Why did Sen. John Cornyn lose? The GOP ‘ground shifted underneath him’

In 2002, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn ran to replace a nationally known political figure: Retiring Sen. Phil Gramm. Back then, he ran as a fresh face — someone promising to bring new ideas to D.C.

Cornyn won the 2002 election, and then the next one and the next one for more than two decades — until Tuesday.

Republican voters kicked out Cornyn in favor of current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, ending Cornyn’s long Senate career.

Todd Gillman, journalism professor at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, covered Cornyn as the longtime Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. He spoke to the Texas Standard about the senator’s legacy and recent electoral loss. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: John Cornyn came up through the Texas courts and the Republican donor network in the Lone Star State, not so much through celebrity politics or cable television. Todd, fair to say Cornyn was sort of the product of a different era of the GOP?

Todd Gillman: Well, stylistically, he certainly was. Karl Rove, who of course was Bush’s political guru and mentor, identified Cornyn as a Senate candidate out of central casting.

Even back in 2002, he was obviously tall and courtly and genteel, as we all used to say, but he already had that kind of senatorial silver helmet of air, and he carried himself with the kind of bearing that people had come to expect of a senator.

But he played hardball, but he did it in a really genteel kind of way, which is why he was so effective and why his colleagues in the Senate, the Republicans, helped him to leadership positions and kept him there for most of his tenure because he just presented so well, and he never really lost that bearing of a judge, which he had been.

Yeah, he’s the second-ranking member of the party’s leadership, and I guess a lot of that power that he’s earned in Washington has come from that reputation that you’re talking about there, Todd: a tactician, a dealmaker, someone willing to work across the lines.

I wonder if perhaps in today’s GOP those strengths might have become considered liabilities within his own party?

Well, certainly he was portrayed that way. I don’t think that he was much for working across party lines. There were a few instances that definitely got him into deep trouble, but he was not a dealmaker the way Kennedy was a dealmaker, or even Mitch McConnell, who was the majority leader.

Cornyn was very, very, very conservative, but he also gave off an aura of being reasonable. I think back at his evolution early in his term as a senator, he was a business Republican when it took on immigration. And he supported all the parts of immigration reform, including active legalization.

But then as the party shifted and that became taboo, he took on an enforcement-first, enforcement-only kind of stance that really deflected away from any possibility of compromise.

He was not one of the people who… He certainly could work with colleagues across the aisle, but when you’re talking about the bipartisan compromise, people point to his work after the terrible shooting in Uvalde when he pushed through and worked with Democrats, pushed through gun legislation that absolutely was not aimed at curtailing access to guns, except for people who were deemed dangerous by a court.

Red flag laws was a big thing for him. And boy, that really played against him in the MAGA base.

But I would not portray him so much as a dealmaker, as much as an amazingly effective voice for conservative Republicans of that older school — as you say, the kind of kinder, gentler style — while also playing complete hardball on things like judicial nominations and really go down the line.

Hardball, but not a bomb-thrower and not someone who would trash talk the opponent with name calling and that sort of thing. I want to talk about the substance, though, of Cornyn’s record.

You mentioned the gun control post-Uvalde. As you look back, does anything else stand out about Cornyn’s legislative record to you?

Well, he was a point person for sure on pushing through conservative judicial nominees and transforming the courts over the years.

One of his main legacies is — and the way he became the Republican whip, the No. 2 most powerful guy — is before that, he had served as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is the party’s Senate campaign arm.

He was an incredibly effective fundraiser. And he leveraged that into pumping incredible sums of money into Republican Senate campaigns around the country and thereby increasing the ranks of Republicans in the Senate, which is one of the many reasons why he was generally so well-regarded by his colleagues in the Senate Republican conference.

So one of his biggest contributions over the years was to facilitate the Republicans’ ability to maintain their majority.

» TEXAS RUNOFF RESULTS: Paxton wins GOP U.S. Senate nomination, plus other key statewide race results

John Cornyn survived a lot of challenges up until Tuesday. You know, he was always commented in recent years, the size of his campaign war chest, that sort of thing. What made this race against Ken Paxton different?

The ground really shifted in Texas underneath him.

Cornyn, as we discussed, is not a bomb-thrower. He has never been a MAGA warrior. He more tolerated Trump than embraced him. He certainly made peace, as many Republican senators did who didn’t come from the MAGA world. And he was somewhat antagonistic to Trump.

In 2023, he famously, in response to my question on a call that he was doing with Texas reporters, I asked him how he felt about Trump trying to get back into the White House in the 2024 campaign. And he said Trump’s time has passed him by and we need to come up with an alternative.

And oh boy, you could tell the seeds were planted if Trump ever came back to power. That this was going to come back to haunt Cornyn with Trump specifically and certainly with the MAGA base. I mean, it was about as far as Cornyn ever went in distancing himself.

But he would never come out and say, “I think Trump is lying about the 2020 election.” He couched it more in terms of, well, we need to be looking forward and using soothing talk, but you always knew where he stood.

He was not a fan of Donald Trump. He was not MAGA and so this race was very different because MAGA is now firmly in control of the Texas Republican Party and as the Senator said in his concession speech, you know, a fraction of 8% of Republicans said, “that guy and not me.”

You know, if you think of Cornyn as representing a sort of final chapter of the Bush-era Texas GOP, are we basically talking about a shift in style or a shift in what Republican politics and politics in Texas has become or is becoming?

I’m just wondering, what is the takeaway if Cornyn is no longer sort of the bulwark of that gentler tone in GOP politics, to the extent that it continues or that it as long as it had. What are we now looking at?

This is an evolution that has been going on for a while and will continue until presumably the pendulum shifts again. I watched Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and the Republican base in Texas grow apart over the years, and the same thing has kind of happened to John Cornyn, who is quite a bit more conservative, I think, than Hutchison was.

But if you look at, I don’t know. Pick a House member. Brandon Gill is a lot more emblematic of Texas Republicans in Congress, the congressional part of the Texas Republicans. Are there any moderate Republicans left in the congressional delegation? That’s just not what Republican primary voters want.

Now, if people could get centrists, moderates, people with more moderate approaches to governing that make it through primaries, they get elected in the general, but that’s not how the system’s set up. And you know, look, Ted Cruz followed this exact same playbook to get to the Senate that Paxton is following…

Oh, the Tea Party days, yeah.

The Tea Party days, but Cruz understood, and he was saying in the lead up to that primary, that if he could just force Lt. Gov. Dewhurst into a runoff, well then, you know, game over for the establishment guy. And that’s exactly what happened here, is that when you have a runoff, the hardest of the hardcore people are the ones that turn out.

And, you know, nobody in the four terms that I covered Sen. Cornyn — from when he was running for that seat — starting then, nobody was like excited about him. You didn’t see like thrilled crowds coming out for him the way you saw with Ted Cruz or with Beto Rourke on the Democratic side, or a number of other candidates.

People respected Cornyn, and they liked him. They found him appealing, but they weren’t, you know, excited by him. And you need a little bit of excitement to get through a primary runoff.

You think Texas Republicans are going to wind up regretting their primary choice? What are we looking at in November, do you think?

Boy, it’s so hard to tell. I have heard Democrats for decades saying, “this is the year we are on the cusp of a comeback.” And, you know, there hasn’t been a Democrat elected statewide in Texas now in decades.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Certainly, Paxton is a deeply flawed and vulnerable candidate. And again, this is why Republicans nationwide spent nearly $100 million, maybe it’s more than that now, to try to protect Cornyn in this primary — is because it will cost them a whole lot more to protect the Senate seat when Paxton is the nominee.

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