Incumbent members of the Senate have an election rate of over 90% each year. In some years, 100% of Senate incumbents win re-election. It is unusual for multiple Senate incumbents to lose in the same year.
It is even rarer for an incumbent senator to be defeated in a primary.
Factors are converging in Texas that could create a nightmare scenario for the Republican Party, where an aging incumbent senator (John Cornyn) is challenged from the right in a three-way Republican primary, with Trump withholding his endorsement.
Two recent polls shows that both U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are at about 25%, while Sen. John Cornyn is in third place with 22%.
Cornyn’s fight is happening even as Republican Senate leadership supports him and pours money into a campaign to get him through the primaries.
The problem is that Cornyn is more electable than both Republicans in a general election because polls show him leading the top two Democrats, James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett, in the primary.
The problem is that Cornyn may not survive the primary, and if Paxton, the scandal-ridden and unpopular among the electorate’s broader attorney general, emerges victorious, it will put Democrats in the once-considered unfathomable position of flipping the U.S. Senate seat in deep-red Texas.
