After historic rout, Texas Republicans train fire on Trump, Paxton and each other in search for answers
By Gabby Birenbaum, graphic by Apurva Mahajan, The Texas Tribune
November 4, 2026
On Election Day, former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson warned fellow Texas Republicans that a “spanking” was coming.
It came: Democrats won every major statewide office on the ballot and flipped the Texas House. And it wasn’t long before Republicans began arguing over the culprit.
“I blame it on our leadership. I just do,” Comptroller Don Huffines, who lost his bid for a full term after three months on the job, said at his election night party. “I blame this on Greg Abbott. I blame it on Dan Patrick. I blame it on all the mushy middle people that want to think, oh, they’re in the middle, we want to make everybody happy. Well, you sure did a good job of this mess!”
The next morning, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who lost the May primary runoff to Attorney General Ken Paxton, offered his own diagnosis. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he pinned the devastation on self-inflicted wounds, including the nomination of candidates like Paxton who forced voters “to choose between policy and personal character” — a “suicidal” proposition for the GOP.
“Here in Texas, traditional conservatives and independents were asked to swallow an almost comical list of personal scandals and improprieties,” Cornyn wrote, also citing Paxton as a candidate who “shrank the tent, obsessing over ‘RINOs’ and political theater.”
On social media, others went straight to squabbling.
“[Ken] Paxton was a terrible candidate, and I have [Republicans who voted in the last four GOP primaries] at the door tell me they couldn’t vote for him,” wrote Derrick Wilson, the chairman of the Texas Young Republican Federation. “He’s not the only cause but he was a drag on the ballot.”
“Please shut up,” replied Republican staffer Decker Reno. “Your political analysis has ruined the [Young Republicans].”
After more than 30 years of utter dominance, many Texas Republicans entered Tuesday’s election having known November as a formality for their entire political lives. They ended the night in the political wilderness trying to make sense of what went so wrong.
The wipeout hit a party that, no matter how ugly its primaries got, had always found a way to overcome the infighting that has split its base since the Tea Party era by winning in November. Tuesday took away that cushion, leaving behind only the internal wreckage.
Some Texas Republicans argued that decades of easy victories had let the party’s general-election muscles atrophy, leaving an entire generation of candidates and operatives trained almost exclusively in the politics of winning primaries. That helps explain the messaging problems that dogged the party this year, that idea holds — problems the GOP will have to fix if it wants to reassert itself.
“Our party has been catering to and focusing on a more narrow and narrow sliver of the electorate, believing the only election they could lose is a primary,” said GOP operative Matt Mackowiak, who was a senior adviser on Cornyn’s campaign.
The tenor of Paxton’s campaign did not waver much from what won him the primary, save for a tax-break-centric economic campaign and proposals on data centers. As recently as his final rally the night before the election, supporters were cheering his disruption of the GOP establishment and his takedown of the “Bush cartel”, as one surrogate put it.
Both charges — closing a chasm in the party and rebuilding its general-election playbook — pose tough assignments. But some who have wanted to purge the MAGA movement’s influence think spending life in the minority could be the medicine that fixes the GOP’s structural flaws.
“Remember the spanking you received as a kid — the one you were told was ‘for your own good?’” Patterson wrote on Facebook before the election. “For Republicans, tomorrow’s spanking is that kind of spanking.”
One clear upshot of the “spanking” was that Republicans seemed more willing than ever to grapple with the influence of their party’s standard-bearer. That included questioning whether their candidates, many of whom owe their career at one point or another to Donald Trump’s endorsement, should have been more willing to publicly break with the president.
With fingers pointing in multiple directions, Trump stood at the top of many Texas Republicans’ blame list behind the idea that everything else is downstream of the president’s low popularity.
“We can talk about the global war, the trade strategy, the taking stakes in private companies, taking sides with Putin,” said Chad Wilbanks, a former executive director of the Texas GOP. “The buck stops with President Trump on the failures of Republicans winning last night.”
The fact that Republicans failed all around the country — losing Senate races in red states like Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina in addition to Kansas — demonstrates just how toxic Republicans’ federal brand, essentially inextricable from Trump’s, became.
Deeply underwater all over the country, the president launched an unpopular war in Iran that drove up gas prices and unleashed a mass deportation campaign that played a role in erasing the GOP’s hard-fought gains with Hispanic voters. And he has been dogged by headlines of corruption, elevating it as an issue in the eyes of voters as he paid too little attention, his critics argued, to the issue at the very top of the list, one he rode to power in 2024: the economy.
“In key areas, Mr. Trump repeated Mr. Biden’s mistake and misread his mandate,” Cornyn wrote in the Journal op-ed. “Voters wanted to retool our trading relationships, but got arbitrary ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs that raised prices without creating incentives for long-term reshoring. Voters wanted secure borders and peaceful streets, but got hyperaggressive immigration enforcement. The Iran conflict came with no attempt to persuade the public.”
Trump, of course, had his own interpretation. Had he been on the ballot, he said, Republicans would have won in a landslide — though he explicitly asked Republicans all over the country to pretend he was indeed a candidate. And he reserved special criticism for Abbott — the only losing Republican he dedicated his own Truth Social post to.
“If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost,” Trump wrote. “He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!
It was a far cry from Trump’s own pre-election words hours earlier, when he wrote that Abbott is an “exceptional governor and man” alongside a list of accomplishments — an irony frustrated Republicans were quick to note.
Those who did win tough races tended to have a distinct brand. GOP operative Ross Hunt identified state Reps. Morgan Meyer of Dallas and Mano DeAyala of Houston as examples of Republicans who campaigned explicitly as moderates and who sought out ticket-splitters. Both held on in their affluent, highly educated Texas House districts that Talarico carried.
But would that have been enough for the statewide nominees?
“Probably not,” Hunt said. “But if our attorney general candidate, or our land commissioner, ag commissioner candidates, or others explicitly distance themselves from Trump, we probably would at least see some 48%, 49% outcomes.”
Texas Republicans brought plenty of their own baggage to the election.
Even beyond this cycle, Republicans pointed to several sliding doors moments that helped author their defeat: Trump elevating Paxton, Cornyn running in the first place, the Texas Senate acquitting Paxton in his impeachment trial, and the primary battles spawned by that episode.
The party’s rightward lurch over several cycles — and intense focus on purging the party of so-called Republicans In Name Only, or RINOs — set the stage for statewide losses, some argued, reserving blame especially for hardline donors whose money has fueled RINO-hunting escapades each primary season.
“This has been years in the making,” Mackowiak said. “[Ultraconservative West Texas megadonor] Tim Dunn should pat himself on the back. He purified the ranks of elected Republicans in our state to such an extent that we had the biggest blowout [in decades] in Texas. It’s an historic accomplishment, and he paid for it, certainly, with hundreds of millions of dollars.”
And then there’s the ethical baggage Paxton was carrying — a yearslong felony case, his impeachment, a massive unexplained rise in his net worth and his alleged infidelity that his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, cited in filing for divorce.
“Nominate a flawed candidate who was impeached and indicted, spend $500 million instead of spending it on other elections, then what do you think is going to happen?” said U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, who has worked for both Cornyn and Paxton. “You can’t buy people [into] wanting to believe in someone they don’t believe in. It’s not enough to be ideologically simpatico. You actually do have to believe in the leadership of someone. For sure, that had a negative impact across the board.”
Of course, statewide Republicans in Texas were swept out across the board, as were GOP nominees in other competitive U.S. Senate races. The scale of the rout appeared to at least absolve Paxton of shouldering the blame alone.
Gregg Keller, a spokesperson for the pro-Paxton Lone Star Liberty PAC, said his overarching takeaway from the night was that non-interventionism remains a powerful motivator in American politics, and especially among the GOP base. Economic frustrations, with the Iran War layered on top, proved a potent combination that overwhelmed the effects of a candidate’s personal brand or policy preferences, he contended.
One of the original sins of the cycle, in Keller’s opinion, was Cornyn’s decision to run for reelection in the first place.
“What we learned last night is that everything [the Cornyn camp] said was incorrect,” Keller said. “They were saying that John Cornyn would have been a better candidate in the general election than Paxton was, and what we learned is that it was a blue tsunami year. Even Greg Abbott, heretofore one of the most popular governors in America, didn’t make it through. I think it’s unfair and mildly pathetic.”
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune. 