Paxton and French Totals Higher in May
as Turnout for Cornyn in OT Plunges 81%
Ken Paxton Most Valuable Player - Bo French Best Upset
Capitol Inside
May 29, 2026
Texas Republicans aren't sure what to make of President Donald Trump's possible impact on the turnout for a primary runoff election in a U.S. Senate race that Ken Paxton won on Tuesday with a higher score than he'd posted in March while incumbent John Cornyn's share in overtime plunged dramatically.
Some inside the GOP contend that the turnout for the runoff would have been substantially higher if the president had stayed out of the Texas Senate race, which he entered a week before the second-round election with an endorsement for Paxton the state's attorney general. On the flip side, it's conceivable that a significant number of people who voted in the Republican runoff wouldn't have done so if Trump had kept his place on the sidelines where he'd remained throughout the race until the final stretch.
According to a Capitol Inside analysis of the primary and runoff votes here in 2026, Paxton saw an increase of 8 percent in support in the runoff compared to the initial vote when he and Cornyn were competing against other in a field of eight Republicans. Paxton scored 885,949 votes in overtime this week after placing second in the March primary with 878,564.
But Cornyn's score dropped 81 percent in the runoff compared to the count of votes he'd garnered in the first round with 910,382 votes as the contest's initial leader with 42 percent in March when Paxton was a close second at 40.5 percent. The 24-year Senate veteran lost the job in OT when 501,725 voters backed his re-election bid in the GOP runoff for a race that had a record price tag in the range of $135 million .
The Republicans who voted for Paxton in overtime most likely included some who'd supported the incumbent in the March primary election when Trump was still neutral. Some of Paxton's second-round voters may have stayed home for the runoff election if Trump hadn't rallied behind the state AG with at least two glowing recommendations on his Truth Social page in the closing days of the race. But a substantial number of Cornyn voters in round one apparently didn't return to the polls for the runoff - and that could be an ominous omen for the Republicans as far as Paxton's prospects against Democrat James Talarico in the general election are concerned.
The Democrats had the highest turnout ever in Texas for a primary in a midterm election when more than 2.3 million ballots were cast here in round one. Talairco scored 1,216,412 votes in the March election when U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett had almost 1.1 million as the runner-up. Talarico beat Crockett by 6 points with 52 percent of the primary total. The natural assumption is that a small but significant share of the Talarico total was a function of independents who tend to vote Republican and GOP voters who are sick of Trump and crossed ranks to support the Democratic nominee in a Senate race that's open in the aftermath of Cornyn's ouster at the polls this week.
The examination of the votes in the Senate competition in the primary and runoff elections points to the possibility that the Trump-backed attorney general had some coattails in the Texas Senate race in round two. Bo French saw an increase of 8 percent - the same as Paxton - in the number of votes he received in OT en route to a victory over incumbent Jim Wright in a race for railroad commissioner.
French - a former Tarrant County chair - received 663,679 votes in Tuesday's runoff after a close second-place finish in a field with five Republicans in the primary election with 614,178 votes. But Wright's runoff count at 648,978 votes was almost 5 percent higher in overtime than it was in the initial election when he had 620,959. After trailing the incumbent by less than 1 percentage point in March, French claimed the nomination for the RRC with 50.6 percent of the Tuesday vote.
Both of the Republicans in a runoff for attorney general - Mayes Middleton and Chip Roy - saw the count of votes they received in a field of four in round one fall 7 percent in the OT vote this week. The total number of votes cast in the GOP runoff in the AG's race was 52 percent lower in overtime than it had been in March. The turnout for the RRC runoff that French won was down 47 percent compared to the initial vote.
But the total count for the GOP in the Senate race was 56 percent lower than the number of votes that were cast in the contest in March. While turnouts for runoffs are rarely higher than they been in primary elections, the total vote count in a high-profile Senate runoff that Republican Ted Cruz won in 2012 was only 27 percent below the initial count.
The turnout for GOP runoffs that Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Paxton won in 2014 in their first statewide bids was about 75 percent below the total counts for the primary election that year. The stakes were high in 2014 when Patrick ousted David Dewhurst from the Texas Senate president's post in overtime when Patrick defeated Dan Branch in OT.
Comparisons between the Senate runoffs here a dozen years apart is apples and oranges in light of the fact that Trump wasn't a factor in 2014 when Cruz won his first term as the underdog against Dewhurst in the opening round.
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