vote for Ted Brown, the libertarian U.S. Senate candidate, this fall. At the core of these decisions is her push to make the political realm in Texas more friendly to independents, centered on a conviction that both major parties are failing to reach large swaths of moderates across a state that routinely has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country.
Stogner, who toyed with a third-party run for the Railroad Commission before shifting to the district attorney race, says the state no longer needs political parties. For now, she said she wants to focus on educating people about their civic duty to vote and the issues that are important to the state, in pursuit of juicing the state’s abysmal turnout.
“I was a lifelong Republican primary voter,” Stogner said, adding that she expected to be welcomed with “open arms” and have “intellectually honest debates” when she entered politics.
Instead, she said she “saw it was just a craziness of cult-like exploitation of lonely people.”
Eric Rocha
He’s too extreme.
Eric Rocha traces his interest in politics to high school, where he caught the bug from discussions with teachers who were candid about their Republican and Democratic leanings alike. The 28-year-old from the Rio Grande Valley has been plugged in ever since, and he’s found himself leaning toward the GOP’s politics, especially surrounding immigration. Rocha lives a five-minute drive from Mexico and noted he has seen firsthand the impact of spikes in illegal border crossings under the Biden administration.
Rocha said he wants a secure border and is against abortion access, though he said he is not very religious and also believes the country was built by immigrants and should have ways for people to enter the country “the right way.”
He’s voted for President Donald Trump three times and plans to vote for Gov. Greg Abbott again this fall. But at the top of the ticket, Talarico has secured his support.
Now a special education paraprofessional in Mission, the border city immediately west of McAllen, Rocha said he appreciates Talarico’s public school teaching experience. He likes how the Democratic nominee talks about his vision for the state and finds him more moderate than Paxton, whose hardline stance on immigration goes too far for Rocha. He voted for Cornyn in part because he felt the senator struck a balance more aligned with his views.
Plus, he is worried that Paxton — who he said “should be in jail” for the crimes he’s been accused of — would be a “puppet” for Trump rather than serve the interests of Texans.
“He’s too extreme,” Rocha said.
In his backyard, Rocha said he has voted for U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, and he still supports her — though he won’t get to vote for her this fall, with the GOP’s new redistricting map having shifted the entire city of Mission to the district of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo.
