Could Republicans blow the Texas Senate race?

Voters will go to the polls in Texas next week — many have already voted early — and most of the attention has been on the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, where Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico are locked in a tight and increasingly nasty battle. But that Democratic primary isn’t necessarily just a fight for the silver medal in November. Texas is a potentially winnable race for Democrats, in part because Republicans have plenty of problems of their own. In fact, the smart money is that incumbent Sen. John Cornyn will lose his job. So let’s cover the Republican primary today, and we’ll have a story about the Democrats in your inbox later this week.

After every election, political commentators come up with countless theories for why the losing party failed. There’s usually a fair amount of disagreement about the correct lesson. But for 2022, a year when Republicans actually lost a seat in the Senate despite facing an already unpopular Joe Biden, it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that Republicans shot themselves in the foot by nominating a bunch of less-than-stellar candidates. It wasn’t the party’s only problem — the backlash triggered by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also hurt the GOP — but still, they lost winnable Senate races in Georgia and Pennsylvania in part because they nominated flawed candidates like Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz.1

The Republican primary in Texas is giving strong 2022 vibes. Cornyn — an establishment figure who has a close relationship with Mitch McConnell and broke with Senate Republicans by not joining lawsuits challenging the certification of 2020 election results — is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is something of a MAGA darling and was recently endorsed by Turning Point USA, although President Trump hasn’t endorsed any one candidate in the race (more on that in a bit).

Paxton is also a scandal-magnet. And by scandals, I don’t mean missing a few votes in the Texas Senate:

• Paxton has allegedly cheated on his soon-to-be ex-wife (herself a member of the Texas state Senate) with two different women.

• To cover up the first affair, he allegedly abused his office to help a