Cornyn trails Paxton in Texas GOP primary as voters seek Trump fighters

There is a scene in “The Godfather” when Michael Corleone tells his childhood friend Tom Hagan that he will be out of leadership during the film’s mob war, saying, “You’re not a wartime consigliere, Tom. Things might get rough with the moves we are trying.” That line echoes what many Texas GOP voters are saying about Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn.

I met Tim for lunch at Pegasus Plaza in downtown Dallas just three days before Cornyn’s Tuesday matchup against Attorney General Ken Paxton, and he told me, “I like Cornyn. He’s a good guy, but Trump needs fighters in D.C.”

Tim is in his 30s, works in banking, and went on to say, “Cornyn just seems to be from a different time. Maybe it was a better time, but it’s not now.”

Another Texan backing Paxton I met was Patti, who is retired and told me, “Cornyn is great if the other side is playing fair, but they aren’t.”

What Cornyn, who is behind in the polls but still within reach of victory, may be realizing is that there is a political price to pay for running on electability — that when an electorate is angry, affability is not an asset.

Ads are currently running in the Lone Star State urging senators to break the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, which requires voter ID in American elections. Every person I talked to, including Democrats, told me they thought Paxton would do it and Cornyn wouldn’t.

Not just in Texas but around the country, I hear enormous frustration from Republican voters about senators like Thom Tillis, Lisa Murkowski, John Barrasso and even Majority Leader John Thune for bringing a whack-a-mole hammer to a gunfight.

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As one man quipped to me this weekend, “Trump has enough Democrats who hate him to fight. He doesn’t need Republicans to fight, too.”

Cornyn appears to be waiting out Trump’s term in office, confident that the kind of GOP he came up in will reappear once Trump is out of its orbit, no longer pulled by his political gravity.

But with JD Vance holding a commanding lead in the — albeit very early — 2028 GOP presidential primary polls, Cornyn’s desire to return the party to its lovable-loser status, in which congressional Democrats regularly roll them, seems remote at best.

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Cornyn belongs to a political age in which the most vital job of Republicans was to hold the status quo on domestic and even foreign policy against the emerging radicalism of the Democrats. But his defensive, Maginot Line-style approach is not landing today.

In Trump, Republican voters found a chaos agent — one who would play offense against the left and, frankly, break a few things along the way.

Take foreign policy. Trump’s view of the neoliberal world order was that the U.S. paid to protect everyone, accepted bad trade deals to maintain stability and asked others to lead — all while apologizing for being in charge. He is now blowing up that model.

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Paxton has shown a willingness to have the president’s back on everything from tariffs to war to “Making America Healthy Again.” Could that be criticized as running as a rubber stamp for Trump? Sure. But that is exactly what many voters want.

As for Paxton’s scandals, which his opponents argue negatively impact his electability in the general election against either Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, or her “Beto 2.0” challenger, James Talarico, I see little evidence of that.

Several voters I spoke to were not even aware of Paxton’s personal life issues and brushed off his alleged corruption. But what they did know about were his accomplishments as a tough-as-nails attorney general.

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Even one Democrat I spoke with, a Talarico voter, praised Paxton’s work cracking down on H-1B visa “ghost offices” that are allegedly committing millions of dollars of fraud against the American people.

One hope for John Cornyn is that moderate voters might be quieter voters, less likely to speak with me or even answer polls. But with some frequency, so-called silent majorities turn into electoral losses.

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Almost nobody I spoke with disliked Cornyn. There were a few who spoke more like an X feed than a human being, but in general, the sense was that he is a good man — but not the right man to go to the mattresses with Trump against the left.

In the end, in “The Godfather,” Michael made the right decision by demoting Tom. He needed loyal fighters, not a smart man who could figure out how to please all sides. Now it is up to Texas Republicans to decide who their wartime consigliere will be. From what I can see, it is very likely to be Ken Paxton.

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