Maybe, just maybe, this is the year Texas really matters.

While the outcome wasn’t shocking, the confirmation of a May 26 runoff between Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and state Attorney General Ken Paxton confirmed the fears of many Republicans who now face a likely scorched-earth campaign that could seriously hobble the victor in November’s general election and drain resources from tough races in places like North Carolina and Maine.

Democrats, meanwhile, are seeing their dream scenario play out: State Rep. James Talarico has defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett outright in the Democratic primary, giving the candidate many strategists see as the party’s best chance to finally turn the Lone Star State blue a clear path to November.

Tuesday’s results showed some surprising strength for Cornyn after he trailed Paxton, a MAGA firebrand, in most polls. The veteran senator is about a point ahead of the AG in the latest returns.

But for national Republicans, keeping Cornyn afloat will be expensive and will risk damaging Paxton if he ends up being their nominee. In the absence of a Trump endorsement for any candidate, Cornyn and his allies have already spent more than $100 million to take out Paxton.

The four-term Cornyn launched into the runoff Tuesday night by framing Paxton as an existential threat to the party — “dead weight” that could cost Republicans control of Congress.

“President Trump’s agenda hangs in the balance,” he said. “I’m proud to have supported President Trump and worked with him to help him achieve his goals in the Congress. If he’s nominated, there’s a high risk that Paxton would lose the Senate seat, taking five congressional seats down with him.”

Paxton reacted with a taunt over Cornyn’s big-budget failure to avoid the runoff.

“We proved something they’ll never understand in Washington,” he said, according to The Texas Tribune. “Texas is not for sale.”

Cornyn-Paxton wasn’t the only high-stakes drama in the Lone Star State. A quick round-up of the latest results from other races:

— Embattled GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales was forced into a runoff against gun influencer Brandon Herrera.

— State Rep. Steve Toth ousted GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw from the seat he’s held for four terms.

— GOP Rep. Chip Roy is heading into a runoff with state Sen. Mayes Middleton for attorney general.

— Rep. Christian Menefee is less than 2,000 votes ahead in his uncalled race against Rep. Al Green, who has served in Congress for more than 20 years.

— Former Rep. Colin Allred is more than 10 point ahead against incumbent Democrat Julie Johnson in another uncalled Dallas-area race.

What else we’re watching: 

— Notable hearings: The House Oversight Committee will hear testimony at 9 a.m. from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison on the misuse of government funds. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is back for a second day in a row of congressional hearings, this time in front of the House Judiciary Committee at 10 a.m. And expect fireworks when IRS CEO Frank Bisignano testifies before the House Ways and Means panel at 10 a.m.

— Senate’s decision day on Iran: A bipartisan resolution to rein in Trump’s Iran war is expected to fail in the Senate Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m.

But beneath the surface, support for the ongoing strikes is looking less than robust. Many Republican lawmakers are harboring private misgivings about the risks to American troops, global stability and their own political fortunes if the military campaign drags on.

Liz Crampton, Hailey Fuchs, Brian Faler and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

Lindsey Graham’s effort to convince Donald Trump to attack Iran began — to the surprise of no one familiar with the relationship between the South Carolina senator and the president — on the golf course.

After the 2024 election, the pair hit the links to discuss a second-term agenda for the resurgent president, and Graham had lots of advice.

In an extensive interview Tuesday in his Capitol Hill office, Graham recalled pushing Trump to “blow some shit up” to combat drug trafficking. He talked about taking on Big Tech by challenging the legal underpinnings of their industry dominance. And he counseled Trump to build on agreements he’d brokered between Israel and U.S. allies in the Middle East.

That last part, Graham emphasized, would require confronting the elephant in the region.

“We were thinking about this early, early on about how Iran is a spoiler for expanding the Abraham Accords and stability in the Mideast,” he said. “I told him before he took office … if you can collapse this terrorist regime, that’s Berlin Wall stuff.”

That launched an ongoing conversation that continued for months, culminating in a flurry of one-on-one lobbying “in the last several weeks,” Graham said. The two also talked about Iran during a Thursday White House meeting that wrapped less than 48 hours before the beginning of the vast joint U.S.-Israeli operation aimed at Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, its civilian and military leaders, as well as other key targets.

Trump’s decision to go to war was the latest indication that hawkish voices he once publicly resisted — none louder than Graham’s — have dominated his second-term decisionmaking. It was also a full-circle moment for the veteran GOP senator, who has spent decades pushing administration after administration to take military action against Iran with no success until now.

Graham’s triumph was never a given. He described a “real contest” within the administration about whether or not Trump should take military action to end a geopolitical rivalry 47 years in the making.

Another person with knowledge of the internal debate said that, within the administration, the idea of striking Iran had very few vocal backers other than U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. That left Graham among those leading the charge from outside and inside.

In public, Graham used frequent cable news hits and hallway interviews in the Capitol to play up the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear and missile programs — even after Trump ordered a June strike to destroy its most sensitive nuclear facilities. He also used Trump’s preferred medium — TV hits — to lavishly praise him, frequently referring to him as “Reagan Plus” for his dramatic impact.

Privately, he appealed to Trump’s attraction to swaggering action and risk-taking over quieter moves — not to mention the term-limited president’s growing concern with his legacy.

“There was a real fight not to do it,” Graham said. “Let Israel do it by itself or just not do much. So we talked a lot about this: ‘Mr. President, you want to have your fingerprints on this. You want them to know America will fight.’”

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Graham said the successful January capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro put Trump “in the mindset to follow through.” But he wasn’t certain until late last month when Trump sent a second aircraft carrier near the region that Trump would ultimately take action.

The strikes have opened Trump up to criticism from Democrats, key European and Middle Eastern allies and even some members of his own party, who have questioned the rationale for the sweeping operation and what the endgame will look like. Polling indicates the American public remains wary of sliding into another “forever war” in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As he makes the rounds defending Trump — both publicly to TV cameras and privately to Middle Eastern allies — Graham has tried to hammer home that the U.S. is not nation-building in Iran. Where the country goes next, he said, remains up to the Iranian people.

“If they want to reconstitute their country, to build more nuclear weapons and more missiles to hit us, we’ll treat the new people like we did the old people,” he said. “I just don’t believe it. I think they’re going to find a way to … be a different country.”

He went on to dismiss the famous “Pottery Barn rule” articulated by former Secretary of State Colin Powell before the Iraq War more than two decades ago.

“‘You break it. You own it.’ That may be true for a consignment shop, but it’s not true for foreign policy,’” Graham said. “If there’s a threat, break it.”

But Trump’s strategy has opened him up to questioning from some of his own supporters, who believe it’s a far cry from the “America First” approach he preaches. The president and some of his top advisers pledged during the 2024 campaign that his second administration wouldn’t rush into foreign entanglements. And Trump during his 2025 inauguration speech said his administration’s success would be measured in part by “the wars we never get into.”

Many of those statements have resurfaced online since this weekend’s strikes, but Trump is now singing consistently from Graham’s interventionist hymnal, and the senator said he’s not concerned Trump will back down amid the criticism and that he’s “in it to win it.”

“He’s a hard sell, but when you sell him, he’s all in,” said Graham, who argued that “America First is not ‘head in the sand.’”

The strikes have sparked a bipartisan push in Congress to block Trump from taking additional military action without congressional signoff. That effort is expected to fall short, but it inspired a lively debate during Senate Republicans’ closed-door lunch on Tuesday — and Graham was in the middle of it.

He pushed back after Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) criticized the lack of consultation with Congress and GOP leaders for not holding hearings, according to two people with knowledge of his comments who were granted anonymity to disclose the private moment.

While Graham’s defense of aggressive military action is nothing new, Trump’s outright embrace of it is. The idea that the pair would be working in tandem on a new Middle East war would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when Graham was running for president himself and roundly criticizing the outsider candidate’s isolationism.

As recently as 2019, Trump publicly criticized Graham’s history of advocating for military intervention in the Middle East after Graham urged him to be more aggressive after Iran bombed Saudi oil production facilities.

“It’s very easy to attack, but if you ask Lindsey, ask him how did going into the Middle East, how did that work out? And how did going into Iraq work out?” Trump said at the time.

Graham said one of his rules is to not “take yourself out of the game” just because of a past disagreement and that it paid off with a now-trusting relationship with a two-term president.

“If you had told me in 2016, I’d wind up being one of his better friends, closest adviser and admire him as commander-in-chief, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Graham said, adding that “what the president sees in me is somebody that can deliver.”

One person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that if anyone had an outsize influence on Trump’s decision to attack Iran it was Graham. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who favors a hands-off foreign policy approach, made a similar observation about Graham’s impact on Trump’s Venezuela strategy, telling reporters that his GOP colleague should be “banned from going to the White House.”

“That’s sarcasm,” Paul clarified.

Other corners of the party’s libertarian-leaning wing have been more blunt. Doug Stafford, Paul’s chief political adviser, called Graham a “warmongering fool.” And Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told reporters after a closed-door Iran briefing Tuesday that “Lindsey Graham hasn’t seen a fistfight he hasn’t wanted to turn into a bombing raid.”

Graham, meanwhile, is looking ahead as he back-channels with Trump and allies in the Middle East. He wants to put together a bipartisan coalition in the Senate to finish the job he talked about with Trump on the golf course — enshrining the full normalization of Israel-Arab relations with a Senate-ratified treaty.

And he is coordinating closely with Trump. The two spoke Tuesday morning, and the president has indicated he’s closely watching Graham’s TV sales pitch for the war, including declarations that the “mothership of terrorism is sinking” and the “captain is dead.”

“He called me and said … ‘I like that — stay on TV,’” he said. “Something tells me I will.”

Dasha Burns and Jack Detsch contributed to this report. 

President Donald Trump met privately on Tuesday with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong before publicly backing the company’s position in an ongoing lobbying clash with banks that has derailed a major cryptocurrency bill, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who were granted anonymity to discuss a closed-door matter.

It is unclear what was discussed during the meeting, but it came just before Trump wrote on social media that banks “need to make a good deal with the Crypto Industry” in order to advance digital asset legislation that has stalled on Capitol Hill. He wrote that a recently adopted crypto law is “being threatened and undermined by the Banks, and that is unacceptable” — echoing Coinbase’s position.

A spokesperson for Coinbase declined to comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The policy clash centers around whether crypto exchanges like Coinbase should be able to offer rewards programs that pay an annual percentage yield to customers who hold digital tokens known as stablecoins that are designed to maintain a value of $1. Wall Street groups are warning that allowing yield-like payments on stablecoins could lead customers to pull deposits from bank accounts and threaten lending that is critical to the economy.

Banks are pushing to ban any type of stablecoin yield payments as part of a sweeping crypto regulatory bill that is currently pending in the Senate. But a wide array of digital asset firms have fought back, and the rift helped derail the so-called crypto market structure legislation bill earlier this year. The legislation would establish new rules governing how crypto tokens are overseen by market regulators — a longtime lobbying goal for digital asset firms, which say they need “regulatory clarity” from Washington.

Coinbase, the largest U.S.-based crypto exchange, has played a key role in the spat. On the eve of a scheduled Senate Banking Committee markup in January, Armstrong came out against the most recent publicly released draft of the crypto bill. He warned in part against “Draft amendments that would kill rewards on stablecoins, allowing banks to ban their competition.” The markup was later postponed, and the bill has remained stalled ever since.

Since then, White House officials have sought to mediate a compromise between the two sides. The White House hosted a series of meetings with representatives from the banking and crypto sectors, but significant differences remain between the two sides and no deal has emerged.

Coinbase has become a major player in Trump’s Washington, thanks in part to massive political spending that is already beginning to shake up the 2026 midterm elections. The exchange, which was co-founded by Armstrong, is a leading backer of a crypto super PAC group known as Fairshake that is armed with a war chest of more than $190 million. Coinbase also donated to Trump’s inaugural committee and to the president’s White House ballroom renovation effort.

In his post on Truth Social Tuesday, Trump included a line that Armstrong has uttered verbatim in interviews about the stablecoin yield fight: “Americans should earn more money on their money.” Separately, on Tuesday night, Trump also posted a picture of an X post from Armstrong praising him for delivering “on his campaign promise to make America the crypto capital of the world.”

The crypto “Industry cannot be taken from the People of America when it is so close to becoming truly successful,” Trump wrote in the initial post.

Declan Harty contributed to this report.