No one who paid even five minutes of attention to Texas politics this autumn should be surprised by the Democrats winning the state’s Senate race. Democrat James Talarico conducted a normal, respectable campaign with good voter outreach, and focused heavily on affordability issues. He ran it slickly, but it was nothing special. More than anything, he was fortunate in his choice of opponents.
Republican Ken Paxton, in addition to being personally unappealing, was the most overtly self-dealing political candidate for major national office in a generation, and couldn’t hide his paper trail. He also ran the most incompetent campaign imaginable, attempting to paint Talarico as a weirdo sex-freak pervert, when Talarico is actually just a mildly woke run-of-the-mill liberal. President Trump endorsed Paxton but then spent months on the campaign trail insulting him in every way imaginable. There’s rarely been an easier choice, and rarely been a candidate who deserved to lose more than Ken Paxton.
Ken Paxton was the most overtly self-dealing political candidate for major national office in a generation
There aren’t enough words to describe his horribleness, so we’ll just glaze past the many Paxton securities fraud charges and his insanely messy divorce ‘on Biblical grounds.’ Then there’s the real-estate development gladhanding that led a heavily Republican state House to overwhelmingly vote to impeach Paxton, its attorney general, in 2023. A judge awarded whistleblowers in that case more than $6 million.
Several independent investigations of Paxton during this campaign revealed a level of political venality seemingly unparalleled in modern times. The AP identified more than 275 out-of-state trips, roughly 730 weekdays with no official-calendar entries, and at least $1.9 million in taxpayer-funded security expenses associated with travel since Paxton took office. Destinations included wine country, resorts and European tourist locations. His office said calendar gaps did not mean he wasn’t working and cited his communications and legal responsibilities. The Wall Street Journal obtained video apparently showing Paxton celebrating New Year’s Eve 2024–25 in Dubai alongside men later identified as Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, who had been indicted in a federal hospital-fraud case and hadn’t returned to face the charges. Local reporting identified campaign contributions from Ahmed totalling approximately $165,000 from 2022 onward, including a $25,000 donation made after his indictment.
Paxton ran his campaign with all the grace of his personal life. He refused to debate Talarico, after saying he wanted to debate Talarico. Instead, his campaign did stuff like releasing an advertisement portraying an AI-generated version of Talarico writing and reading a fictional Bible, including bringing up a previous quote of Talarico’s that ‘God is nonbinary.’ OK, fine.
Then, in early October, Talarico suspended public campaigning while recovering from influenza. Paxton and his campaign demanded ‘proof of life,’ promoted missing-person imagery on milk cartons, and established a ‘Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line.’ At a Trump rally, Paxton questioned Talarico’s whereabouts. Senior Paxton advisor Michelle Smith later amplified an unsupported claim that Talarico had entered psychiatric treatment in Ohio.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Trump, who endorsed Paxton over normal Republican incumbent Senator John Cornyn, said this about his chosen one: ‘He may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.’ He also referred to Paxton as as ‘a pain in the ass’ at a rally in San Antonio, right before realising Paxton was standing nearby, quickly pivoting to praise him as the ‘greatest attorney general in the United States of America’. But he’s not that. And soon, he’ll be a private citizen.
On the governor’s side, Republican Greg Abbott didn’t have nearly as much baggage as Paxton, but voters appear truly sick of him. The state’s economy did fine under his endless rule, but Texas also suffers from a crumbling school system that panders to the religious right, and a decaying infrastructure. Abbott never politically recovered from his horrible handling of the electrical-grid disaster, or from his initial handling of the situation in Uvalde after one of the country’s worst mass shootings ever. And thus, for the first time since the Civil War, or so it feels like, Texas will be have a Democratic Senator and governor. It remains to be seen whether nor not that’s a good thing, but either way, you can place the result clearly at the feet of Ken Paxton and Donald Trump, two men for whom the term ‘pain in the ass’ were invented.
