Last week, Ken Paxton patiently awaited Trump’s speech in the Rose Garden where he was set to announce a series of events planned in Paxton’s honor for his Texas Senate bid. This was supposed to be his moment. Then the President of the United States stepped up to the microphone and delivered the worst endorsement speech I’ve heard in a long time:
“Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses. And I say this, it’s so insulting to him, but I might as well say it. You might not like the way he looks. You might not love his look. You might not love his television interviews.” A pause, then the save: “But he was the best attorney general in the country, perhaps.” The next day, a Fox News host asked Paxton on air whether he’d be changing his suit. Not his platform. Not his message. His suit.
That’s not even Paxton’s biggest problem this week.
On Monday, James Talarico’s campaign released a new ad featuring David Maxwell, who spent nearly fifty years in Texas law enforcement, the last decade of it running law enforcement for Paxton’s own Attorney General’s office. Maxwell was one of the senior officials who reported Paxton to the FBI in 2020, alleging Paxton had used the power of his office to help a political donor named Nate Paul, who was under federal investigation at the time, by intervening in a lawsuit and giving Paul’s lawyers access to sensitive files. Paxton fired every one of them within weeks. They sued under the Texas Whistleblower Act, and it took years, but a judge eventually awarded Maxwell and three other former aides a combined $6.6 million.
Those same allegations were the core of the twenty articles of impeachment the Texas House brought against Paxton in 2023, articles that passed on a 121 to 23 vote in a chamber his own party controlled (the Senate acquitted him a few months later, largely along party lines). Maxwell was one of the people who testified, and now he’s stumping for the Talarico campaign, stating, “Ken Paxton ended my five-decade career in public service because I blew the whistle on his corruption. I am supporting James Talarico for the U.S. Senate.”
Those are the words of a man who has been around law enforcement for half a century, endorsing his former boss’s opponent just days before his old employer walks into a convention that’s supposed to make him look strong.
It gets worse from there. Paxton’s wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on what she described in court filings as “biblical grounds,” accusing him of adultery. Ken Paxton was then photographed in London over Fourth of July with a woman identified as his girlfriend, spending Independence Day weekend overseas while his own campaign was trying to make the case that he’s the guy Texas should trust with a Senate seat. A Republican strategist and former Trump State Department appointee summed it up to MS NOW: “He has more baggage than a 747.”
The backdrop of Paxton’s infidelity makes what he did on Tuesday harder to stomach.
Paxton’s Senate campaign released an AI-generated political attack ad, meant to run nationally, showing a reimagined Talarico scrawling with a crayon into something called “The King James Talarico Bible.” The insinuation from Paxton’s team was that James Talarico is weaponizing faith to sell a radical agenda. Not true in the slightest.
Set aside whether attacking a seminary student training to become a pastor over his theology is the best use of a campaign’s final two months. The man accusing his opponent of weaponizing faith and proselytizing about what it means to be a Christian is the same man whose own wife just told a judge, under oath, that their marriage ended because he broke a Commandment.
It’s not just faith that Paxton will bend to fit the moment. It’s the truth generally. Almost every Republican has made “election integrity” a rallying cry since 2020, and Paxton built his entire career on it, prosecuting mail-in ballots and warning Texans that illegal voting would not be tolerated on his watch. He should have been more careful about his own behavior instead.
A Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation this summer found that Paxton himself appears to have voted in six elections over the past two years from a Collin County address he no longer lives at, the home he shared with his wife before their marriage fell apart. Three election law experts told the reporters he may have broken the exact law his own office enforces. When a reporter asked him about it directly at a press conference, his aide cut in before he could answer: “We’re just going to answer questions on law enforcement today.”
The Attorney General of Texas would not answer a law enforcement question, at his own press conference, about himself.
With all of that sitting as dead weight on his campaign, it’s no wonder Paxton’s so far behind financially. But understand what that actually means in a state like Texas. Republicans have carried it in every presidential election since 1976. A Republican losing ground here isn’t supposed to be possible, and yet in the second quarter of this year, Talarico raised over $31 million for his Senate campaign. Paxton raised barely $9 million. Not a typo. He’s getting outraised by more than three to one.
As of a few weeks ago, none of the major donors who gave at least $50,000 to John Cornyn during the primary have given Paxton a dollar since he beat Cornyn in the runoff. Two West Texas oil billionaires who’ve written Paxton checks for years sat this cycle out entirely. Karl Rove told Fox News this week that “time is running out” for Paxton without a real infusion of national money. Ted Cruz wouldn’t promise a win for his own party’s nominee on Sean Hannity’s show: “I think it’s going to be close.” That’s Ted Cruz hedging about Texas.
Trump’s own operation finally stepped in last week, transferring $10 million to an aligned entity, just sixty days before the general election, after months of sitting on a war chest worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Cornyn, who lost the primary to Paxton, put the party’s delay in supporting Paxton in context when the two were still campaigning: “[Trump] could write a check if he wanted Paxton to be the nominee, with all his wrinkles and warts…it’s a simple solution.”
MAGA world has never been all-in on its eventual nominee.
None of what I’ve laid out here is coming from a Democratic strategist. It’s Karl Rove. It’s Ted Cruz. It’s David Maxwell, who ran law enforcement for Paxton’s own office for years. It’s also a longtime Cornyn staffer who just left to go work for Talarico’s campaign instead.
Republicans in Texas are sounding the alarm because they can read the same race I just walked you through and see that Paxton is the gift that Democrats have been waiting cycles for in their pursuit of a blue Texas. Republicans are also panicking because Talarico isn’t some placeholder benefiting from Paxton’s collapse. He’s a strong candidate whose efforts have tripled the fundraising of his opponent.
That combination of a badly wounded nominee and a genuinely strong opponent is what has Texas Republicans worried heading into this week’s midterm convention in Dallas. It’s why they are broadcasting weakness with the hope they’ll receive out-of-state help and won’t hemorrhage a seat they once took for granted.
But even if they do get a financial bailout for their flawed candidate, every dollar Republicans now divert to save this seat is a dollar that doesn’t go to defending GOP-held Senate seats in Ohio, Iowa, Maine, or Alaska. It puts them on the defensive in a year already expected to deliver a blow to their ranks in Congress.
And even when the time given to each candidate before an election is equal, Paxton has coughed up capital there too by having to dodge questions about his own voter registration, or his own suit and why the president doesn’t like it, instead of talking about the issues.
Every week Paxton’s agenda is consumed by candidate quality concerns is a week Talarico spends building a lead that keeps getting more real. While Texas Republicans wanted a fighter, what they nominated is a man who might gift Democrats the control of the U.S. Senate.
Like most associated with our president, Paxton is wholly and uniquely unqualified. He is not worthy of a seat in the U.S. Senate. Trump’s narcissism led him to choose a loyalist over John Cornyn. My hope is that Democrats don’t squander this opportunity.
It’s astounding to me that a candidate so obviously corrupt as Paxton is a major party nominee for US senate and has a chance to win.