John Cornyn

With the retirement of North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, the Republican with the heaviest Senate primary burden in 2026 becomes John Cornyn. The Texas incumbent faces off in a contest against MAGA favorite Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is relying on backlash against some of Cornyn’s more centrist moves in recent years and a range of financial backers who poured nearly $3 million into his campaign coffers in the first quarter, a number Cornyn exceeded – but not by a lot. It’s too close for comfort for some Republicans, who are concerned the clash puts Texas at risk of a rare turn from red to blue.

It took John Thune just two ballots to get the job of the new majority leader of the Senate, replacing Mitch McConnell after eighteen years of rule. Attempts to challenge him by John Cornyn and Rick Scott fell short, with the final tally of the secret ballot (where just about everyone knows how everyone else is voting) led to a 29-24 vote victory.  The South Dakotan is a longtime member of the Republican establishment, originally recruited by the George W. Bush team to challenge the supposedly unbeatable Tom Daschle, the Democratic minority leader at the time, in what became the most expensive campaign of 2004.

One of the two Johns — John Cornyn and John Thune — is in all likelihood going to be the next leader of the Senate. One may potentially, based on the very favorable map for Republicans this cycle, may be the next majority leader. It’s a massive trade in power, away from the long-tenured Mitch McConnell and his diaspora of consultants and groups, and into the new hands of different Senate staffers and teams. But one thing that Cornyn and Thune represent is not just a generational shift, but a shift in the nature of the leadership and what they represent. Cornyn and Thune were both recruited in 2004 by Karl Rove as part of the effort by George W. Bush to take the Senate.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week the biggest news in politics has nothing to do with the presidential election — it’s the decision by Mitch McConnell to step down after leading the Senate Republicans for seventeen years. McConnell’s choice to exit was inevitably going to come at some point, and announcing it this early allows him to escape the many questions about how he’d potentially work with President Trump in the future. McConnell doesn’t want to have to play pretend, and after his bout with recent health issues, he also eliminates the ability of Democrats to play games of comparison around Joe Biden’s age and enfeebled nature. It’s going out in a time of his own choosing — in sports, business and politics, that’s a rare thing to accomplish.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has been out of the public eye for weeks, following a serious fall that hospitalized him. Now multiple sources confirm that Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota are actively reaching out to fellow Republican senators in efforts to prepare for an anticipated leadership vote — a vote that would occur upon announcement that McConnell would be retiring from his duties as leader, and presumably the Senate itself. One source says that Cornyn has been particularly active in his preparations, taking fellow senators with whom he has little in common to lunch in attempts to court them.