After the gun bill, John Cornyn is now less popular than Ted Cruz

For the past decade, Texas’s senior senator, John Cornyn, has been the straight man of the duo our state has sent to Congress’s upper chamber. Junior senator Ted Cruz is the type to pick fights with Muppets or talk about secession, while the seventy-year-old former Texas attorney general has served in relative anonymity. He’s spent much of his four terms playing Gallant to Cruz’s Goofus, coasting to reelection by double-digit margins in every campaign he’s run. For stretches of his career, the bulk of the Texans who elected him to high office couldn’t even rate his work and answered “don’t know” when asked to. Now that’s power. The past few weeks, however, have revealed cracks in the aura of “I don’t know, he seems fine?” that has kept Cornyn ascending the GOP ranks to Senate minority whip. In late June, at the party’s Texas convention, Cornyn addressed the crowd—to a chorus of boos from conservatives displeased with his efforts to advance a (downright modest) gun safety bill in the wake of the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde. The bill did not include any weapons bans, and polling indicates that, among a broader pool of Texans than the ones who attend the convention, stricter gun laws are popular: 52 percent would like to see more-strict laws, while only 14 percent would like them to be loosened further—a group that, it’s safe to say, was significantly overrepresented by convention attendees.

The booing was a far cry from the days when Cornyn got to walk out on the convention stage to a video in which a Sam Elliott soundalike recited a poem about how “Big John” was a cowboy! The senator tried to defend his bill over the boos by stressing how little it would change. (The bill “primarily means enforcing current law,” Cornyn said. “Nothing more, and nothing less.”) No matter: following the speech, Donald Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to decry the senator as a “RINO” who would “TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY.” The displeasure with Cornyn extends beyond the limited focus group that is the Texas GOP convention, however. According to new polling from the University of Texas’s Texas Politics Project, rank-and-file voters have also begun expressing their dissatisfaction with Cornyn’s performance. Back in February, his approval, disapproval, and “don’t know” numbers were almost identical. But a survey of Texas voters conducted in late June found that Cornyn’s disapproval number has risen to 50 percent, while his approval rating has fallen to 24 percent, with 26 percent unsure—an unpromising trend over the year to date, and a downright dramatic reversal from the halcyon days of 2016 and before, when a plurality of Texans didn’t even know what the guy did all day.