Texas Senate Primary: The Race Both Parties Are Watching

President Trump traveled to Texas as three Republicans — including sitting Senator John Cornyn — fought it out in a competitive GOP Senate primary that was just over a week away. On PBS NewsHour, anchor Geoff Bennett turned to David Brooks of The Atlantic and Jonathan Capehart of MS NOW to make sense of a race that, at the time, had no Trump endorsement attached to it despite the president inserting himself into the state early and forcefully.

Asked whether Trump's presence signaled he's still the undisputed kingmaker of the Republican Party or whether he was trying to prove that he still is one, Brooks answered "a little of both, maybe a little more of the latter." For Brooks, the absence of an early endorsement in a race this closely watched was itself a data point about how contested the GOP's identity has become.

The backdrop mattered too: this is a segment recorded before votes were tallied, built around a primary election that both parties treated as a proxy fight over their own direction, not just a single Senate seat in a red state that had not elected a Democratic senator in decades.

Brooks framed the Republican primary as a test of how much juice remains in the party's MAGA wing. Ken Paxton, he said bluntly, "has been scandal-plagued since nursery school," while Cornyn is "not the most exciting bulb in the Senate, but a standard-issue Republican." Brooks predicted Paxton would likely finish first in the multi-candidate field but probably force a runoff rather than win outright.

The real signal, in Brooks's view, would come from the other direction: if Paxton underperforms and either Wesley Hunt or Cornyn does well instead, "that's a sign the Republican Party is beginning to move on" from the most combustible strain of MAGA politics. If Paxton dominates, it shows the opposite — that the base still rewards confrontation and scandal-tolerance over a "standard-issue" incumbent.

What made this framing useful is that it turned a crowded, noisy primary into a single legible test. Instead of parsing three separate campaigns on their own terms, Brooks reduced the Republican field to one underlying question: does a Republican electorate that has spent years rewarding maximum confrontation still do so when the alternative is a plainly more conventional, if less exciting, incumbent senator? Cornyn's presence in the race, more than any speech he gave, functioned as the control group for that experiment.

On the Democratic side, Brooks described the choice between Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico as the defining question inside the party right now: "do we want somebody who will just go to the mat and take down these Republicans, or do we want somebody who will be conciliatory and win over people from the center?" Crockett, an "aggressive, progressive fighter," represents the first path. Talarico, described as more moderate and "trying to revive the religious left," represents the second.

Capehart dug into the polling, which he said was "a bit all over the place." One survey from UT Tyler had Crockett up by 12 points, though he flagged the small sample size. Other polls he'd reviewed showed Talarico ahead by single digits — roughly six to eight points. Rather than picking a favorite, Capehart described two legitimate but very different theories of the electorate at work.

Two Different Turnout Bets

Capehart argued Crockett is chasing disaffected voters and African American voters who may not have turned out in previous elections — a strategy he compared to what Trump did in 2016, calling it "fracking for votes," pulling out people who hadn't voted before. Talarico, by contrast, is "going after more middle-of-the-road" voters, specifically disaffected Republicans uneasy with the president who "might be gettable." Capehart's summary of election night: watching which turnout theory actually worked, and whether either candidate could clear a majority and avoid a runoff of their own.

Capehart also added a broader caveat that cut across the whole race: regardless of which Democrat wins the nomination, he said, "they will be infinitely better than whomever the Republicans decide to nominate" — a reminder that for Capehart, the more consequential fight for the general election was still happening on the Republican side of the ballot.

Even before Texans finished voting, Brooks and Capehart connected this primary to a bigger question they returned to later in the same conversation: is Trump's grip on his own party loosening? Brooks pointed to data suggesting some slippage — independents swinging sharply away from Trump, and Pew Research finding a sharp drop in the share of Republicans who say Trump respects the country's democratic values. Most strikingly, Brooks cited a finding that 61% of Republicans say they have no responsibility to support Donald Trump. He was careful to note that GOP support for Trump "is not going anywhere, but it's getting demoralized."

That context matters for how to read whatever happens in the Texas Senate race once results are in. A strong Paxton showing would suggest the demoralization Brooks describes hasn't yet translated into primary behavior. A Cornyn or Hunt surprise would suggest the opposite: that even in deep-red Texas, part of the party is quietly looking for an exit from the most Trump-aligned candidates. Either way, both analysts agreed this single primary contest was a genuine bellwether, not a formality, for how both parties define themselves heading toward the 2026 midterms.

There's also a general-election dimension that outlasts whichever candidates advance out of the primary. Texas hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate in decades, but Capehart's read on the Crockett-versus-Talarico turnout debate — whether the winning strategy is mobilizing infrequent voters or peeling off disaffected Republicans — is really a preview of the same question Democratic strategists are asking about every competitive Senate map this cycle. Whichever theory of the electorate wins in Texas will get cited, for better or worse, as evidence in that argument well beyond this one state.

And whatever the final margin between Cornyn, Paxton, and Hunt turns out to be, Brooks's framing suggests the more durable story is about direction, not just who wins a single Senate seat: whether a party that has rewarded scandal-tolerant, combative candidates for the better part of a decade is starting to reconsider that bargain, or whether Texas simply reconfirms it for another cycle.