Get Ready for a Rock Fight in the Texas Senate Race

By David M. Drucker

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

James Talarico better don a flak jacket. With Republican voters in Texas having nominated scandal-plagued Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate, GOP strategists who make their living in Lone Star State politics say carpet-bombing the upstart Democratic standard-bearer with negative advertising is the surest way to prevent a massive upset in midterm elections this fall.

 

Paxton, the third-term Texas attorney general, was endorsed last week by President Donald Trump and defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday’s Republican primary runoff contest. Many Republican insiders—in Texas and Washington, D.C.—are fretting about that development. They worry the myriad personal and professional improprieties dogging Paxton, plus Trump’s deep unpopularity with independent voters, will enable Talarico, a state senator, to overpower the strong GOP advantage in statewide elections, snapping the Democratic Party’s 30-year losing streak.

 

Paxton’s best defense in a November campaign that public polling shows as a toss-up? Making the Senate race a referendum on Talarico and his well-articulated liberal positions, Republican operatives in Texas told The Dispatch, gives them the most confidence among available options. “I think [it should be] all about Talarico and what a crazy lefty he is. I do,” a veteran Republican consultant in Texas said, requesting anonymity to speak candidly.

 

“From a messaging and campaign standpoint, they need the resources to be able to focus on doing nothing other than, absolutely, making Talarico out of touch, out of step and unacceptable to Texas voters,” a second longtime Republican strategist based in the Lone Star State added. “This is not a game about convincing anybody anything about Paxton. This is a game about making sure the other guy is pulled down.”

 

The Paxton campaign will no doubt seek to tear down Talarico, a first-time statewide candidate. But a senior campaign adviser for the likely Republican nominee told The Dispatch he has an appealing and overlooked story to tell about his achievements as attorney general that speaks to why voters have returned him to office twice. That includes support for Paxton among so-called “Make America Healthy Again” voters via lawsuits he’s filed against corporate food processors; legal action he’s taken against Big Tech firms like Meta, and his work to overhaul Texas’ child support system.

 

Still, the Paxton campaign made abundantly clear this week that attacks on Talarico will be plentiful. “Texas values are Texas values, and Talarico doesn’t have them,” the Paxton adviser, Nick Maddux, said in a telephone interview. And the critiques won’t be limited to policy differences, as the attorney general suggested during a campaign appearance in which he solicited nicknames for his Democratic opponent from the audience–“Low T Talarico,” as in low testosterone, was the one he liked best. (The Talarico campaign declined to comment.)

 

Paxton, 63, must overcome a laundry list of allegations, some exposed by whistleblowers who worked for him, that led to his impeachment and near removal in 2023 by the overwhelmingly Republican Texas Legislature: bribery, improper use of the attorney general’s office, making false statements, and having extramarital affairs. For these and other reasons, Paxton could struggle to raise resources.

 

Many wealthy Republican donors are uninterested in financing a contest they believe would be safe and inexpensive for the GOP, but for Trump’s decision to elevate Paxton over Cornyn. The fourth-term incumbent is a loyal party foot soldier and has always won with relative ease—even in Democratic wave elections. These monied contributors are instead writing checks to defend Senate seats in, among other states: Maine, a blue state, and North Carolina, a purple state, and to flip an open Democratic-held seat in Michigan.

 

Immediately following Trump’s endorsement of Paxton, key Republican groups charged with preserving the party’s 53-47 Senate majority sent similar signals. The thinking of top officials at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, is that since Trump chose Paxton over their objections, he can cover the cost of putting Texas in play out of his own war chest, which according to public filings earlier this year had amassed $483 million. 

 

“Donors will not give to Paxton. They think he’s a legitimate crook,” a senior Republican official said. “This is truly a situation of: You broke it, you bought it. I hope MAGA Inc. understands that.” This official added: “Ultimately, Talarico is going to lose and Ken Paxton will win. But we can’t afford to be outraised [up to] 5-1. … Someone has to provide air cover for Ken.” MAGA Inc. is the designated pro-Trump super PAC and holds a majority of the funds at the president’s disposal.

 

Alex Pfeiffer, MAGA Inc. spokesman, declined to comment on the group’s 2026 plans for Texas. “MAGA Inc. is committed to retaining and building the GOP majorities in the House and Senate. We don’t disclose our battle plans through the press,” he told The Dispatch in a text message. Neither the NRSC nor SLF responded to requests for comment.

 

If the NRSC and SLF hold firm and Trump’s political machine doesn’t pick up the slack, Paxton could be in trouble in a toxic midterm environment in a state where the president is polling as poorly with independents as he is in competitive battlegrounds. Texas is a sprawling state of more than 30 million people served by 20 media markets. Advertising in just the top four metropolitan regions—Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio—can cost campaigns more than $3.5 million per week. Super PACs, ineligible for candidate rates, pay up to $6 million weekly.

 

Alfredo Rodriguez, a GOP consultant in Austin, told The Dispatch it’s imperative that Paxton set aside any resentment toward and forge ties with the skeptical Republican donors and party-aligned groups, who spent roughly $150 million spotlighting his scandals in a bid to derail his primary campaign. “If Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee, he needs to find some modicum of humility and learn to play nice with others,” he said. In fact, that’s exactly what the attorney general intends to do, Maddux explained.

 

“As the temperature cools down from this runoff, he’ll be working hard to get every Republican donor’s support,” he said.

 

Fundraising is not expected to be much of a challenge for Talarico, whom Republicans predict will raise hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaign. The 37-year-old Democrat is likable and dynamic. He wears his Christian faith on his sleeve and has had Democrats believing he can win in Texas this year—even against Cornyn—and slay a red whale they have hunted for a generation. Democrats came close in 2018, Trump’s first midterm election, when then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke lost to Sen. Ted Cruz by just 2.6 percentage points.

 

O’Rourke outpaced Cruz among independent voters by 3 points, according to CNN exit polling, suggesting an upset victory by Talarico is possible given independent voters’ high dissatisfaction with Trump. Some Republican strategists in Texas who otherwise concede the Senate race is competitive with Paxton as their nominee nonetheless insist Talarico can’t win. The Democrat’s voting record in the Legislature is too left-wing for a statewide race, they argue, as are his public comments on politically charged issues. A sampling:

 

Talarico opposed legislation to establish a statewide ban on transgender girls participating in female sports, preferring to leave the question to local communities and youth sports leagues. The state senator opposed legislation to mandate the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. He declared “God is nonbinary,” and, as flagged by The Texas Tribune, said in a social media post in 2021 that “radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.”

 

Accordingly, some Republican strategists in Texas would urge Paxton to run a “conventional campaign” that, like any “conventional Republican candidate.” Paxton, they say, should utilize a mixture of positive and negative messages balancing his accomplishments over nearly a dozen years as attorney general with hits on Talarico’s rhetoric and legislative votes, rather than going strictly on the attack. And if Paxton ends up more vulnerable than they suspect, they predict the culprit will be cost-of-living issues, particularly higher gas and diesel prices—not the attorney general’s history of malfeasance.

 

“Paxton should run as an incumbent: ‘You know me and I’ve done this work for you as attorney general. I’ve done A, B, and C. You’ve voted for me before, now you get to vote for me for Senate,’” Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican consultant in Texas who previously advised Cornyn, told The Dispatch. “I would not spend a whole lot of time talking about Talarico.”