Four-term U.S. Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will both advance to a Senate runoff on May 26 after neither candidate looked poised to clear the 50 percent threshold necessary to win the contest outright in Tuesday's Lone Star State Senate primary.

The Associated Press called the GOP runoff shortly before 11 p.m. Eastern.

Tuesday's primary results narrow the GOP field by allowing the top two vote-getters to proceed to a runoff. The third-place candidate, U.S. Representative Wesley Hunt, was trailing far behind both top-two candidates when AP called the runoff.

The next few weeks will be bloody. The challenge for runoff candidates Cornyn and Paxton ahead of the late May contest is to peel off Hunt supporters while continuing to court Trump, the kingmaker in Republican primaries who has declined to pick a favorite in the race so far.

Paxton and his team have spent months arguing that four-term Senator Cornyn, a former Senate GOP whip, state attorney general, and Texas Supreme Court justice, is a relic of George W. Bush–era conservatism and is not sufficiently MAGA to juice base turnout in a general election.

"He got booed at the Republican convention because of his support for funding state red-flag laws," former Texas GOP Chairman Matt Rinaldi, a Paxton supporter, said in a recent interview with National Review. "He’s just a typical establishment Republican who tries to avoid issues that he sees as controversial but that are very important to the primary electorate."

Cornyn has the backing of Senate GOP leadership and has responded to intraparty attacks from Paxton and Hunt by touting his Trump-aligned legislative record in the Senate. He's spent months characterizing the race as a battle for the soul of the party and has kept the focus on the attorney general's history of public scandals, including an impeachment inquiry over corruption and bribery charges (he was acquitted in the Texas Senate), a nearly decade-long battle over a recently dismissed securities fraud indictment, and a messy split from his wife, who filed for divorce last year "on biblical grounds."

Also on Tuesday, Texas Representative James Talarico was locked in a close race with U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett in the Texas Senate Democratic primary. According to the Associated Press, race was too close to call as of this writing.

A Talarico upset would mark a major boon to moderate Democratic voters who have long viewed Talarico as the far more electable general election candidate, even as many Republicans publicly maintain that the Presbyterian seminarian is far too liberal to carry a red state that Trump won by nearly 14 percent in 2024.

"It’s what liberals who are not Christians think will appeal to Christians," Rinaldi, the former Texas GOP chairman, said of Talarico. "So, they think he has a chance."

Trump is expected to loom large over the Senate GOP runoff. "I like them both," Trump said in the Oval Office over the summer, pressed by National Review on whether he had plans to endorse Cornyn or Paxton. "The worst situation I have is when I have two people that I get along with. Well, I hate it, and they all want the endorsement."

Republicans currently enjoy a 53-seat majority in the Senate, and protecting Texas is a top priority for the GOP this cycle. But some GOP operatives worry that Senate leadership-aligned groups have already invested too much money boosting Cornyn’s primary bid in what should be a reliably red state when battleground states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan are also in play this cycle.

Democrats have long dreamed of flipping Texas blue. They came close in 2018, when Beto O'Rourke lost to the state's junior U.S. senator, Ted Cruz, by just two points in a blue-wave midterm cycle.

Nearly a decade later, Democrats are holding out hope that Trump's falling approval ratings will boost their chances, especially if Talarico can spend the next eight months appealing to disaffected Republicans and independents and if the Republican runoff candidates continue to battle each other for their party's nomination.

Tuesday’s close Democratic primary results follow a nasty primary race that revolved around allegations of racism in the final stretch. After dropping out of the 2026 Texas Democratic primary to make room for Crockett's late entry, former U.S. Representative Colin Allred elevated unsubstantiated claims from a social media influencer that Talarico had called Allred a "mediocre Black man." Talarico insisted that the accusation was a "mischaracterization of a private conversation," which he maintains focused on the mediocrity of Allred's 2024 Senate race against Cruz, who won reelection by 8.5 points.

The drama roiled Talarico's campaign in the final weeks of the primary and tested the party's patience for woke purity tests and unsubstantiated accusations of racism.

Crockett, who is black, responded to Allred's allegations by fanning the flames, further alienating moderates in Washington and in Texas who already believe she is too liberal and too focused on Trump to appeal to independent voters. Her campaign also came under fire late last month for kicking an Atlantic reporter out of one of her events for being a "top-notch hater" — code for publishing a critical profile of the congresswoman in the magazine last year.