Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton enters the May 26 Republican primary runoff against Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) with a fundraising gap that could prove fatal to his campaign.
And unusually for a race of this size, Paxton allies are pointing the finger at a single donor: Leonard Leo, the conservative powerbroker sitting atop a reported $1 billion-plus war chest, large portions of which he had previously deployed to make Paxton the GOP political force he is today, but which are now parked safely on the sidelines as Paxton faces the toughest fight of his political life.
Leo is not a household name in Texas, but his fingerprints are on a substantial portion of the conservative legal infrastructure that defines modern Republican politics. He helped build the Federalist Society into the primary pipeline for conservative judicial nominees. Every Supreme Court justice appointed by Donald Trump was recommended by the Federalist Society. The same network that shaped the federal judiciary also spent a decade shaping Paxton.
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When Paxton won his first attorney general race in 2014, Leo joined his transition team, an unusual commitment for a Washington operative in a Texas statehouse race. Over the following decade, Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network, later renamed the Concord Fund, funneled $20.3 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association. In 2018 alone, RAGA gave Paxton $650,000 plus $21,500 in in-kind contributions. RAGA once called Paxton its “greatest champion,” a line that has since been quietly removed from its website.
Leo also gave Paxton’s office something harder to quantify: a central role in the legal campaigns the Federalist Society network had spent years engineering. In 2021, Leo provided legal counsel to a whistleblower organization in a False Claims Act lawsuit against Planned Parenthood, filed before Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, a Federalist Society member whose appointment Leo had helped secure. Paxton’s office joined the litigation. That same year, Paxton led the multistate challenge to OSHA’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate that produced NFIB v. OSHA at the Supreme Court, a ruling grounded in the major questions doctrine the Federalist Society had championed for years. In November 2024, Paxton led a coalition of 11 states suing BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street over alleged antitrust violations in the coal market, one of the highest-profile ESG enforcement actions in the country. The outside counsel was Cooper & Kirk, a Federalist Society-aligned firm with documented ties to Leo’s network. In each case, Paxton was the institutional vehicle. Leo’s network supplied the doctrine, the judges, and the legal firepower.
That relationship is now effectively over.
In January 2026, Leo quietly dissolved the Concord Fund. The successor organizations he has stood up have not directed a dollar toward Paxton’s Senate race. A review of Paxton’s Q1 2026 FEC filings covering more than 3,000 itemized transactions turned up zero matches for any Leo-affiliated name, employer, or vendor.
Where Leo is spending tells its own story. The Lexington Fund gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Maine Sen. Susan Collins, hardly a MAGA standard-bearer. It also gave $500,000 to the Sentinel Action Fund, a conservative super PAC whose 2026 endorsement pattern reads as a clear statement of strategic priorities: Susan Collins first, then former Rep. Mike Rogers in Michigan, then Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio. Both Rogers and Husted have received Trump endorsements, but none of SAF’s picks are MAGA insurgents. They are establishment-aligned, institutionally credible, and built for general elections.
The tension between Leo’s network and MAGA populism goes deeper than endorsement patterns. The Federalist Society justices Leo championed have declined to simply hand Trump legal victories when the law did not support it, and that independence has made them targets on the MAGA Right. Notably, Leo was the driving force behind the Supreme Court challenge to Trump’s signature tariff policy, where his side prevailed with help from Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, both Federalist Society-recommended nominees. Leo appears to have concluded that the future of the conservative legal project runs through electable institutionalists, not through candidates such as Paxton.
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There are signs SAF has weighed involvement in the Texas runoff on Cornyn’s behalf, though at least one Paxton ally speaking on background predicted it would not happen, arguing that polling and campaign momentum suggest Paxton will win comfortably. The RealClearPolitics average does give Paxton a lead.
But nearly a quarter of Cornyn’s primary voters say they would back Democrat James Talarico in November if Paxton is the nominee, a defection rate that could prove decisive in what is shaping up as a difficult cycle for Texas Republicans statewide. The man who built Paxton’s career has placed his bets elsewhere. Whether that costs Paxton the nomination is an open question. Whether it would cost him in November is harder to dismiss.
Taylor Millard is a freelance journalist who lives in Virginia. Follow him on X @TaylorMillard.