Tuesday's Texas Republican Senate runoff is two days away. President Trump endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton on May 19. The same week, Senator John Cornyn was one of three named Republican absences on the 50-47 Senate vote that advanced the joint war-powers resolution against operations in Iran. [1] The runoff Trump just endorsed against him is the most immediate political risk in his career; the second Senate vote on the resolution is scheduled for June 1, eight days after the runoff closes. Cornyn's office issued no Iran statement Sunday morning.

The paper's Saturday brief on the same runoff named the calendar collision: the YOLO-caucus member fighting for his primary survival is the same senator whose flip on the joint resolution's discharge could pass the measure against a presidential veto. The Sunday update is the silence. RealClearPolling's average has Paxton +3.2 (Paxton 45.5, Cornyn 42.3); the University of Houston's Hobby School poll fielded April 28 to May 1 had Paxton 48-45. [2] Wesley Hunt's third-place voters broke for Paxton 54-35 in the same poll, and Hunt has not endorsed. Punchbowl News's smaller-and-more-conservative runoff-electorate read — "the hard-core activist types who show up to vote the day after Memorial Day" — is the structural variable. [1]

Trump's "largely negotiated" Saturday-evening Truth Social changed the political calculation around the June 1 vote without changing the runoff math at all. A deal that arrives before June 1 moots the second vote; a deal that does not forces the cohort to confront a presidential claim of negotiated peace with a war-powers resolution already on the floor. Either way, Cornyn answers to Paxton's primary electorate on Tuesday before he answers to the Senate on the following Monday.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington