John Cornyn’s Approval Continues to Plummet

John Cornyn’s disapproval rate has gone from 39% to 50% between April and June, according to a Texas Political Project Poll.

Texas voters have not forgiven Cornyn for not being firm enough about not allowing any kind of gun restrictions following the mass shooting in Uvalde in which an 18-year-old legally bought two assault rifles to then kill 19 kids and two teachers.

He was booed at the Republican convention held a few weeks ago, for even proposing the need to regulate gun use so mentally ill people have no access to weapons and expressing his condolences for the victims of the shooting in Uvalde. In contrast, Ted Cruz, who still refuses to acknowledge the gun crisis in the country and blames doors in schools instead, was cheered on.

It is important to highlight that Cornyn isn’t even pro-gun restriction, he is just caught in the middle as the Republican negotiator in the bipartisan gun safety packet. Despite claiming he “fought and kept President Biden’s gun-grabbing wish list off the table,” he was still booed by the members of his party.

According to the poll, 50% of voters disapproved of Cornyn’s performance as a senator, with only 24% approval. The poll was conducted in June by Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In April, those percentages were 39% and 32%.

The director of the Texas Politics Project, Jim Henson, stated for the Texas Tribune that there is no direct causal link to Cornyn’s disapproval and his sponsorship of the gun bill. Yet he did say that it is hard not to see the correlation.

“We didn’t ask ‘what do you think of John Cornyn sponsoring the gun bill?’ but when you see a drop this big in such a short period of time, you look for some proximate cause,” Henson said. 

Cornyn didn’t win any approval with the Democrats, either. The gun bill was extremely disappointing to them since it doesn’t promise much change. He knew he was taking a political risk by assuming the negotiation for the legalization, and is now seeing the results of two very divided parties who ended up dissatisfied either way.

“The drop is so big because nobody was satisfied,” Henson said. “For Republicans, it was too much. For Democrats, it was too little. Independents on guns right now look a little bit more like Democrats than they do like Republicans, so Independents likely thought that the bill didn’t do enough as well.”