By Manu Raju, Alison Main, Sarah Ferris, CNN
Houston (CNN) — Sen. John Cornyn stood before TV cameras in Houston recently and issued a warning to Ken Paxton, the man threatening to take the seat he’s held for nearly two dozen years: Things were about to get a whole lot uglier.
“After we get through with the attorney general” in a potential runoff, Cornyn said, “he’s going to be unelectable.”
Cornyn and his allies had already poured tens of millions of dollars in attack ads accusing the three-term state attorney general of corruption and personal enrichment. Cornyn’s closing message, in the final days of the primary, blasts Paxton for infidelity, accusing him of “sleeping around with a married mother of seven,” a claim CNN has not verified.
“We are just getting started,” Cornyn said in an interview after the event last week. “By the time it’s over, Texans will know everything they need to know about the candidates, including Ken Paxton.”
But the campaign has revealed something about Cornyn too. After more than two decades in the Senate, cordially climbing the rungs, backing conservative policies but also working on bipartisan deals, Cornyn is putting aside that history. He’s presenting himself as a stalwart ally of President Donald Trump — despite periodically breaking with him over the years — and spending furiously to try to drag Paxton down.
Yet those attacks haven’t done much to dent Paxton’s standing so far.
Polls show Paxton leading a three-way race that also includes GOP Rep. Wesley Hunt. The Tuesday primary is all but certain to end up in a May runoff with the top two vote-getters, setting up a long battle that Republicans estimate could cost $200 million on top of the roughly $100 million already spent mostly by Cornyn and his allies.
Paxton is closing the primary with a statewide TV ad narrated by his daughter, aiming to rebut Cornyn’s character attacks. Paxton predicted that Cornyn’s push would backfire with voters, saying in a statement, “Unlike John Cornyn, who’s become a desperate shell of a man clinging to power, my campaign is not about attacking someone else’s family.”
Speaking to CNN, Paxton echoed claims from Trump of being a victim of vindictive prosecutions.
“Trump went through the very same thing, and look where he’s at,” he said at a campaign stop packed with voters in “Make America Great Again” hats. “It’s going to be the same way for me. We overcame all of them. You can make up whatever you want to make up, but the allegations are the allegations. But the truth is the truth.”
One bipartisan deal is following Cornyn on the campaign trail
When then-President Joe Biden hosted a group of lawmakers at the White House for an event in summer 2022, he thanked them for helping to pass the first nationwide gun-safety bill in decades.
Among them was Cornyn, who pushed hard for the bill in the weeks after the elementary school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. It was one of many bipartisan deals Cornyn has pursued in his four terms while also voting for Republican priorities consistently.
“I hope it doesn’t get you in trouble, mentioning your name,” Biden quipped to Cornyn at the time.
It did. Years later, Cornyn’s support for the Biden-brokered gun compromise remains one of the top issues his opponents hammer.
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