Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading the Senate runoff by double digits, and the Republican establishment that spent years trying to end his career is about to watch him waltz into Washington. A brand-new Remington Research Group survey of 1,810 likely voters shows Paxton at 47% to Senator John Cornyn's 36%, with 17% still undecided and the May 26 runoff approaching fast.
So let me get this straight — they impeached the guy, dragged him through lawfare, and sicced every media outfit in the country on him, and he's winning by eleven points? Chef's kiss.
The poll, conducted May 3-5 with a margin of error of just ±2.6%, shows something even more brutal for Cornyn buried in the favorability numbers. Paxton sits at 51% favorable and 30% unfavorable among likely Republican runoff voters. Cornyn? A dismal 34% favorable against 45% unfavorable. The sitting U.S. Senator is underwater with his own party's voters. That's not a campaign in trouble — that's a campaign on life support.
The original primary saw Cornyn emerge narrowly ahead but fall short of the threshold needed to avoid a runoff. U.S. Representative Wesley Hunt was also in the race but got eliminated, and according to Just the News, Hunt's departure "appears to have largely benefited Paxton" in the subsequent polling. Turns out the grassroots voters who backed Hunt weren't exactly Cornyn superfans. Shocking.
Here's what makes this story so delicious. The Texas Republican establishment threw absolutely everything at Ken Paxton. They impeached him in the state House. They tried to remove him from office. Media outlets ran wall-to-wall coverage painting him as some kind of corrupt villain. And after all of it — every hearing, every headline, every breathless "bombshell" — the man survived every single attack and came out stronger.
Now he's on the verge of replacing the very senator who represents everything the base has grown to despise about Washington Republicans. Cornyn voted for gun control. Cornyn played nice with Democrats on judicial nominations. Cornyn embodied the go-along-to-get-along GOP that voters have been trying to fire for a decade.
Paxton embodies the opposite. He fought the Biden administration in court more than any other AG in the country. He challenged Big Tech. He went after election integrity when most Republicans were too scared to touch it. And when the establishment came for him with impeachment, he didn't buckle — he fought back and won.
The revenge tour is real, folks.
With 17% of voters still undecided and the runoff less than three weeks away, Cornyn would need to win virtually every single undecided voter to even pull even. That's not a path to victory — that's a math problem with no solution. The establishment spent millions trying to keep their guy in Washington, and the voters said no thanks.
Ken Paxton survived impeachment, survived lawfare, survived the full weight of the political machine — and now he's about to become the next United States Senator from Texas. Sometimes the good guys actually win.