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Rising Democratic Party star James Talarico won his party’s US Senate primary contest in Texas late on Tuesday, while a bitter and expensive Republican primary contest between incumbent senator John Cornyn and state attorney-general Ken Paxton was forced into a run-off.
Tuesday’s primary elections in Texas fired the starting gun on a US midterm election season that will serve as a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency, and determine which party controls Congress for the next two years.
The primaries in Texas to determine each party’s candidate for the US Senate were being closely watched as a litmus test of both Democratic Party enthusiasm and Trump’s grip on the Republican Party heading into November’s general election.
Texas has long been seen as a Republican stronghold. But Democrats have become increasingly bullish on their chances of winning statewide in this November’s Senate race, given the president’s sliding approval ratings and the possibility of running in a general election against Paxton, a scandal-ridden state attorney-general who is popular with Trump’s Maga base but risks turning off more moderate voters.
A Democratic upset in Texas would be a major win for the party as it fights an uphill battle to take back control of the 100-member Senate, which Republicans control 53-47.
With most of the votes counted, Associated Press called the race for Talarico, a 36-year-old Democratic state legislator and Presbyterian seminarian. He won 53 per cent of the votes to beat Jasmine Crockett, the 44-year-old Democratic congresswoman whose district spans much of the Dallas area, by a seven-point margin.
Many party figures were quick to congratulate the former school teacher, who touted progressive policies while making mild-mannered outreach to independents and disaffected Republicans central to his pitch.
Crockett, who has made a name for herself in Washington with a more combative brand of politics, had said late on Tuesday that she did not intend to concede the race to Talarico, and suggested she would launch a legal challenge in the face of voter confusion over polling stations.
Still, Greg Casar, the Texas Democrat who chairs the congressional progressive caucus, called Talarico the “future of the Democratic Party”.
“He unites working people of all kinds to take on the billionaires who are making life unaffordable,” Casar said in a post to X. “He’s going to show Texas Republicans how powerful working people are when we stand together.”
Trump declined to endorse a candidate in the Republican primary, despite an aggressive lobbying campaign from Republican congressional leaders to persuade him to throw his weight behind Cornyn, the 74-year-old incumbent who is seeking a fifth term in office.
The president did not immediately weigh in on the results on Tuesday night.
Cornyn is seen as representing the more institutional, traditional wing of the Republican Party as opposed to Paxton, the state’s firebrand attorney-general who has been unflinchingly loyal to Trump over the years.
The two men will face one another in a run-off election on May 26, after neither candidate cleared the 50 per cent threshold required under state law to win a primary on Tuesday.
That sets the stage for three more months of a combative and costly campaign.
More than $129mn has already been spent on advertising in the Senate primaries in Texas, making it the most expensive Senate primary on record, not adjusting for inflation, according to Financial Times analysis of AdImpact data.
Nearly $70mn has been spent to date on advertisements in support of Cornyn’s candidacy alone — outspending Paxton by a ratio of 16 to one. In the Democratic primary, Talarico also outspent Crockett on ads, with $24.4mn in advertising supporting him — nearly five times the amount for Crockett.
Speaking to supporters on Tuesday night in Austin, Cornyn hinted at a nasty Republican run-off campaign to come.
“I’ve worked for decades to build the Republican Party, both here in Texas and nationally,” Cornyn said. “I refuse to allow a flawed, self-centred and shameless candidate like Ken Paxton risk everything we’ve worked so hard to build over these many years.”
Unlike Cornyn — who Trump once called a Rino, or Republican in name only — Paxton is popular with the Maga base. But he has also proven controversial, and Democrats are confident they could exploit his spate of legal and personal problems at the ballot box.
Paxton was among the fiercest proponents of the president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and spoke to the president’s supporters at the rally on the National Mall on January 6 2021, hours before the attack on the US Capitol.
Paxton was indicted on securities fraud charges that were later dismissed, and was impeached in 2023 by Texas’s Republican-controlled state legislature on charges of bribery, abuse of office and corruption.
Paxton’s personal life is also messy: his estranged wife announced in a social media post last year that she was filing for divorce “on biblical grounds”.
Additional reporting by Eva Xiao in New York