Texas Sen. John Cornyn raised $1.5 million between Jan. 1 and March 31, according to the latest filings with the Federal Election Commission, bringing his cumulative funds raised to just over $7.56 million as he looks toward re-election next year.
The filings offer the last picture of the incumbent’s fundraising before incumbent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on April 8 announced that he would run to unseat Cornyn, who himself was the state attorney general from 1998 to 2002.
Candidates for U.S. Senate are required to file quarterly reports with the FEC. Though Paxton is a U.S. Senate candidate, he filed after the close of the reporting period at the end of March.
The filing
In the first quarter of the year, Cornyn’s principal campaign committee, Texans for Senator John Cornyn Inc., raised $1,585,751.74 and spent just $120,579. To date, Cornyn’s campaign has spent $2.64 million on his 2026 re-election campaign.
Three-quarters of that money came in the form of transfers from other committees, mostly coming from one joint fundraising committee, the Cornyn Victory Committee.
Donors can give the Cornyn Victory Committee larger sums of money than they could to the incumbent’s official committee, then earmark that money to go to Cornyn’s re-election effort and other committees — hence the “joint” fundraising committee. The other political groups include the following committees:
- NRSC (the National Republican Senatorial Committee)
- R Senate PAC
- Texans for a Conservative Majority
- Alamo PAC
- Conservative Majority Project Super PAC
That’s why all but three of the largest individual contributions to Cornyn’s re-election campaign — coming from wealthy individuals able to give large sums — were transfers from the Cornyn Victory Committee.
That’s reflected in the filing for the Cornyn Victory Committee, too. Between January and March, it raised $2.06 million in donations, and disbursed $2.03 million. 93% of that disbursed money was transferred to its affiliate committees.
The remaining three transfers came from other committees: two from the American-Israel Public Affairs PAC and one from WinRed, a GOP donation pass-through committee.
Who’s donating
Excluding one transaction, there was a 41-way tie for the most money given to Cornyn’s campaign by an individual (all coming from transfers from other committees), at $7,000 per person: $3,500 donated for his primary campaign, $3,500 donated for his general election campaign.
Why $3,500? Every two years, the FEC revises its caps on individual contributions to account for inflation. For the 2025-2026 election cycle, that limit is $3,500 per election to a candidate directly.
The one exception was David Peacock, the son of the late Houston car dealership owner Tom Peacock, who gave an additional $697.27 to the campaign committee (via Cornyn Victory) to help pay for a recount, which is subject to different limits than the primary or general campaigns.
That gave Peacock the edge to claim the largest cumulative money donated to the campaign at the start of this year, at $7,697.27.
The remaining 40 people were all tied for second place, at $7,000 per person.
But many of the committee transfers to the campaign also came from political action committees, or PACs, which are tax-exempt fundraising entities that can donate to campaigns or ballot initiatives. Several PACs with ties to corporations made $5,000 donations to Cornyn’s campaign (again, via Cornyn Victory) in the first quarter of the year, including the following:
- Samsung Electronics America Inc. PAC
- Humana Inc. PAC
- Vizent Inc. PAC
- Western Alliance Bancorporation PAC
- UnitedHealth Group Inc. PAC
- iHeartMedia Inc. PAC
- American Frozen Food Institute PAC
- Gridiron PAC, affiliated with the NFL
