FIRST ON FOX – Republican Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas is taking sides in the Lone Star State’s burgeoning GOP Senate primary battle between longtime Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Gooden, a four-term lawmaker who represents a congressional district which includes parts of eastern Dallas as well as large swaths of suburban, exurban, and rural areas east of the city, endorsed Paxton on Thursday. He is known as a MAGA firebrand and ally of President Donald Trump.
“Attorney General Paxton is the conservative champion we need in the U.S. Senate,” Gooden wrote in a statement shared first with Fox News.
He predicted that Paxton “will take a sledgehammer to the establishment, secure the border, and fight hard for President Trump’s agenda. Ken Paxton has my complete and total endorsement.”
GET READY FOR A NASTY AND EXPENSIVE GOP SENATE PRIMARY IN TEXAS
Gooden, who is a member of the House Armed Services and Judiciary committees, is the second member of the Texas congressional delegation to back Paxton, following Republican Rep. Troy Nehls, who endorsed the attorney general on Wednesday.
As he gears up for what will most certainly be his roughest re-election of his decades-long career, Cornyn has the backing of the top Republican in the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, as well as the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).
And Republican sources confirmed to Fox News that Thune, as well as Sen. Tim Scott, R–S.C., the NRSC chair, have personally asked Trump to back Cornyn.
The president’s grip on the GOP is stronger than ever and any endorsement Trump may make in the emerging Republican Senate primary in Texas would be extremely influential.
Paxton announced his candidacy Tuesday night in an appearance on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”
“It’s time for a change in Texas,” Paxton, who first won election as state attorney general in 2014, said as he launched his campaign.
And pointing to conservative Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Paxton argued that “it’s time that we have another great senator that will actually stand up and fight for Republican values, fight for the values of the people of Texas and also support Donald Trump in the areas that he’s focused on in a very significant way.”
Paxton has flirted for a couple of years with launching a 2026 primary challenge against Cornyn, a former state senator, former Texas Supreme Court justice, and former state attorney general, who first won election to the U.S. Senate in 2002.
ONLY ON FOX NEWS: SENATE REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN CHAIR REVEALS HOW MANY SEATS HE’S AIMING FOR IN 2026
Paxton has long claimed Cornyn does not represent the conservative values of Texans, and has accused the senator of not being an ally of Trump. He has also regularly labeled Cornyn a “RINO,” a “Republican in name only” – an insult MAGA and “America First” Republicans have regularly used to criticize more mainstream or establishment members of the GOP.
Cornyn, during the early stages of the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race, had said he would prefer that the GOP take a new direction, which angered Trump. But the senator endorsed Trump in late January of last year, after the then-former president won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the first two contests in the Republican presidential nomination calendar.
Since Trump returned to the White House three months ago, Cornyn has been supportive of the president’s Cabinet nominees and agenda.
ONLY ON FOX NEWS: SENATE REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN CHAIR REVEALS HOW MANY SEATS HE’S AIMING FOR IN 2026
In the senator’s campaign launch video last month, the announcer highlighted that during Trump’s first term in office, “Texas Sen. John Cornyn had his back.”
And Cornyn told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that he had “a 92% voting record with President Trump.”
“It’s unclear to me exactly what is motivating Mr. Paxton, other than vanity and personal ambition, certainly it’s not going to make a lot of difference in terms of the voting record, because I’ve been a supporter of President Trump and his agenda,” the senator argued.
Paxton grabbed national attention in 2020 for filing the unsuccessful Texas vs. Pennsylvania case in the Supreme Court that tried to overturn former President Joe Biden’s razor-thin win over Trump in the Keystone State, and for speaking at the Trump rally near the White House that immediately preceded the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists aiming to disrupt congressional certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.
During Biden’s four years in the White House, Paxton took the administration to court numerous times.
While Paxton, who’s in his third four-year term as Texas attorney general, has long been a legal warrior in the MAGA movement, he also has plenty of personal political baggage.
Paxton was indicted on securities fraud charges soon after taking office in 2015, and also came under investigation by the FBI over bribery and corruption allegations from former top staffers. In 2022, he survived a bruising primary amid his many legal difficulties.
In 2023, Paxton was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives, but he was later acquitted of all charges by the state Senate.
The charges in the long-running federal corruption probe were dropped during the final weeks of the Biden administration.
While Paxton for years has denied any wrongdoing and has survived his legal fights, he would likely continue to face tough optics and plenty of incoming fire over his past predicaments during a Senate showdown.
“Paxton has a checkered background. He is a con man and a fraud and I think the people of Texas know that,” Cornyn charged on Wednesday.
And the senator added: “This is what will be litigated during the course of this campaign.”
Matt Mackowiak, a veteran Republican strategist and communications consultant based in Texas and Washington, D.C., pointed to the bruising intra-party battle ahead as he told Fox News that “this is going to be the most expensive, nastiest, most aggressive, most personal U.S. Senate primary in Texas history.”
“You have two candidates who are going to raise significant funds, who are in significant positions, who do not like each other and have not liked each other, whose teams do not like each other and the stakes could not be higher,” Mackowiak said.
Potentially complicating the primary battle is a possible Senate bid by conservative Rep. Wesley Hunt, who represents a Houston-area district.
The third-term 43-year-old Texas Republican and rising MAGA star has made his case to the president’s political team, sources confirm to Fox News. Hunt’s argument is that he’s the only person who can win both a GOP primary and a general election, a source familiar with the discussions confirmed to Fox News.
An outside group supportive of Hunt is currently spending seven figures to run ads across the Lone Star State to increase the lawmaker’s name recognition.
The eventual winner of next year’s GOP primary will be considered the favorite in the general election against whomever the Democrats nominate.
Former Democratic Rep. Colin Allred has said he’ll decide by this summer if he’ll mount a 2026 Senate campaign.
Allred, a former Baylor University football player and NFL linebacker who later represented Texas’ 32nd Congressional District (which includes parts of Dallas and surrounding suburbs), was last year’s Democratic challenger in the race against Cruz.