Talarico wins, but Cornyn gets new hope.

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Texas Democrats selected state Rep. James Talarico over U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in their primary on Tuesday after a well-publicized, frequently ugly, and unusually competitive race. Talarico was widely viewed, including by the GOP, as the more electable candidate in November. His message focuses more on inclusivity relative to Crockett’s projection of partisan confrontation, and in a state where there are simply more Republicans than Democrats, crossover appeal matters.

But if that’s the welcome news for Democrats’ long-sought-but-never-realized quest to turn Texas and the Senate majority blue, Republicans got welcome news in their primary too: Sen. John Cornyn, the party’s most electable candidate, may not be as dead as previously reported.

As expected, Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will head to a runoff for the Republican Senate nomination in late May, while Rep. Wesley Hunt finished in third. It was the margins between the candidates, though, that were modestly surprising.

While polling heading into the primary showed a lot of variance, the average converged on Paxton leading the race by about 4 points. Paxton had held the lead over Cornyn, sometimes by substantial margins, throughout the race. With most of the vote counted, however, Cornyn is narrowly the leading vote-getter, with 42 percent to Paxton’s 41.

It isn’t a statistical marvel that someone trailing by 4 points in an average of imperfect polls ends up leading by 1 point when human beings actually vote. And Cornyn still has to be concerned about the makeup of the runoff electorate, which could comprise more of the sort of die-hard MAGA voters favorable to Paxton. What’s important, though, is not just that the Cornyn campaign can spin the performance into a narrative of momentum generally. It can spin it that way directly to the one person who can decide the race.

President Donald Trump hadn’t endorsed prior to the runoff. But that, and the race, appears set to change imminently. On Wednesday afternoon, Trump posted that he would make his endorsement “soon” and called on the candidate he does not endorse to immediately “DROP OUT OF THE RACE!” The Atlantic has reported that the president is expected to back Cornyn.

If Trump does endorse Cornyn, and Paxton obeys Trump’s orders to drop out, it immediately knocks the wind out of Democrats’ sails. Even with a strong midterm environment for Democrats, this is still a state that Trump won by 14 points in 2024. If Republicans don’t nominate someone uniquely terrible, Democrats face a much more difficult climb.

Trump’s hesitancy to endorse earlier in the race was understandable. He appreciates the loyalty of Paxton, who filed suit to overturn the 2020 presidential election and is naturally aligned with Trump’s base. But Trump also doesn’t want to lose the Senate—something that nominating Paxton, with all of his personal and professional baggage, would risk—and he doesn’t want the party to have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to carry Paxton through November. As far as Cornyn goes, Trump hadn’t wanted to support someone who could end up losing the primary even with an endorsement. It was imperative that Cornyn, who appeared to flatline for much of the campaign even after tens of millions of dollars were spent on his behalf, finally show Trump something.

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Cornyn and his allies hope that his performance on Tuesday may have done the trick. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who for months has been making the case to Trump to back Cornyn, didn’t waste time pushing.

“I’ve been making that case for a long time,” Thune told reporters Wednesday, “and we’ll make it again, and today, I think, even more emphatically given the outcome last night.” Thune also emphasized that he would like the president to make that endorsement “early.”

The official plan to save John Cornyn, then, is to convince Trump, based on Tuesday’s results, that Cornyn is close, has the momentum, and is a sure bet to keep Texas red in November. If Trump agrees to endorse right away, either Paxton would drop out or Cornyn would quickly cut the endorsement into ads and take command of the race. Much money would be saved, and many Republican nerves about losing a Senate seat in Texas would be soothed.

This plan doesn’t sound as outlandish as it did a few days ago. John Cornyn winning the primary generally sounds a lot less outlandish than it did a few days ago. What a difference a few percentage points make.

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