Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is clobbering incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in poll after poll ahead of next year’s Senate primary in the Lone Star State. Paxton revealed the secret on Breitbart News Saturday.
“It’s pretty simple,” Paxton explained to host Matt Boyle. “When you go 23 years like John Cornyn, not pay attention to your constituents, and you pay more attention to what Mitch McConnell wanted you to do, people notice.”
Polls continue to show Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump, with a double-digit lead over Cornyn, who is fighting for a fifth term in the Senate. Saturday morning, yet another poll’s results were reported showing Cornyn down 17 points in a head-to-head matchup against Paxton.
“The fact that he supported gun restrictions that Joe Biden was complimenting him on, and President Trump was calling him a RINO [and] saying someone should run against him, the fact that he wouldn’t support the border wall and he was insinuating that allowing all these people to stay would possibly be a good idea, the people in Texas noticed,” Paxton said.
Cornyn’s Texas campaign image doesn’t match his Washington priorities, Paxton believes.
“Look, we’re in Texas. We’re not Vermont, we’re not Maine,” he said. “We expect a Senator that’s like Ted Cruz, is conservative, that is consistently conservative, that votes the way his constituents want him to vote, and doesn’t necessarily follow what’s going down in Washington, just to go along, to get along,” Paxton told Boyle. “And the reality is, that’s what Cornyn is.”
Paxton’s ideology isn’t his only parallel with Trump. The Texas attorney general has been the target of weaponized lawfare since his first election.
“This started immediately after I got elected,” he recalled. “They indicted me on three felonies. I never even had a speeding ticket. Suddenly I was in real trouble.”
Paxton survived the lawsuits and an impeachment by the Texas House of Representatives, but his victory required staring down a bipartisan establishment that wanted him out of the way.
“It was a combination of the Democrats, and Karl Rove and the the establishment Republicans that wanted me out of their way so that they could get their moderate elected, whether it was George P. Bush or somebody else,” Paxton said. “And so that’s that’s been the strategy. And if, if you’re not a billionaire, you have to spend a lot of money and try to find ways to creatively finance it, because that’s what they always hope. They hope they’ll wear you down and that you won’t be able to afford it, and that you’ll just give up, just based on the pressure and the cost.”
Paxton praised Trump’s big beautiful bill, a reconciliation package delivering the president’s legislative priorities ranging from immigration to taxes and spending.
“I don’t think most people realize how many good things are in this bill,” he said. “Not only does it cut spending by $1.6 trillion – I think [it] is the largest cut we’ve ever had. It funds things like the border wall, which I care a lot about. It funds more border agents. It funds more facilities to detain people.”
Not only does the bill cut benefits to illegal aliens, but its border security spending will save money by reducing “the cost of illegal immigration, whether it’s social costs with crime or just the health care costs, all the other things that we’re paying for,” Paxton said. He also praised the bill for “extending the 2017 tax cuts I think have driven the economy” and incorporating Trump’s no tax on tips or overtime campaign pledges, and in the increased Child Tax Credit.
During President Joe Biden’s administration, as Texas bore the brunt of his immigration policies, McConnell and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) worked on a migration deal with Democrats that would have catastrophically increased the inflow of legalized immigrants into Americans’ communities, workplaces, and schools.
After Trump came out in opposition to the bill, the pragmatic McConnell released his Senate allies to also oppose the dead-in-the-water legislation.
The bill, which its sponsors presented as a solution to Biden’s border crisis, was part of a scheme to unleash tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funded foreign aid, primarily to Ukraine, Breitbart News reported. Prior to McConnell’s decision, Cornyn had advocated for the legislative framework and pairing it with Ukraine aid.
That’s inexcusable to Paxton.
“I can understand maybe a senator [not from a border state] not understanding the importance of having strong immigration laws and stopping illegal immigration, but for Cornyn to wobble at it is remarkable, given his constituency in Texas, and given how much that impacts our state in negative ways, both cost and with crime,” Paxton told Boyle.
Even without sweeping new legislation, Trump has moved swiftly to reverse Biden’s intentional disassembling of the secure border he inherited from Trump. With the big, beautiful bill, he’ll be able to do even more, Paxton said, insisting, “President Trump has done by far the best job with illegal immigration than any president in my lifetime.”
“President Trump, he actually wants to help Texas,” he added. “He actually wants to help protect Texas.”
Despite his polling advantage, Paxton knows the establishment won’t give up Cornyn’s seat without a fight. He encouraged voters and supporters to visit his website to learn how they can help his campaign.
“We need all the help we can get, because obviously, the incumbents have a huge advantage in fundraising, because they get money from Washington sources,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.
