Trump Teases Potential Endorsement in Texas Senate Primary After Spending Nearly a Year on the Sidelines

After spending the better part of a year staying on the sidelines, President Trump says he may soon issue an endorsement in the hotly contested Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas. The primary campaign, which currently features three major candidates, could effectively end once Mr. Trump backs a candidate. The Senate race is pitting the incumbent, Senator John Cornyn, against the state’s hardline conservative attorney general Ken Paxton and Congressman Wesley Hunt, who is pitching himself as the electable conservative for the general election. For months, Messrs. Cornyn and Paxton have been tied in primary polling, with Mr. Hunt taking a sizable chunk of the vote in third place. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote in the first round of voting in the March primary, then a runoff election will be held in May. The most recent polling from Emerson College shows Mr. Paxton ahead in the primary by just one point over Mr. Cornyn in the first round of voting — 27 percent to Mr. Cornyn’s 26 percent. Mr. Hunt follows in third with 16 percent. Polling aggregators find a similar result. The RealClearPolitics average of polls for the primary has Mr. Paxton at 29.3 percent and Mr. Cornyn at 29 percent. Mr. Hunt takes 19 percent of the vote in the same polling average. Mr. Trump says he is friends with all three men, and has long stated that he would not endorse in the race. He told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, however, that he was looking at a possible endorsement. “I’m giving it very serious thought. You know, my problem is I’m friendly with all of them,” the president said when asked about a possible endorsement. “Those are the hard ones. I like all of them.”“You’ll be seeing soon,” he said, teasing an endorsement. Mr. Trump has spent the last year largely avoiding endorsing candidates in contested primaries, though that has changed in recent weeks. He is supporting Congresswoman Julia Letlow, who is running against another incumbent, Senator Bill Cassidy, in this year’s Senate race in Louisiana. On Sunday, he endorsed a former lawmaker, Senator John Sununu, to reclaim his old seat in New Hampshire. Mr. Sununu is running against Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to New Zealand, Senator Scott Brown, who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate for nearly two years. In Texas, Democrats are likely to get their act together quickly, given that only two major candidates are vying for the Senate nomination. Polling has been mixed so far, with some showing Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett up ten points in the primary, while others showing state representative James Talarico up by the same margin. No matter who wins that contest, they are sure to raise tens of millions of dollars in the coming months as Democrats look to go on the offense in this year’s Senate races. Special election results across the country have shown Latino voters rapidly shifting away from the GOP, which could give Democrats a real shot at winning a seat in the Lone Star State. Senator Chuck Schumer has orchestrated an aggressive recruitment campaign to help win back the Senate majority, which would require four more seats for his party. He has convinced the sitting governor of Maine to run against Senator Susan Collins, a popular former North Carolina governor to run for his state’s open seat, a former lawmaker, Senator Sherrod Brown, to run in Ohio’s special election, and a wildly popular former representative, Congresswoman Mary Peltola, to challenge her state’s GOP senator in Alaska this year.

Trump Teases Potential Endorsement in Texas Senate Primary After Spending Nearly a Year on the Sidelines

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