Texas voters returned to the polls on Tuesday to settle a slate of primary runoffs left unresolved after the crowded March ballot, with the highest-profile contest pitting Attorney General Ken Paxton against four-term incumbent senator John Cornyn for the Republican nomination to the United States Senate. President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning publicly endorsed Paxton, a move party operatives in Austin said had been weeks in the making.
Cornyn has cast the runoff as a referendum on Texas’s influence inside the Senate Republican leadership, where he serves as deputy whip and chairs the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution. Paxton, who survived a state impeachment trial in 2023 and a federal securities-fraud case that ended in a plea deal earlier this year, has framed the race as a generational replacement and as a test of fidelity to the president.
The Democratic Senate runoff, won in March outright by congressman Colin Allred, is no longer on the ballot. But Democrats are voting Tuesday in a closely watched runoff for the new 39th congressional district, a North Texas seat redrawn last year, between state representative Julie Johnson and former US representative Colin Allred’s 2024 campaign manager, Bilal Hassan.
Statewide, Republicans are also choosing nominees for attorney general — the seat Paxton is vacating — and for railroad commissioner; Democrats are voting in their party’s land commissioner runoff. The attorney general race on the Republican side has pulled in roughly $14 million in outside spending since March, the most of any sub-Senate Texas race this cycle.
Polling stations in the Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin metros opened at 7 a.m. local time and were due to close at 7 p.m. Statewide turnout was tracking ahead of the May 2024 runoff by roughly 12 percent in early voting, according to Texas Secretary of State data, with disproportionately heavy Republican participation in Tarrant, Collin and Denton counties.
The endorsement landscape is unusually crowded. Beyond Trump’s Paxton backing, vice-president JD Vance recorded a robocall for the attorney-general race; Senator Ted Cruz endorsed Cornyn last week. Senate Republican leader John Thune travelled to San Antonio on Monday to campaign quietly with Cornyn at a fundraiser. National Democrats have largely sat out the GOP contest, calculating that a Paxton nomination would put a redder Texas Senate seat marginally in play in November.
A Paxton win would set up an unusually competitive general election in a state Republicans have not lost statewide in nearly thirty years. Recent University of Texas polling shows Paxton running roughly even with Allred in head-to-head matchups, while Cornyn maintains a six- to eight-point edge over the same opponent.
Tuesday’s results were also expected to clarify the lineup for several down-ballot judicial races and for two state Senate special elections, but the Senate runoff is likely to dominate the night. The Texas Secretary of State’s office said full statewide results were expected by midnight local time.