What to watch in the Texas Senate race
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, political correspondent Ashley Lopez, and Houston Public Media senior reporter Andrew Schneider.
This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast for Tuesday, February 10th, 2026. I'm Miles Parks, and I cover voting. |
| 0:11.3 | And I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. And Andrew Schneider of Houston Public Media is also here with us today. Hi, Andrew. |
| 0:17.4 | Hello. |
| 0:18.4 | And today on the show, we are talking Texas, where early voting in the primary elections for this year's midterms starts next week. |
| 0:25.3 | And we're going to start today with the Senate race because primary races for both parties are shaping up to be really interesting. |
| 0:31.9 | And Andrew, I want to start with Republicans. |
| 0:33.6 | This is John Cornyn's seat. |
| 0:35.1 | He's been in office for more than 20 years. |
| 0:37.3 | Who's challenging him? |
| 0:39.2 | Right. So he's actually being challenged by two candidates. One is Ken Paxton, who's been the |
| 0:45.3 | State Attorney General for 11 years. Then there's Wesley Hunt, who's a two-term Houston area |
| 0:51.2 | congressman and West Point graduate. Both of them have been making the |
| 0:55.6 | arguments that they are the true conservatives in this race and that Cornyn is out of step with |
| 1:02.4 | the party and the country. And Cornyn is sort of a more old school Republican. Is that right? |
| 1:07.5 | I mean, he came into office, you know, more than 20 years ago. I think of him as more of the sort of George W. Bush Republican versus the sort of MAGA Republican. Is that a fair assessment? I think that would be a fair assessment, although he has made the point repeatedly that he has voted almost entirely according to President Trump's priorities in Congress. And he's been making that point |
| 1:31.0 | as he comes under attack from both Paxton and Hunt over past statements that suggested |
| 1:38.2 | less than full-throated support of the president. |
| 1:40.7 | Got it. Well, Paxton's really interesting here, Ashley. We've talked about him on this podcast before. He has made a lot of statements as Attorney General that have made news, but he also has some personal baggage for lack of a better term. Can you explain that? Yeah, I mean, Ken Paxton is arguably one of the most controversial, at least interesting figures in Texas politics. And I can say this is someone who covered Texas politics for many years, mostly because he has been mired in legal trouble |
| 2:05.3 | pretty much his entire tenure as the Texas Attorney General, which I should mention, is basically |
| 2:10.1 | the top law enforcement official for the state. He has faced allegations of corruption. |
| 2:14.5 | He was impeached by the House, but acquitted by the Senate, which |
| 2:17.5 | means he wasn't removed and he was allowed to stay in office. There were whistleblowers and |
... |
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