Four-term Sen. John Cornyn is staring down the most dangerous primary of his career — and more than $50 million in allied spending hasn't moved the needle. With early voting just 11 days away and the March 3 contest fast approaching, new surveys show Cornyn mired in third place in a three-way Republican brawl with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt.
A J.L. Partners survey released Thursday found Paxton leading the field at 27%, Hunt close behind at 25.7%, and Cornyn at 25.5%. A separate Cygnal poll — leaked to the Daily Caller News Foundation and conducted between January 26-28 with 615 respondents — painted an even bleaker picture for the incumbent: Paxton at 25.7%, Hunt at 25.1%, and Cornyn at just 22.4%.
The senator who first won his seat in 2002 may not survive to the runoff.
Cornyn and his allies have dumped more than $50 million into campaign advertising, with another $10 million blitz pledged in the coming weeks. To grasp the scale of that advantage: the pro-Paxton Lone Star Liberty PAC has spent less than 1% of what pro-Cornyn groups have combined. Standing for Texas, a pro-Hunt nonprofit, has spent roughly $6 million.
Fifty million dollars. Less than 1% of that from the other side. And Cornyn is losing.
There's a lesson here that the Republican establishment in Washington has been slow to learn. Voters are not TV commercials waiting to be programmed. When an incumbent has held office for over two decades and the base has moved — ideologically, temperamentally, generationally — no amount of ad saturation can manufacture enthusiasm that doesn't exist. Money can introduce a candidate. It can define an opponent. But it cannot make a primary electorate want someone they've already decided to move past, as The Daily Caller reports.
Paxton noticed the disparity — and twisted the knife. In a statement posted to X, the attorney general laid into Cornyn's spending:
"He's stolen $50+ million from races in NC, ME, MI, and GA and what does he have to show for it? He's stuck in the mid-20s, doesn't even know if he'll make the runoff, and is set to lose by huge margins even if he does."
That line sticks because the numbers back it up. Cornyn's team has outspent everyone in the race by orders of magnitude, and the return on investment is a statistical tie for last place among the top three — with nearly 22% of GOP primary voters still undecided in the J.L. Partners survey and a staggering 26.9% undecided in the Cygnal poll. That's a combined pool of persuadable voters larger than any single candidate's share. The final weeks could reshape everything — or they could simply confirm what the trendlines already suggest.
The real story in these numbers may not be Cornyn's decline. It's Hunt's rise.
Back in early December, J.L. Partners had Paxton at 29% with Cornyn and Hunt each at 24%. Since then, Paxton has dipped slightly while Hunt has edged ahead of the incumbent senator. In head-to-head matchups, the congressman dominates: Hunt leads Cornyn by 11 points (44% to 33%) and beats Paxton by a similar margin (44% to 34%).
Even in a hypothetical Paxton-Cornyn two-man race, the attorney general leads 41% to 40%. The incumbent can't win a head-to-head against either opponent.
That's a brutal position for a man who's held his Senate seat for nearly a quarter century. Hunt has managed to position himself as the candidate who inherits support from both camps if the field narrows — a rare strategic sweet spot in a three-way primary. He's not weighed down by Cornyn's establishment baggage or Paxton's personal controversies, including the attorney general's ongoing divorce after 38 years of marriage. In a race where both frontrunners carry liabilities, the younger alternative is collecting the upside.
Cornyn's allies aren't done fighting. The NRSC penned a memo this week arguing that Cornyn is "the only Republican candidate" who can "reliably win a general election matchup" against potential Democratic nominees James Talarico or Jasmine Crockett. The committee circulated internal polling showing:
The general election argument has some teeth, particularly the Paxton-Talarico number. A Republican trailing a Democrat by three points in Texas is the kind of data point that should get the party's attention. But here's what's conspicuous: the NRSC survey did not include Hunt. If the whole purpose of the memo is to prove Cornyn is the only viable general election candidate, why leave out the man who's surging in every primary poll? The omission suggests Washington's GOP establishment isn't eager to test whether the younger congressman polls even better against Democrats than the incumbent does.
The electability argument is also a harder sell when you're running third. Primary voters tend to process these things simply: if you can't win your own party's contest, why should we trust you to win the general? Fair or not, that's the psychology Cornyn is fighting.
President Trump, who often acts as a kingmaker in GOP primary contests, has not intervened. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told the DCNF in January that he has asked Trump to publicly back Cornyn, but those conversations have yet to materialize in an endorsement.
The absence of a Trump endorsement creates an unusual dynamic. All three candidates are vying for the MAGA lane, each claiming to be the truest vessel for the president's agenda. Without Trump putting his thumb on the scale, the race becomes a pure test of who the Republican base in Texas actually wants — stripped of the permission structure that a presidential endorsement provides. For Cornyn, that test isn't going well. For the party, it's clarifying.
Trump's silence doesn't kill Cornyn's campaign. But it denies him the one lifeline that could break through where $50 million couldn't.
The math is straightforward. No candidate is anywhere near 50%, so the top two finishers advance to a runoff expected in late May. Cornyn's problem isn't just winning — it's surviving the first round. If he finishes third, he's out. If Cornyn fails to secure a runoff spot, he would be the first sitting senator to lose to a primary challenger since 2010.
His campaign senior advisor, Matt Mackowiak, offered a measured response to the DCNF:
"We have a plan to win the primary and we are executing it."
Plans are nice. But $50 million bought Cornyn third place with a month to go, and another $10 million is supposed to change the trajectory. The Republican base in Texas isn't confused about who John Cornyn is. They've had 24 years to decide. The polling suggests a growing number of them have.
Early voting begins in 11 days. Texas Republicans are about to render their verdict — and the four-term incumbent may not like what they have to say.