Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. John Cornyn after Paxton handily won the runoff against Cornyn on Tuesday. When President Donald Trump endorsed Paxton late in the race, the campaign was effectively over. It is President Trump’s GOP, and his endorsement in a primary is the decider. Period.
Had Cornyn been the nominee, his re-election would have been a layup. Paxton’s race against Texas state Rep. James Talarico will be much more like a contested 3-pointer in the NBA than a layup. Talarico is indeed, as President Trump nicely summed it up, “weird.” But even given that, Paxton will need to raise a ton of money because the engines of the Democratic fundraising machine are already at top speed for the hard-left Talarico. Paxton should win, but even Golden State Warriors star and future NBA Hall of Famer Steph Curry hits only slightly more than 42% of his shots from beyond the arc. Curry may be the best ever, but it’s a tough task to drill that shot.
So too is Paxton’s task. The entire Texas GOP will need to get behind him quickly, and Paxton will need Cornyn’s half-million runoff voters and his financial supporters. The whole GOP will need to swing behind Paxton, even though Cornyn is respected and admired by longtime conservatives like me who value his knowledge of the Constitution, his work on the Judiciary Committee in every tough fight there over decades, and his tenure as GOP whip. But party loyalists have to know that ours is a two-party system and Winston Churchill’s admonition, “Trust the people!” applies in every fair contest.
So too does the wisdom of another brilliant prime minister of Great Britain — Benjamin Disraeli, whose years as leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservatives came in the 19th century.
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“It is not becoming in any Minister to decry party who has risen by party,” Disraeli declared long ago. “We should always remember that if we were not partisans, we should not be Ministers.” The same applies to every elected member of the GOP Senate stung by the defeat dealt their friend by the Lone Star State’s Republican voters.
The Senate majority is very much up for grabs in the fall. Republicans must defend four seats in which Democrats will mount well-financed campaigns, even if their nominees are weak. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Jon Husted of Ohio face hard-left Democrats in Graham Platner and former Sen. Sherrod Brown. Platner is quickly becoming an albatross for Democrats across the country, as well as in Maine, but Maine is a purple-to-blue state. Brown is as formidable a candidate as Democrats can field in ruby-red Ohio.
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Republicans also have to defend an open seat in North Carolina. Former national GOP chairman Michael Whatley has considerable skills and financial backing, but he drew the best candidate of all the Democrats in 2026’s close races: former Tar Heel State Gov. Roy Cooper. Democrats have a vulnerable incumbent in Georgia, where Sen. Jon Ossoff is still very much the “accidental senator,” but he is as hard-left as Democratic activists and donors want. Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire are all seats held by retiring Democrats, and Republicans should nominate excellent candidates not just against Ossoff but also in these three states.
So while the GOP’s current margin in the Senate is three, and control would flip to Democrats only if their nominees win four of the seven seats “in play,” that’s not an impossible result, especially in the sixth year of any presidency.
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The actual accomplishments of all presidents eventually get reduced to two or three lines in American textbooks. TR, for example, is best known for the Great White Fleet, the national park system — and the election of Woodrow Wilson and all the ill that was brought down upon the country because of Roosevelt’s decision to split the GOP in 1912. Richard Nixon’s three are summed up as opening China, détente with the Soviets and Watergate. It pretty much works that way for everyone not named Lincoln or Washington.
Right now, President Trump’s tentative trio is saving the Constitution with his three Supreme Court nominees, the war with Iran and his remarkable 2016 upset and 2024 comeback.
If the Senate flips, that record is going to change dramatically, as the lawfare Trump faced while out of office will pale next to the procession of articles of impeachment from the House and never-ending trials in the Senate — none of which would succeed in removing Trump from office but all of which will drain the last two years of his tenure of joy and of other possible legislative accomplishments.
Holding on to the Senate majority is vital to the president, the party and especially the country. The Democrats have collectively embraced an agenda of extreme policy and rhetoric. So, whatever your feelings about any of the GOP’s Senate nominees, put them aside and realize — once again — it is the party with the majority in the two chambers of Congress that sets much of the agenda. There simply isn’t any room to brood over tough losses.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
