Alex Latcham, the executive director of the Senate Leadership Fund, was confused. He’d started to hear chatter early last year that Republican Rep. Wesley Hunt wanted to run for Senate, against not only longtime incumbent Sen. John Cornyn but also Texas’ high-profile attorney general, Ken Paxton.
So he talked with the Houston-area congressman last April to ask why on Earth he thought he could win — and to try to talk him out of sabotaging his career.
“I basically said, ‘Look, in a three-way race, given your profile, given the money I think you can raise, you’re going to get in the mid-teens,’” Latcham told NOTUS in an interview Wednesday.
Latcham’s warning proved prescient: Hunt finished a distant third in Tuesday’s GOP Senate primary in Texas, with just 13.5% of the vote. It was an ignominious end for Hunt, who entered the primary in the fall over the objections of some Republican leaders but never seriously challenged for a place in the top-two runoff.
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His defeat also marked the end of a campaign that GOP officials in Washington and Texas found uniquely frustrating. The congressman had little chance of winning, Republicans said, but his presence might have prevented Cornyn, the favored choice of many party officials, from winning the race outright Tuesday.
Instead, the incumbent now faces a time-consuming and expensive 10-week runoff against Paxton. And top Republicans blame both Hunt and the people working on his campaign.
“Ultimately, I feel bad for him,” Latcham said. “Because he torched his career. And in my opinion, he was taken advantage of by his team and his consultants.”
“He’s an incredibly talented guy and does genuinely want to serve his country, but this was not the way to do it,” Latcham, whose group is closely aligned with Senate Republican Leader John Thune, added.
“I’ve never seen so much political potential squandered in such a short amount of time to achieve so little,” one House GOP leadership aide told NOTUS. “His staff and consulting team should be drug out into the town square and tarred and feathered.”
Officials with Hunt’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In remarks Tuesday night, the lawmaker thanked his supporters and vowed to seek elected office again. He had previously denounced the Republican establishment’s opposition to his campaign, saying that the GOP was wasting tens of millions of dollars in ads against a candidate who both supported President Donald Trump and could win a general election in the fall.
The winner of the Republican runoff will face Democratic state Rep. James Talarico this fall. Democrats think they have a chance of winning thanks to the GOP’s long, ugly primary and a national political environment affected by Trump’s sinking approval ratings.
Republicans in Washington are confident that if Cornyn is the nominee, they’ll win the seat. But they’re deeply frustrated that the primary will have lasted this long or drawn this much in spending.
“Whether you support Ken Paxton or John Cornyn, you should be frustrated that we have another 10 weeks of Republican-on-Republican violence,” Latcham said.
For Hunt, Tuesday’s defeat is a stinging blow for a lawmaker once widely viewed as a rising star in the party. Party operatives, many of them once friendly with the congressman, wondered why he would launch such a long-shot campaign.
According to correspondence between Hunt and a Trump transition official reviewed by NOTUS, Hunt badly wanted out of the House and did not view running for Senate as the only way to achieve that goal.
Shortly following the 2024 election, Hunt pushed Trump officials to find a place for him in the Cabinet, the correspondence shows. He routinely asked if he could be secretary of the Energy or Interior departments and even asked people to advocate for him to Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff.
In one of the messages, he tried to find out who was working on the transition team to better help his case in getting a Cabinet position.
Hunt’s team, particularly his chief of staff, James Kyrkanides, was also pushing the rumor that Cornyn would be appointed NASA administrator and would clear the lane for Hunt to run, according to messages from Hunt’s team reviewed by NOTUS.
None of these things occurred, and Hunt still lost the Senate seat, finding himself out of a job.
In the process of Hunt trying to find any way to escape the House, he burned nearly every bridge with his colleagues and is unlikely to find support from House or Senate leadership for any future endeavors.
Another GOP leadership aide told NOTUS that “Hunt showed he’s the biggest clown in the circus that is politics.”
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