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Cornyn Appears to See Hunt as Threat
More than Paxton in U.S. Senate Clash
Capitol Inside
October 6, 2025
Attorney General Ken Paxton rolled out a rhetorical red carpet on Monday when he welcomed U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt to the U.S. Senate race in Texas where incumbent John Cornyn's campaign greeted the Houston lawmaker's emergence in the fray with accusations, warnings and threats.
"We welcome Wesley Hunt to the race," Paxton campaign adviser Nick Maddux said in a statement. "Primaries are good for our party and our voters, and Wesley and General Paxton both know that Texans deserve better than the failed, anti-Trump record of John Cornyn."
The Paxton campaign's kid gloves treatment of the Senate competition's newest major candidate appeared to give the impression that the state lawyer does not perceive Hunt to be a threat to his own bid for the job that Cornyn has held for nearly two dozen years and is seeking again at the polls in 2026.
But that wasn't the case with the incumbent solon's camp - which came out swinging the moment that Hunt announced this morning that he was running for the U.S. Senate in the GOP primary election in March.
"Wesley Hunt is a legend in his own mind," Cornyn senior campaign adviser Mack Mackowiak said today in an email. "No one is happier this morning than the national Democrats who are watching Wesley continue his quixotic quest for relevancy, costing tens of millions of dollars that will endanger the Trump agenda from being passed."
The Texans for Senate John Cornyn PAC slammed Hunt in a statement that Mackowiak issued - portraying the incumbent's new rival as a part-time legislator who'd been "piling up" absences while testing the waters for the Senate race. The committee contended that Hunt had missed 18 percent of roll calls in the U.S. House during his first 33 months as a member since January 2023.
According to the site GOVTRACK.us, Hunt ranked 6th among all U.S. House Republicans in the percentage of the votes he skipped during his first term from January 2023 to January 2025. Hunt missed 16.4 percent of the votes that were cast in the lower house of Congress during that two-year span.
Former congressional Republican Kay Granger of Fort Worth ranked 4th in absences during the 118th Congress when she missed 25.1 percent of the votes in that period. U.S. Reps. John Carter of Georgetown and Dan Crenshaw of Humble were rated 9th and 11th respectively among 222 House Republicans in the GOVTRACk analysis on congressional members who were missing in action in 2023 and 2024.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee took a shot at the latest entrant in the Texas Senate fight as well. "Now that Wesley has chosen personal ambition over holding President Trump's House majority there will be a full vetting of his record," NRSC communications director Joanna Rodriguez warned. "Senator Cornyn's conservative record of accomplishment stands tall against Wesley's."
The NRSC ripped Hunt for his admission that he'd voted for Hillary Clinton for president in the Democratic primary election in Texas in 2008. But Hunt has argued that he was going along with Rush Limbaugh's push to get Texas Republicans to vote in the Democratic primary for the former first lady in an attempt to impede Barack Obama's path to the presidency.
Hunt has been a distant third in polling on the Senate clash here in a field that Paxton led by double-digit before Cornyn began to cut the gap. But Hunt's share of support in a hypothetical three-way fight with Cornyn and Paxton jumped 7 points to 22 percent in a Texas Southern University survey in August compared to his standing in a poll there in May.
Cornyn's support jumped from 27 percent in the TSU poll in the spring to 30 percent in the August survey. Paxton led the pack in May with 35 percent in the university's polling on the Senate contest after receiving 34 percent in August.
more to come ...
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