When President Donald Trump rallies in San Antonio on Wednesday, the stakes for his party will be clear: In a difficult national climate for Republicans, they likely need to hold Texas’ Senate seat to keep their majority.

For Trump, people close to him say, the stakes are more personal: protecting his record as the GOP’s kingmaker.

His eleventh-hour endorsement helped Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeat longtime Sen. John Cornyn in a bitter Republican primary runoff in May. Now Paxton is in a close race against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, who has held a consistent but narrow lead in public polling. A Paxton loss would be Trump’s loss, too.

“Texas is a must win, and this would be his biggest endorsement fail,” said a former White House official, who, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak openly about campaign strategy. “This one would be a stain on his list.”

Wednesday’s rally will be Trump’s third trip to Texas in less than a month, following remarks at a truck factory in Denton last week and an unprecedented two-day Republican midterm convention in Dallas. A campaign blitz is supposed to be about offense, and Trump has promised to visit the 35 most competitive races in the country. In Texas, though, he keeps returning to play defense.

Trump’s team has its own rationale for the repeat visits. Few competitive races remain where Trump’s involvement carries the weight it once did, according to the former White House official, as well as a current one, and the Texas Senate race tops that short list.

Republicans haven’t lost a statewide race in Texas since 1994. But the president’s party typically struggles in midterm elections, and this year, the outlook for the GOP is especially dire: Republicans are on the defensive over the war with Iran and high gas prices, issues on which Trump polls poorly among moderate voters. 

That Texas is in play at all is a measure of how difficult the year has become for the GOP. 

“It highlights the dangerous and unsettling position the Republican Party finds itself in: shoring up the GOP base that’s been hurt viciously by Trump’s tariff and war policies,” another former Trump administration official said. “These red states are hurting.”

The White House did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment about this story. “No one can dispute the fact that President Trump has created one of the most robust coalitions in political history with the MAGA movement, and the President understands how to communicate with them,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told MS NOW in response to a request for comment last week about Trump campaigning in traditionally red states.

A strategist familiar with Republicans’ thinking on the midterms dismissed the concerns about a Paxton loss. “Every two years, there’s this same news cycle of — ‘Oh, this is the year Democrats flip Texas,’” they said. “And then at the end of the day, Republicans walk away and win.”

Given the pervasive anti-incumbent sentiment in recent years, renominating Cornyn would not have made the general election a sure thing for Republicans, they continued, and that as such, a Paxton loss would not be a stain on Trump’s record. Even so, “we feel confident about maintaining the Senate majority,” the strategist said. “It’s not going to come down to one race, and it’s certainly not going to come down to a decision that was made six months ago,” referring to Trump’s endorsement of Paxton. 

One prominent Texas Republican won’t be in San Antonio. Gov. Greg Abbott — who is seeking a fourth term in a race generally polling within the margin of error — is skipping Wednesday’s rally, citing scheduling conflicts. Some in his party see the absence as deliberate, given Trump’s weak standing with the moderate voters who could decide a close race.

The former administration official was blunter.

“If you have the [three]-term Republican governor of Texas — and Texas has been Republican for the last 30 years — giving Donald Trump the Heisman like ‘I don’t want to be seen with you,’ that is a testament to how bad the Trump brand is right now,” the former Trump administration official said.

Speaking Monday, Abbott praised the president’s ability to mobilize his MAGA base.

“When the president shows up, it creates excitement among the base. He does a good job of organizing the base and turning people out,” Abbott said. “Because of my schedule, where I travel to multiple cities a day for events like this, I already have events scheduled that day and will not be able to make it.”

For Republicans, the math is unforgiving. They hold a 53-47 Senate majority, so Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control. Democrats don’t need Texas to get there, but losing it would leave Republicans very little margin for error elsewhere on the map.

The fight over the Texas seat has become one of the most expensive of the 2026 midterms. With less than a month until Election Day, at least $450 million has been poured into the contest in ad spending alone, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact — though that’s partly a result of the messy, monthslong primary, during which Republicans spent more than $130 million before the general election had even begun.

Most Republican groups now appear to have united behind Paxton. Possible holdouts include Cornyn and former President George W. Bush, who reportedly hosted a Texas fundraiser last month for Republican Senate candidates in battleground races, but not for Paxton. And the party came together only after Trump’s endorsement threw what could have been a safe re-election for Cornyn into chaos.

The Senate race isn’t the only nail-biter in Texas. As Republicans defend their narrow House majority in November, they’re playing offense in several redrawn majority-Hispanic districts in South Texas that Trump carried in 2024.

Trump’s tour has so far stuck to friendly territory. It began last week in Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama, three heavily Republican states. Some GOP strategists see that as a deliberate effort to keep the president away from contested races where moderate voters who are unenthusiastic about him play a central role.

Trump has framed the red-state start as a tribute to states that backed him in all three of his presidential runs, while acknowledging that he isn’t worried about them.

“Oklahoma and Alabama, I’m here to say hello,” Trump said at a campaign rally on Friday in Mobile, Alabama. “I’m here because sometimes even though you don’t have to come here, you’ve got to pay respect to the people that have loved me every year.”

Texas is another matter. At the rally in Oklahoma last week, Trump said he was “worried” about Texas and Michigan, along with a few other states, and he urged supporters to vote as if he were on the ballot.

That concern hasn’t been lost on some voters. Tom Prohonic of Grapevine, Texas, who said he is a registered Republican and a conservative but has voted against Trump in past presidential elections, told MS NOW last week that it’s telling that the president keeps coming back to the state.

“It shows that it’s a focus and that it’s needed, and that he has to get out and campaign for the people who are running on the GOP board,” he said.

But Prohonic said Republicans lost his vote by nominating Trump’s pick. Paxton has faced allegations of securities fraud and was impeached by the GOP-controlled Texas House over accusations of public corruption and abuse of office. The securities fraud felony charges were dropped after Paxton pleaded not guilty and agreed to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution. He has denied the corruption allegations.

“Corruption, being impeached by his own party, threatening to sue pretty much everyone in Texas and outside of Texas at various times during his role as AG,” Prohonic said when asked why he’s voting for Talarico instead of Paxton. 

Cornyn “was a fine candidate,” he said. “And it’s unfortunate that the party chose Paxton.”

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