🔥 Could Trump Blow the GOP’s Senate Majority? | Chris Cillizza

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Could Donald Trump cost Republicans their Senate majority this November? I now think that's a real question we have to ask after Trump's decision this week to endorse State Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent Senator John Cornin in Texas. Uh as well as what Trump may well do in the Georgia Senate runoff. I think it's worth investigating whether Donald Trump's tendency to do what is good for him to endorse candidates that kind of remind him of himself but are not as electable in a general election could wind up really hurting his party at the Senate level in November. So, I want to go through u the races uh race by race here. Before I do that, very quickly, I hope you subscribe to my channel, independent, authentic, here every single day. I also hope you check out the membership tab on my channel. Uh, just click memberships.

[00:01:00]You'll see three levels that you can support me for as little as $2.99 a month. You can back independent journalism and get exclusive content for yourself. Okay, so let's go through two specific races and then broaden out. So, on Tuesday, two very big things happened as it relates to the Senate. The biggest thing, as I mentioned, is Donald Trump chose sides in the May 26 runoff in Texas between Ken Paxton, the very controversial state attorney general, and John Cornin, the incumbent Republican senator. Now, Paxton may have won this runoff anyway. I think he was a slight favorite before the Trump endorsement, but Trump's endorsement makes it very likely that Ken Paxton will be the Republican Senate nominee in November against state rep James Telerico, who has already won the Democratic nomination. What does that mean? Um, it does not mean that Republicans can't win this state.

[00:01:55]There's no question about that. It's still a Trump plus 13 state, right?

[00:01:59]Trump won in Texas in 2024 by 13 points.

[00:02:03]But what it does mean is it's going to be harder and more expensive for Republicans to win that state. And that's really really uh important. So just in terms of let's talk money first.

[00:02:16]Paxton is not a good fundraiser. He raised $1 million in the first three months of this year. James Tarico is a very good fundraiser. He raised $27 million in that same three-month period at the start of this year. Polling suggests that uh Paxton and uh Telerico are running closer than Terico is running against John Cornin. Um and there's reason for that, right? This is a guy in Ken Paxton who paid more than $3 million to former staffers to settle a corruption allegations. This is a guy who was impeached by the Republican le state house uh over allegations of corruption. Uh he was not convicted by the state senate if you are wondering.

[00:03:00]This is a guy whose wife who is a state senator, Angela Paxton, announced last year that they were getting a divorce because he had broken the biblical bonds of marriage. Draw the conclusions you want to draw off of that. But the point is, he is a much more controversial nominee and a nominee that is less easy for the broad swath of the Texas Republican party to be for. No question the base, the MAGA base is more for Paxton than they would be for Cornin.

[00:03:27]But in a general election, the Republican base is going to vote for whoever the Republican nominee is, right? It's more can you win those voters in the middle. I want to flag something uh that my friend uh Jess Taylor, the Senate and Governor's editor at the Cook Political Report, nonpartisan Handicapping site, wrote on Wednesday about this race. This is important. With a nominee, I'm quoting her. With a nominee like Paxton, Texas would move into a fully competitive race. If he does indeed unseat Cornin next Tuesday, talking about Paxton, we would shift our rating from likely Republican to lean Republican. And that's just the nature of it, right? It doesn't mean that Ken Paxton can't win.

[00:04:08]Again, it's just going to be harder.

[00:04:11]It's more of it's closer to a tossup with Ken Paxton and James Telerico than it would be with John Cornin and James Tel Rico and more expensive. Paxton is a bad fundraiser. He's going to need financial support from national Democrats. So that's Trump's decision there was not the smart decision in terms of picking the candidate on the Republican side who is the going to give the party broadly the best chance to win. Now let's talk about Georgia which has gotten a little less attention. So the Georgia primary was also Tuesday night. Uh in that race, Mike Collins, very conservative uh member of Congress, very MAGA uh son of Matt Collins, a former member of Congress, finished first with about 41% of the vote. In second was Derek Douly, the former football coach at the University of Tennessee, who is the son of legendary University of Georgia football coach Vince Douly. Um, so what that means is because neither Collins nor Douly got 50% of the vote, they will go to a June 16th runoff. Here's the thing. Uh, Trump has not yet endorsed in this race, but Collins will work very hard to try to get the Trump an endorsement. And again, from a sort of vibes and voting record perspective, is much more maga than Douly. Uh, who's a little bit more tonally moderate, although he has never run for anything before, so we don't have a voting record on him. The other complicating factor is Derek Douly was recruited into this race and strongly backed by the outgoing governor of Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp. Donald Trump and Brian Kemp have history, and it's not good history. Donald Trump wanted Brian Kemp to change uh uh he called Brian Kemp, pressured Brian Kemp to change the voting results in Georgia in 2020 to try to give him the victory rather than Joe Biden. Brian Kemp refused. Donald Trump recruited a primary challenger to Brian Kemp in 2022. Guy who was a businessman and had spent time in the US Senate named David Purdue. Unlike most people that Trump challenges, Kemp actually won. Uh, but they have a long history of not really getting along, not seeing eye to eye.

[00:06:20]So, it's hard for me to imagine given that Mike Collins is pretty MAGA and is going to be pushing really hard for the Trump endorsement and Derrick Douly is clearly Brian Kemp's guy that Donald Trump stays out of the race. That would be the best case scenario if you're a national Republican. But I think he probably gets in the race for Mike Collins, which does obviously then give Mike Collins a leg up to win the Republican runoff because Donald Trump is still very popular in the Republican party. The problem there is I think Mike Collins is a weaker general election nominee against Democratic Senator John Osaf than Derek Douly would be. And Dem Republicans need to play offense in some of these places. Georgia is a swing state. Donald Trump won Georgia in 2024.

[00:07:02]John Oaf is an obvious target, but if you nominate the wrong Republican, John Oaf will probably win. So that's now two places if Trump endorses Mike Collins, as I expect he will, that Trump has made uh the Senate chances, Republicans chances of holding the Senate less likely rather than more likely. And I will note we have some recent history here that suggests Donald Trump does endorse candidates for Senate that are not the best general election candidates. In 2022, he was for Hershel Walker. Also in Georgia, Hershel Walker was not a good candidate. Any Republican would have told you that. Trump endorsed him. Walker won the primary, lost the general election. Trump endorsed me Oz, the TV doctor in Pennsylvania in 2022.

[00:07:47]Oz won the primary, lost the general election. Uh in 2020, Trump endorsed Blake Masters, who is kind of part of the Peter Theal uh JD Vance universe. Uh again, more Trumpy than the other candidates in the race. Masters went on to lose that race. So, there is some history of that here. I will note on the plus side for Trump, yes, he has endorsed Paxton. Yes, I think he's probably leaning towards endorsing Mike Collins. In his uh defense, he did make two Senate endorsements, admittedly earlier this year, but he did make two smart Senate endorsements. He endorsed Mike Rogers, the former congressman in Michigan, and he endorsed John Cenounu, the former senator in New Hampshire.

[00:08:31]Both of them are not hardcore Trumpers.

[00:08:33]In fact, Cenounu has said some negative things about Trump, but they are the best candidate to give their party a chance in to to flip Democratic seats.

[00:08:42]So, it's not as though Trump has done only bad things as it relates to Senate races, but I will say the Paxton endorsement, the Mike Collins potential endorsement, uh, they do hamstring Republicans in the general election. And remember, just to reset the math for people, Republicans have a three seat majority right now. They have 53 seats.

[00:09:03]Democrats need to net four seats out of that. Um, the first two seem to me very likely to be North Carolina, the open seat. Tom Tillis is leaving. He's a Republican. And Maine, where Susan Collins is running in a state that Kla Harris won. But then we get into some of these races that we're talking about.

[00:09:21]Can Republicans take a Democratic seat and therefore make the number that that Democrats need to net go up a little bit? like Georgia. Texas being competitive between Paxton and uh and and Telerico is a big problem for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is it's going to cost a bunch of money if they can drag Paxton across the finish line for the general election. That's not going to be cheap. That's a 10, 20, $30 million investment. That's money that can't go to New Hampshire, Iowa, maybe North Carolina, right? some of these places where uh Republicans feel like they have a chance to win. So, I don't know if Trump has cost Republicans the Senate. We're going to have to wait until November 3rd when we get actual votes to know that. But I will say some of the moves he has made in the last 24 hours and the moves I expect him to make in the relatively near future suggest to me that his focus on supporting candidates who are ultra MAGA and who remind him of himself or who are loyal to him and him only does hurt Senate Republicans chances of keeping the majority. Does it mean it cost the majority or not? I don't think we're there yet to say it. But man, it definitely imperils the majority in ways that Senate Majority Leader John Thun, uh Tim Scott, who's the head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, really wish he hadn't done.

[00:10:42]And top of that list, without question, is that endorsement of Ken Paxton. Um, all right, that's it for me. Uh, as I said, I hope you uh do subscribe, independent, authentic here every single day. I also hope you consider a membership. I've got the Diamond Club, the Dugout Club, and the Press Club.

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