The establishment pulled the knives out for President Trump and MAGA.
Trey Gowdy says it all traces back to one primary choice MAGA voters made.
And Donald Trump just named one other casualty that blows a hole in Gowdy’s theory.
Trey Gowdy Called the Race Before Anybody Voted
Former Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) brought his complaint to Fox News the night before the election.
Bret Baier asked what he was watching. Gowdy turned the Texas Senate race into a joke about wasted money. “I was laying in bed the other night wondering how do I blow 500 million dollars?” he said.
His answer was choosing Ken Paxton over John Cornyn. Gowdy claimed Cornyn voted with Donald Trump 99.3 percent of the time, so in his telling Republicans burned half a billion dollars chasing the other 0.7 percent. “All you had to do was nominate John Cornyn,” he said.
Gowdy even offered a forecast. “Do I think Talarico is going to win? No,” he said, before griping that the race had turned “unnecessarily difficult because they nominated Paxton.”
Then Texans voted. James Talarico beat Paxton and became the first Democrat to win a US Senate race in Texas since 1988.
And the consultant class grabbed Gowdy’s script the moment the networks called it. MAGA voters picked the wrong guy, the story goes, and the whole party paid the price.
But that story has a hole in it, and the hole has a name.
Greg Abbott Had Every Advantage Gowdy Wanted
Governor Greg Abbott lost too.
Democrat state Representative Gina Hinojosa beat him on the same ballot, making her the first Democrat to win the Texas governorship since Ann Richards in 1990.
Think about everything Gowdy says Republicans threw away by passing on Cornyn. Incumbency. A long résumé. No bruising runoff. A mountain of cash.
Abbott had all of it. He won his three previous races by roughly 20, 13, and 11 points. He outspent Hinojosa by about ten to one, according to Mediaite. Nobody in Washington, DC, spent the summer fretting about his electability.
And he still lost by a margin only slightly smaller than Paxton’s, according to Breitbart’s election-night count.
So what would a 24-year Senate incumbent have done differently, when a three-term governor sitting on a war chest couldn’t hold the line?
Trump offered his own answer within hours of Abbott’s concession. “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. He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The Governor Who Kept Trump at Arm’s Length
Trump didn’t spell out which moves he meant. But Abbott’s final months leave plenty of clues.
In August, Abbott told ABC News, “What I’m hearing on the campaign trail, people are not talking to me about Trump.”
When Trump held his rally in San Antonio in October, Abbott skipped it. His campaign told reporters that “The governor is running a re-election campaign and has other previously scheduled events with Texas voters.”
He refused to debate Hinojosa, even though he debated in all three of his earlier races for governor. He ducked when ABC pressed him to grade Trump on the economy. And back in February, he broke publicly with Trump over the President’s push for a bigger federal role in running elections.
That’s the keep-your-distance playbook consultants adore. Run on the local brand, leave the President off the stage, and hope suburban voters forget the R next to your name.
It flopped. Voters itching to punish Republicans don’t give anybody credit for snubbing Trump. Voters who love Trump sure notice the snub, though.
The “original formula” line deserves a second look, too. In October 2013, during his first run for governor, Abbott’s campaign said of the Texas law handing in-state college tuition to illegal aliens: “Greg Abbott believes that the objective of the program is noble.” His campaign wanted the law reformed, not repealed. Abbott toughened up a great deal after that, building a border record that earned plenty of praise from Trump. But a man who once called taxpayer-subsidized tuition for illegal aliens a noble goal, then spent his last campaign avoiding the President, gave Trump plenty to work with.
The Primary Polls Never Showed a Cornyn Firewall
Gowdy’s whole case rests on the idea that Cornyn would have run safely ahead of Talarico. The polls taken while Republicans were still picking a nominee never said that.
Texas Public Opinion Research found Talarico beating Cornyn 44 percent to 41 percent in April. A Texas Southern University poll in May gave Cornyn a single point, 45 to 44, with Paxton tied. A University of Houston and YouGov poll actually had Paxton running a hair stronger than Cornyn. Emerson’s January poll put Cornyn up three and Paxton tied.
Every one of those gaps sat inside the margin of error. Pollsters didn’t find a Cornyn lock. They found a coin flip either way.
The University of Texas/Texas Politics Project dug a little deeper. Among Texas Republicans, 13 percent backed Paxton against Talarico while withholding support from Cornyn. Only 10 percent said the reverse.
So swapping in Cornyn wouldn’t have added voters. It would have traded one pool of unhappy Republicans for a slightly bigger one.
And GOP primary voters knew exactly what they wanted. Cornyn edged Paxton by about a point in the March first round, with Wesley Hunt splitting the field. Paxton then won the May runoff with more than 63 percent. Gowdy likes to remember Cornyn as “the lead vote getter.” The voters who finished the job remember it differently.
None of this means Paxton ran a perfect race. His 2023 impeachment by the Texas House, which ended in acquittal, handed Democrats plenty of ad material. But Abbott carried none of that baggage, and the voters showed him the door anyway.
The Establishment Already Picked Its Post-Trump Villain
Gowdy’s 99.3 percent figure also skips a few details about Cornyn. He led Senate Republicans in negotiating the 2022 gun control bill Joe Biden signed into law. After Paxton won the nomination, Cornyn kept his fundraising muscle out of the general election, according to Texas Tribune reporting. A loyalty score can’t capture what a senator does when his own career takes a hit.
Look at how the other party handles the same moment. In Michigan, Chuck Schumer backed Haley Stevens in the Senate primary. When Abdul El-Sayed beat her, Schumer endorsed the winner within a day. Democrat leaders don’t go on television to tell their own voters they blew it.
But Republican insiders do it every cycle. The wave that handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress didn’t stop at the Red River, and it didn’t check which Republicans had Trump’s endorsement and which ones kept him off the stage.
That matters for what comes next. The donor crowd wants a tidy fable heading toward 2028, where MAGA nominees lose and polished establishment candidates win. Texas tore that fable up on its first night, because the establishment’s model incumbent went down right alongside the nominee they wanted to blame.
Gowdy told Baier he never asked Trump why the President passed on Cornyn, and that Trump “might not tell me if I did ask.” Nobody on the establishment side has asked the harder question yet, which is why the Republican who ran Texas exactly the way they like lost on the very same night.
Sources: RealClearPolitics, “Trey Gowdy: ‘All You Had To Do Is Nominate John Cornyn,’ I Don’t Know If Paxton Will Win” (Fox News Special Report transcript); Yahoo News, “Trump Calls Abbott a ‘RINO’ After Texas Governor’s Loss”; Dallas Morning News, “Here’s why Trump says Greg Abbott lost Texas governor’s race”; Mediaite, “Trump Turns on Long-Time Ally Greg Abbott in Furious Truth Social Post”; KUT/Texas Newsroom, Texas governor and Senate results coverage; Breitbart, “Democrat James Talarico Wins Texas Senate Seat Over Republican Ken Paxton”; MultiState, Texas Governor Election Results 2026; ABC News, “Gov. Abbott dismisses GOP worries about Texas”; The Irish Times, “Lone star Trump believes he can bend Texas and midterm elections to his will”; Newsweek, “Greg Abbott Snubs Trump’s Texas Rally as Polls Tighten”; PolitiFact, Abbott-O-Meter on in-state tuition (citing Dallas Morning News, October 2013); Texas Public Opinion Research, April 2026 Texas Senate poll; The Hill, “Cornyn, Paxton in dead heat with Talarico”; Newsweek, Cornyn vs Paxton polling coverage; Emerson College Polling, Texas 2026 Poll; University of Texas/Texas Politics Project, “Senate Race Polling Reveals Republican Turnout Challenges”; NBC News, Texas Senate primary results; MegynKelly.com, Paxton runoff results.
