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Bush and Cornyn Fundraise for Senate Candidates Without Paxton

5 sources · updated 2026-09-24
Left 50% Center 0% Right 50%
1 left · 0 center · 1 right

What happened

Former President George W. Bush and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) appeared Monday night in Dallas at a fundraiser for Maintain the Majority, a joint fundraising committee backing Republican Senate candidates in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Ohio. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate nominee who defeated Cornyn in the 2026 Republican primary — described as the most expensive Senate primary in U.S. history — was not among the beneficiaries. Also omitted were Republican Senate nominees Michael Whatley of North Carolina and Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia. Bush had donated $5,000 to Cornyn during that primary; Paxton had been endorsed by President Donald Trump. Cornyn has said he has no plans to campaign for Paxton but intends to support the Republican ticket in November.
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Omitted — what each side leaves out

Unpacked

Left-leaning coverage frames the Dallas fundraiser as the Republican Party failing to get behind its own Texas nominee, a reading that does not survive the money already in Paxton's race. ABC News presents the snub as Republicans having "struggled to get behind" him. Daily Wire reports a PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune has put $54 million behind Paxton. That difference decides whether the story is a party freeze-out or just Cornyn and Bush sitting out. Left-leaning coverage calls Paxton the "scandal-ridden candidate" and never applies a similar ideological tag to James Talarico. Right-leaning coverage calls Talarico "leftist" and skips that scandal label. None of the coverage says whether Paxton was invited Monday night or was never on the list.
Bottom line

ABC News cast the Dallas dinner as Republicans abandoning Paxton, without reporting Daily Wire's $54 million from a Thune-aligned PAC already in that Senate race.

The Left View
Left-leaning outlets cast the Dallas event as a deliberate snub that shows Republicans still will not fully back Paxton. ABC News called his exclusion “the latest example of how Republicans have struggled to get behind the scandal-ridden candidate” and said the gathering “represents the divide between the old guard of the Republican Party and the new,” noting Bush-era figures such as Harriet Miers and Kay Bailey Hutchison on the host committee. They reported that Paxton is now closing an earlier fundraising gap with Democrat James Talarico after more than $109 million in outside spending, including from MAGA Inc. and America PAC. ABC also said some GOP operatives believe the North Carolina and Georgia races “may be slipping out of reach,” offering that as a reason those Trump-aligned nominees were left out as well.
The Right View
Right-leaning outlets treated the event mainly as Bush coming “off the sidelines” to help Republicans hold the Senate in battlegrounds that will decide control for the second half of Trump’s term, with Paxton a “notable exception.” The Daily Wire stressed that Bush has been “relatively quiet politically” and had said he had “retired from politics,” framing Dallas as a rare return aimed at hold and pickup races rather than a Texas unity event. Fox News grouped Paxton with Whatley and Collins as “a trio of Senate candidates closely tied to Trump’s political orbit” and tied the omission to Bush and Cornyn’s “complicated relationship with President Donald Trump and his favored candidates,” while noting MAGA Inc.’s cash on hand and Thune-aligned spending already flowing to Paxton. Fox quoted RNC Chair Joe Gruters calling Texas “ruby red” and predicting it will “send up a MAGA warrior.”
Our Take (balanced)
The left’s strongest argument is that leaving out the party’s own Texas nominee, after Bush funded Cornyn in the primary, reads as an establishment refusal to embrace Paxton; ABC’s “scandal-ridden” phrasing and the Bush-era host list are the clearest evidence for that reading. The right’s strongest argument is that Maintain the Majority was built for battleground Senate math, not a home-state endorsement, and that Paxton is already drawing large Trump- and Thune-aligned independent expenditures even as party officials call Texas structurally Republican. The central unresolved tension is whether the snub mainly measures Paxton’s liabilities with traditional GOP donors, or an old-guard network routing scarce dollars away from Trump-aligned nominees — a puzzle sharpened by Whatley and Collins being left out too, which can support either a factional story or a cold resource-allocation story.

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