The Republican who won Texas’s Senate primary with Donald Trump’s backing is now hoping the president and Senate Republicans will help him keep the seat from falling into Democratic hands in the midterms.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won a contentious primary against the incumbent senator, John Cornyn, and secured the GOP nomination in May. Since then, he’s been running neck and neck with Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, who led Paxton by six points in a poll from a Democratic-linked polling firm published on Thursday. And he says he needs Trump’s cash to put him over the finish line.
Paxton said in an interview Sunday that his campaign’s own internals showed the race to be a different picture, but conceded that it was a close fight.
“I don’t trust all these polls. We have our own polling that suggests maybe a little different result, but we definitely have a close race,” he told The Sunday Briefing on Fox News.
He added that he needed a cash infusion from Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. PAC, which has a war chest of more than $800 million but has been sparing in doling out funds this cycle.
open image in gallery“I know that they are going to be a part of this,” Paxton said. He declined to say whether he has spoken with the president about fundraising during Trump’s campaign stop to Texas last week, though he said he expected money to come in from Senate Republicans to help keep the seat from becoming “California’s third senator.”
But that cavalry might not be coming.
Senate Republicans aren’t coming out in waves to support Paxton, who ousted one of their own closely tied to leadership and whose scandal-plagued background has already been the target of millions in negative ad spending by their campaign arm as they sought to protect Cornyn from his challenger.
open image in galleryCornyn himself has signaled that there’s no love lost between the two men, telling reporters repeatedly that he won’t campaign or raise money for Paxton.
“Paxton’s a poor campaigner,” the Republican senator told The Texas Tribune last week. “He’s lazy and doesn’t raise money. And he basically is not offering a very compelling case for his election.
Cornyn said Paxton is “making this harder than it needs to be.”
On Sunday, Republican Sen. John Kennedy stressed that the Senate GOP’s campaign arm — the National Republican Senatorial Committee — didn’t have any money budgeted to protect the Texas Senate seat as Republicans find themselves fighting off a number of credible Democratic challenges.
open image in gallery“We in the senate don’t have the money budgeted for Texas. We need help from the president,” Kennedy told The Sunday Briefing on Fox News.
“The president says he has $850 million in his campaign accounts. That’s a lot of jack. I’m hoping that the president’s gonna spend $100 or $200 million in Texas. But he hasn’t committed to it yet,” Kennedy said. “But in the meantime, we’ve got a race, and I’m not going to play-act and say that we don’t.”
Fox’s interviews with Paxton and Kennedy came as the network highlighted the massive advantage Talarico currently has over Paxton in available cash, which Paxton credited to the expensive runoff against Cornyn.
Talarico won significant national support and saw a fundraising surge after former CBS host Stephen Colbert said that his network banned an interview with Talarico from the airwaves in February. His own primary did not go to a runoff, sparing the Democrats a second costly battle.
open image in galleryRepublicans are optimistic that Trump’s support and Texas’s strong Republican voting base will push Paxton over the finish line, but the president’s sinking approval ratings and Talarico’s popularity compared to Paxton’s are making that a tough argument to make.
A former top aide to Cornyn made headlines earlier this month when it was reported that he accepted a senior position on Talarico’s campaign, a sign of the work the Talarico campaign has done to win over Republicans averse to supporting Paxton.
The Texas attorney general was investigated by the FBI and accused of misusing his office, and faced an impeachment trial led by Republicans in the state legislature. In 2024, he accepted a deal to avoid charges on securities fraud by paying restitution of $300,000. The Department of Justice declined to bring charges against him in a decision made just weeks before Trump was set to take office.
Texas is just one of several red-purple states where Republicans are defending Senate seats this year and Democrats believe they have a chance to reverse the GOP’s gains made in the last election cycle, potentially even securing a majority. Such a possibility was considered far off just last year.
Democrats are also mounting serious challenges in Iowa and North Carolina, where retiring Republican senators have left their seats open, as well as in Alaska, Maine and Ohio where Democrats are challenging incumbent Republicans.