John Cornyn had no reason to lose.
The senior US senator from Texas is an institution in the Lone Star State. Elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1990, he went on to serve as Texas attorney general before being elected to the United States Senate in 2002 with the enthusiastic backing of then-President George W. Bush. Across his quarter-century tenure, Cornyn has been the very model of an establishment Republican: No scandals to his name, no controversies on policy, no fire-breathing outbursts. Three times, he was re-elected at a canter, and his seat was one of the safest in the Senate. In Washington, he was powerful, quiet, respected and conducted himself with genteel charm expected of an upper-crust blue-blooded Texan lawyer.
And then he lost.
Last week, with the endorsement of Donald Trump, a man called Ken Paxton ousted Cornyn from the Republican primary ballot and will replace him this November. Paxton might well be the anti-Cornyn: He is loud, brash, rhetorically extreme and has a list of scandals longer than your arm: He agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution after charges of securities fraud. He was impeached – by his own party – as Texas attorney general over charges of corruption and then further charged with retaliation after he allegedly sacked the whistleblowers. His wife divorced him over an affair – hardly uncommon or disqualifying by itself – that he was alleged to have corruptly covered up. He was investigated by the State Bar of Texas for using the powers of attorney general to prosecute his opponents. These are just a few of the better-known scandals.
"The worst Republican is better than the best Democrat"
His Democratic opponent, James Talarico, has no scandals on record. But he is of course a Democrat, and therefore – in Paxton’s eyes and those of his voters – something of a girly man. Talarico, like most progressives raised in the woke era, has his own long list of controversies, but these relate more to things he has said than things he has done. “God is non-binary”, he declared on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives in 2021. “Our southern border should be like our front porch, we should have a welcome mat out” is another line Paxton is highlighting, though in fairness Talarico also said that “your front porch also has a lock on the door”. He has extolled the virtues of tofu and veganism, leading Paxton to label him “too low-T (testosterone) for Texas”.
The race, then, pits the ethically compromised Republican against the “too woke” Democrat, and the Republican message amounts to “even the worst Republican is better than a woke progressive”.
But of course, this ignores a key point: Paxton did not become the Republican nominee despite his scandals. He became the Republican nominee because of them. The very awfulness that Republicans now insist voters should ignore is what attracted them to Paxton in the first place and is the reason why he defeated Cornyn. As with Trump in 2016, Republicans chose him over the genteel and scandal-free Cornyn, who was compared in the primary campaign to the infamously beaten Jeb Bush, in part because voters want “fighters”.
It is a neat two-step trick and a useful illustration of how American politics now works: you eagerly nominate the worst, most extreme candidate possible and then insist that the worst person on your side is better than the best person on the other.
This exact scenario is also playing out in Maine, but with the roles reversed.
Senator Susan Collins is among the last of a dying breed: the genuinely politically moderate incumbent senator. The Republican has held her seat in Maine time and time again, to the immense frustration of Democrats who have been trying to oust her for what feels like a century. She is a social liberal who votes with Democrats on issues like abortion and LGBT rights, but her vote ensures Republican control over the Senate and key committees. She is also a fiscal conservative. Like the ousted Cornyn in Texas, there has never been a whiff of scandal about her. But if polls are to be believed, she may be entering the final months of her career.
The Death’s-Head Democrat
Opposite her stands a Democrat called Graham Platner, a man who rose from relative obscurity to suddenly win the adulation of Maine Democrats. Platner is a man whose scandals almost defy belief: For 18 years, he had tattooed on his chest the death’s-head insignia of the Nazi Party’s SS, then claimed that he did not know what it meant or represented. He has also promoted videos from the antisemitic extremist Stew Peters on his social media feeds. In 2014, he praised a Hamas attack on Israel.
Like Paxton in Texas, he has what the Americans call “zipper problems”, with his campaign admitting this week that he was engaging in sexually explicit conversations via text messages with “up to six” women at the same time. Platner and his wife, whom he married only in 2023, say that this is a private matter and that the couple are in counseling.
Many may remember the 2025 incident in which X owner Elon Musk was said to have performed a “Nazi salute” by waving at the end of a speech, as well as the enormous progressive backlash to Musk’s alleged gesture. Democrats are now enthusiastically rushing to back a man with an actual Nazi tattoo. Platner says he did not recognize the tattoo, but the New Yorker, in a glowing profile, calls him “a precocious reader who devours books on military history”, which might make us believe that somebody is stopping short of telling the full truth.
But the same thing is happening in both races: just as in Texas, where it is hard to believe that Paxton’s general awfulness helped him win his primary, there is a strong case to be made that Platner’s tattooed hostility to Israel and general awfulness made him attractive to Democrats. In both cases, the parties are making the same case: the worst of ours is better than the best of yours. It is political combat unchained, with no pretense whatever that the political center or the voters who live there matter to either party.
Data confirms this: the most striking finding is that over the past 50 years, Americans have become ever more partisan. In 1964, a clear majority of Americans had a favorable view of the opposite party to theirs. Now, fewer than a quarter are willing to think well of the party they do not support. The increasing partisanship of voters is – probably as democracy is intended to work – being reflected in ever more partisan candidates.
From Anti-Trump to AntiTrump?
This shows for one thing that Democrats are moving from being Anti-Trump to embracing candidates who are the AntiTrump. Or, as the English say: If you cannot beat them, join them.
For the objective neutral observer who cares about the quality of legislators and the general tone of politics, it might be observed that the US Senate will be a poorer place next year if Collins and Cornyn are replaced by Paxton and Platner. American voters would be trading two experienced and capable and generally moderate politicians for a pair of ethically compromised, much more extreme candidates.
And it is perhaps fitting that as Trump enters the final two years of his reign next year, two of his political and rhetorical heirs might take their seats in the most prestigious legislative chamber on the planet. In the Senate, esteemed leaders of both parties in 2015 were desperate to avoid the prospect of a President Trump. Now, it seems, voters on both sides are hungry to replace them with Trump’s spiritual heirs. Those who imagined that the Trump era might end in 2029 are, one might suspect, in for a rude awakening.