Ken Paxton’s Senate bid could reshape Republican control in Texas

Ken Paxton’s bid for the U.S. Senate has become more than a Texas primary fight. It is now a test of whether Republican voters will punish a candidate with impeachment, indictments and a sprawling corruption cloud, or reward a hard-right fighter anyway, even as control of the Senate hangs in the balance.

Paxton, Texas attorney general since 2015, launched his campaign on April 8, 2025, against Sen. John Cornyn and quickly turned the race into a referendum on Donald Trump-style politics in a state that remains central to Republican power. Cornyn, backed by Senate Republican leadership, has attacked Paxton as a fraud, while Paxton has cast himself as the more loyal conservative. Trump has not endorsed either man, leaving both campaigns to fight for the same base with no clear blessing from the party’s most influential figure.

Paxton’s political resilience has been built on surviving scandal. In May 2023, the Texas House of Representatives impeached him by a 121-23 vote on allegations that included abuse of office to help donor and real estate developer Nate Paul, misuse of public resources, retaliation against whistleblowers, obstruction tied to his securities-fraud case and false statements about his finances. He was suspended from office, but the Republican-controlled Texas Senate acquitted him on September 16, 2023, by a 16-14 vote on all 16 articles of impeachment. Four additional articles that had been held in abeyance were later dismissed.

The legal trouble did not stop there. Paxton had already faced three felony securities-fraud indictments, and he later settled with whistleblowers for $3 million and an apology after they reported him to the FBI. A federal corruption investigation remained the most serious threat for years, but the Justice Department declined to prosecute him in 2025. That sequence has made Paxton an unusually durable figure in a polarized era, one who survived institutional punishment and returned to statewide politics with his core support intact.

The stakes are larger than one Texas seat. The March 3, 2026 Republican primary produced no majority winner, sending Cornyn and Paxton to a May 26 runoff. With Republicans holding a narrow edge nationally, a Texas loss would complicate their effort to keep or expand Senate control. The race has already drawn heavy spending and sharply negative attacks, and it now stands as a blunt measure of what Texas Republican voters value more: personal scandal or partisan power.