Trump's Silence Hands an Impeached AG the Senate Lead

Prediction markets give Ken Paxton a 62% chance of defeating John Cornyn in the Texas Republican Senate runoff, as the former president's refusal to endorse reshapes the race.

Prediction markets give Ken Paxton a 62 per cent chance of defeating John Cornyn in the Texas Republican Senate runoff, as the former president's refusal to endorse reshapes the race.

Five weeks ago, Donald Trump stood before a crowd in Texas with three Republican Senate candidates vying for his blessing. He offered none of them a word of endorsement. That silence has proved more consequential than any rally speech could have been.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who was impeached by the state House in May 2023 on charges of corruption, bribery and abuse of office, now leads John Cornyn, the four-term incumbent US senator and former Senate Republican whip, by 23 points on Polymarket. The prediction market prices Paxton at 61.5 per cent to Cornyn's 38.5 per cent, with more than $15.3m in trading volume behind the contract. The runoff is scheduled for May 26.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Cornyn needed Trump's endorsement to consolidate the Republican establishment vote and frame the contest as loyalty versus recklessness. Without it, the race has become a referendum on insider credentials versus outsider combativeness, terrain on which Paxton holds the natural advantage.

Trump's neutrality was not inevitable. Cornyn has voted reliably for the president's legislative agenda and served as a senior figure in Senate Republican leadership. But he also voted to certify the 2020 election results and has, at various points, maintained the institutional posture that Trump's base views with suspicion. Paxton, by contrast, has positioned himself as the candidate of uncompromising alignment with the MAGA movement, a framing bolstered by his impeachment, which he has cast as a politically motivated attack by establishment Republicans.

That impeachment remains the central fact of Paxton's candidacy. The Texas House voted to impeach him with broad bipartisan support, presenting 20 articles of impeachment that included allegations of bribery, obstruction and misuse of official power. The Texas Senate acquitted him in September 2023 in a trial that lasted fewer than two weeks. The acquitting body was composed of many of the same Republican senators with little political incentive to set the precedent of removing a statewide official from their own party. Paxton has treated the acquittal as complete vindication; his opponents regard the proceedings as evidence of exactly the vulnerabilities that could surface in a general election.

Those general election vulnerabilities are not hypothetical. Polling reported by Politico in March showed Democrat Chris Talarico leading both Paxton and Cornyn in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. The finding is striking in a state that has not elected a Democratic senator since Lloyd Bentsen won his final term in 1988. Yet the margin is not without precedent. In 2018, Beto O'Rourke came within 2.6 percentage points of unseating Ted Cruz, demonstrating that Texas statewide races are no longer foregone conclusions for the Republican Party.

The implications extend well beyond the state. Senate control in 2026 will be decided by a handful of competitive races across the country. A Republican primary that selects a candidate already trailing in general election polls against an otherwise little-known Democrat would represent a significant unforced error. If Paxton wins the runoff and subsequently loses in November, the seat becomes a Democratic pickup in a cycle where every margin matters.

For Cornyn, the remaining six weeks present a narrow path. Without a Trump endorsement to anchor his campaign, he must persuade Republican primary voters that electability in November outweighs ideological intensity. That argument has struggled in recent Republican primaries nationwide, where base voters have repeatedly chosen combative outsiders over candidates with conventional electoral profiles.

For Trump, the calculus of continued silence is less clear. An endorsement of Cornyn would consolidate the establishment lane but risk alienating the populist base that views Paxton as one of their own. An endorsement of Paxton would energise the base but own any general election liability that follows. The current posture of studied ambiguity allows Trump to claim credit for the winner without absorbing blame for the loser.

Betting markets suggest that strategy is working, at least for Paxton. Whether it works for the Republican Party's Senate majority is a question that will not be answered until November.