Texas AG Ken Paxton announces run for US Senate

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle Tuesday night that he will run for the U.S. Senate. 

The announcement comes as Paxton no longer faces the cloud of a federal corruption investigation that loomed over him as he rose up the ranks in the Republican Party. 

The announcement by Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump and a MAGA firebrand, comes two weeks after Republican Sen. John Cornyn officially launched his re-election campaign as he bids for a fifth six-year term serving Texas in the Senate.

“It’s time for a change in Texas,” Paxton told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, before acknowledging Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas’ other Republican senator. “It’s time that we have another great senator that will actually stand up and fight for Republican values, fight for the values of the people of Texas and also support Donald Trump in the areas that he’s focused on in a very significant way.”

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On Sunday, Cornyn said he was looking forward to “the competition” amid rumors of Paxton’s candidacy. 

“Ken Paxton is a fraud,” Cornyn’s campaign charged in a social media post after Paxton’s announcement. “He talks tough on crime and then lets crooked progressive Lina Hidalgo off the hook. He says his impeachment trial was a sham but he didn’t contest the facts in legal filings which will cost the state millions.”

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“He says he’s anti-woke but he funnels millions of taxpayer dollars to lawyers who celebrate DEI,” the post continued. “And Ken claims to be a man of faith but uses fake Uber accounts to meet his girlfriend and deceive his family.”

Cornyn’s campaign noted that the incumbent senator has voted with Trump more than 95% of current senators. Trump and Texas need a “battle-tested conservative” who knows how to protect his agenda in the Senate and won’t be outsmarted by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrats, the campaign said. 

The announcement from Paxton puts the gears in motion for what may be an extremely expensive and bruising GOP primary battle, pitting the remaining establishment and business factions of the Republican Party versus the ascendant MAGA wing.

“It sets the table for the most expensive primary in Texas. It will be a brutal battle,” veteran Republican strategist Dave Carney told Fox News. Carney, the longtime top political adviser to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, noted that the announcement by Paxton also “opens up the attorney general’s race. There will probably be a very competitive primary for that and we’re going to have a lot of musical chairs down ballot.”

Matt Mackowiak, a veteran Republican strategist and communications consultant based in Texas and Washington, D.C., said “this is going to be the most expensive, nastiest, most aggressive, most personal U.S. Senate primary in Texas history.”

“You have two candidates who are going to raise significant funds, who are in significant positions, who do not like each and have not liked each other, whose teams do not like each other and the stakes could not be higher,” he emphasized.

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Paxton’s announcement was not a huge surprise, as he has long claimed Cornyn does not represent the conservative values of Texans and has accused the senator of not being an ally of Trump.

He has also regularly labeled Cornyn a “RINO,” a “Republican in name only” and an insult MAGA and “America First” Republicans have regularly used to criticize more mainstream or establishment members of the GOP.

Paxton, who has been Texas’ top prosecutor since 2015, has regularly criticized his GOP rival, pointing to Cornyn’s position on a border wall and opposing Trump during the 2016 election. 

Cornyn also previously came under criticism from conservatives after he helped push a bipartisan gun control bill after the 2022 mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school that killed 19 students and two teachers. 

Paxton, for a couple of years, had flirted with a primary challenge against the 73-year-old Cornyn, a former state senator, former Texas Supreme Court justice, and former state attorney general, who first won election to the U.S. Senate in 2002.

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“I can’t think of a single thing he’s accomplished for our state or even for the country,” Paxton said in a September 2023 interview on the Fox News Channel. “Somebody needs to step up and run against this guy,” adding, “everything’s on the table for me.”

Fast-forward to earlier this year, and Paxton, at a county GOP meeting in Texas, told supporters that one of the things “we need to do, and I might play a role in this, is replace John Cornyn in the U.S. Senate.”

And in a Fox News Digital interview in January, Paxton acknowledged that he was “looking potentially at the U.S. Senate.”

Cornyn, during the early stages of the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race, had said he would prefer that the GOP take a new direction, which angered Trump. But the senator endorsed Trump in late January of last year, after the then-former president won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the first two contests in the Republican presidential nomination calendar.

Since Trump returned to the White House three months ago, Cornyn has been supportive of the president’s Cabinet nominees and agenda.

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And in the senator’s campaign launch video last month, the announcer highlighted that during Trump’s first term in office, “Texas Sen. John Cornyn had his back.”

As he gears up for what will most certainly be his roughest re-election of his decades-long career, Cornyn has the backing of the top Republican in the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.

And Republican sources confirm to Fox News that Thune, as well as National Republican Senatorial Committee chair Sen. Tim Scott, have personally asked Trump to back Cornyn.

The president’s grip on the GOP is stronger than ever and any endorsement Trump may make in the emerging Republican Senate primary in Texas would be extremely influential.

Making Cornyn’s path to renomination even more difficult is a possible Senate bid by Rep. Wesley Hunt, who represents a Houston area district.

The third-term 43-year-old Texas Republican and rising MAGA star has made his case to the president’s political team, sources confirm to Fox News. Hunt’s argument is that he’s the only person who can win both a GOP primary and a general election, a source familiar with the discussions confirmed to Fox News.

An outside group supportive of Hunt is currently spending seven figures to run ads across the Lone Star State to increase the lawmaker’s name ID.

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Some Republican operatives and strategists worry that a primary battle in Texas could cost up to $100 million, potentially diverting much-needed resources from other races.

While Paxton is very popular with the conservative base of the party, it’s not clear at this point what Trump will do regarding the race. And political strategists note that toppling Cornyn in a GOP primary will likely be a very expensive proposition, and it’s not clear if Paxton can raise the money needed for victory.

“This says two things. One, Paxton sees an opportunity. And two, him getting in this early shows he needs the maximum time possible to try to raise money,” Mackowiak said. He added that Paxton “has received some negative feedback on fundraising.”

Paxton grabbed national attention in 2020 for filing the unsuccessful Texas vs. Pennsylvania case in the Supreme Court that tried to overturn former President Joe Biden’s razor-thin win over Trump in the Keystone State, and for speaking at the Trump rally near the White House that immediately preceded the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists aiming to disrupt congressional certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.

During Biden’s four years in the White House, Paxton took the administration to court numerous times.

While Paxton, who’s in his third four-year term as Texas attorney general, has long been a legal warrior in the MAGA movement, he also has plenty of personal political baggage.

Paxton was indicted on securities fraud charges soon after taking office in 2015, and more recently came under investigation by the FBI over bribery and corruption allegations from former top staffers. And in 2022, he survived a bruising primary amid his many legal difficulties.

In 2023, Paxton was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives, but he was later acquitted of all charges by the state Senate. 

The charges in the long-running federal corruption probe were dropped during the final weeks of the Biden administration. 

The attorney general also faced an investigation by the Texas State Bar for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

While Paxton for years has denied any wrongdoing and has survived his legal fights, he would likely continue to face tough optics and plenty of incoming fire over his past predicaments during a Senate showdown.

The eventual winner of next year’s GOP primary will be considered the favorite in the general election against whomever the Democrats nominate.

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Former Rep. Colin Allred has said he’ll decide by this summer if he’ll mount a 2026 Senate campaign.

Allred, a former Baylor University football player and NFL linebacker who later represented Texas’ 32nd Congressional District (which includes parts of Dallas and surrounding suburbs), was last year’s Democratic challenger in the race against Cruz.

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