Can Ken Paxton outrun a trail of scandal to win US Senate seat in ruby-red Texas?

Depending how you look at the situation, it is either predictable that Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general and Republican candidate for US Senate, is struggling in the polls – or impressive that he is not doing worse. Beloved by hardcore Maga voters and regarded with skepticism by the broader voting public, Paxton is also puzzlingly bland. Recently, Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters that the 63-year-old Paxton “may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen”. The president was endorsing him.

Yet it is Paxton’s ability to attract – and somehow scrape through – scandal that makes him a less charismatic, perhaps, but still kindred spirit of “Teflon Don”: nothing sticks. He has survived state prosecution (on securities-related charges that he settled without admitting guilt), impeachment by the Republican-led Texas legislature (on abuse-of-office charges of which he was later acquitted), and so many controversies that it can be difficult to pin down the most outrageous.

There was the time in 2011 that God appeared to a tech entrepreneur in a red-roofed Dairy Queen in McKinney, Texas, and told him to give 100,000 shares of company stock to Paxton, then a state legislator, in what the entrepreneur called a gift and critics called an illegal commission. (Paxton and the entrepreneur denied that allegation.) There was the time in 2013 that Paxton allegedly stole a fellow lawyer’s $1,000 Montblanc pen. (Paxton said that it was a mix-up while going through a security screening at a courthouse.)

Then there was the time in 2020 that eight of Paxton’s staffers asked the FBI to investigate whether their boss had, as attorney general, abused his office to help a real estate investor and political donor – in return for a free kitchen renovation and a job for a woman with whom Paxton was having an affair. (Paxton and the real estate investor denied those allegations; the investor was never charged with a crime and Paxton’s impeachment over the matter ended in acquittal.)

And there was the time in 2022 that Paxton’s wife, state senator Angela Paxton, allegedly helped him escape, in a Chevrolet truck, from someone trying to serve him with a subpoena for a federal court case. (Paxton said that the man was harassing him.) That screwball romcom ended sadly, however, when Angela Paxton filed for divorce last year on “biblical grounds”. Ken Paxton’s scandal sheet includes two alleged extramarital affairs.

All of it may be catching up to Paxton – an ultraconservative Republican, in a diverse but still very right-leaning state, who has somehow found himself in a muddy political trench fight with a babyfaced Democratic state legislator, James Talarico, whom Republicans have likened to a “Coexist” bumper sticker in human form. Talarico, 37, is a former teacher and a seminarian affiliated with an arch-progressive mainline Christian church in Austin. (Trump has dubbed him “Talafreako”.)

Texas has not elected a single Democrat to statewide office since 1994 – the worst state losing streak, for either party, in the United States. But Paxton and Talarico are in a dead heat. Some polls even show Talarico leading.

“This is the closest race that we’ve seen in the state in three decades,” James Henson, a political scientist and pollster who directs the Texas Politics Project, said. Rightwing groups in “red-alert mode”, he added, are pouring millions of dollars into the state to prop up Paxton and other Republicans fighting for election next month.

Polls have, famously, been wrong before. But the fact that a Republican candidate in a Republican stronghold is struggling would be notable by itself even if this were not also one of the most high-profile of all the midterm elections. The race is critical to either party securing a Senate majority. It is already one of the most expensive of its kind in US history.

The situation has put Paxton – a hard-right Maga sycophant endorsed by Trump over the misgivings of some other Republicans – under a harsh and unflattering light. Paxton has repeatedly dodged opportunities to debate Talarico, enabling Talarico’s campaign to paint him as cowardly.

Less than a month before the election, Paxton’s woes keep growing. This week the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2024, he was filmed at a New Year’s Eve party in Dubai in the company of an extramarital girlfriend and two men who were under indictment for federal healthcare fraud and considered fugitives from justice. One of them had donated $190,000 to Paxton.

His campaign has shrugged off the new reporting. “Like President Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years,” a spokesman told the Wall Street Journal. “[A]nd every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas.”

Yet in a series of audio clips leaked to the news media by unnamed sources over the past several weeks, even Paxton could be heard admitting, in closed-room conversations with conservative allies, that he and other Republicans in Texas were struggling.

In one clip, he seemed to say that Trump’s recent midterm convention in Texas – where voters, as elsewhere, are furious about high fuel costs worsened by the Iran war – had hurt more than helped. (Trump’s approval numbers, according to recent polling, are at a dire low.) In another, he said, “I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign … it’s all coming – you know – from DC.”

Were the tapes leaked by Republicans unhappy at the resources the party is expending to save the flailing Paxton? Or by loyalists of John Cornyn, the longtime Republican senator whom Paxton knifed in a party primary, earlier this year, and displaced as the Republican nominee?

Whatever the case, the tapes are embarrassing. “I thought that was a bad look for Ken Paxton,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, said. “It makes it look like he’s not grateful for all of the help that’s come to him. He needed all the attention that Trump can give. It may be that it comes with these caveats, and it’s not an unqualified good. But without Donald Trump, there would be no Ken Paxton.”

‘Scandal resilience’

As attorney general of Texas, Paxton sued the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia for, he claimed, voting irregularities that had stolen the 2020 presidential election from Trump. The lawsuit lacked evidence and critics on both sides of the aisle accused the lawsuit of being a political stunt and legal farce; some even speculated that Paxton was vying to win Trump’s favor in case his legal problems necessitated a presidential pardon. (Paxton’s campaign did not reply to an opportunity to provide comment for this story.)

Earlier this year Trump repaid Paxton’s loyalty when he endorsed him for Senate over Cornyn – the more bipartisan, respected and generally less scandal-prone politician who had represented Texas in the Senate, as a conservative Republican, since 2002.

Journalists, ex-employees, and political opponents have also questioned Paxton’s expensive and jet-setting tenure as attorney general, as well as the perks he has enjoyed and the energy he has often seemed to devote to building a national profile in the Maga movement, according to critics, instead of solving problems in Texas.

Of course, many Texans are well aware of Paxton’s alleged trespasses, some of which go back years, and have repeatedly elected him to office anyway. (The pen-theft allegation is less well-known, though the Talarico campaign – which did not respond to a query from the Guardian – recently began selling ballpoint pens marked “Not Ken Paxton’s Pen”.)

Jed Silverman, an attorney who prosecuted the state securities case against Paxton, noted that, in the eyes of the law, Paxton has a clean bill of health. “My opinion of him, my subjective belief one way or another, really doesn’t matter,” he said. “He made an agreement with the state, did what he was supposed to do, and got his cases resolved.”

For his part, Rottinghaus, whose recent research has studied politicians’ ability to navigate scandal, views Paxton’s career as “a textbook example of ‘scandal resilience’”. Political polarization, he noted, “has raised the standards for what a scandal breaking point is”. Voters in the Republican or Democratic bases are more likely to weigh their candidate’s alleged ethical lapses against a sense that their party “needs to win”.

Bill Miller, a Texas political consultant and lobbyist, made a similar point. “Baggage is something that the American public seemingly has learned to accept,” he said. Trump has “been elected twice, and everyone knows who he is and all that comes with that. I mean, people don’t expect squeaky clean. They hope they get squeaky clean, but they elect people who aren’t.”

Miller noted that he has known Paxton for years and is friendly with him; despite Paxton’s blotted public image and reputation as bumbling and less than charismatic, he described him as a savvy operator with a Bill Clinton-style facility for remembering people’s names and a history of being underestimated by political opponents.

Silverman, similarly, called Paxton a “political animal”.

The national political climate is overwhelmingly tough right now for Republican candidates, and strategists and pollsters are predicting that the midterm elections could be a bruising referendum on Trump’s second presidency. From that vantage, Paxton is facing uniquely fierce headwinds, or is uniquely ill-chosen for the moment, or both. His unorthodox opponent has benefited.

“The Democrats were looking for somebody who wasn’t a traditional politician,” Rottinghaus said. “Talarico fit that mold. He kind of looks like a youth minister, he talks like a choirboy and he’s committed to his values, which Democrats like and independents feel like they can trust. He’s a good candidate in that way. There’s baggage, though, that people are ignoring.”

Talarico has never held a statewide elected office. And, though he has tilted toward the center, he has a record of statements and policy stances that would be eyebrow-raisingly “woke” in Brooklyn, let alone in suburban Texas. Republicans are growing frustrated, Rottinghaus added, because they believe that he has been able to define himself to the public in a “way that isn’t the real James Talarico”.

Based on remarks Talarico made in the past about the environmental costs of eating meat, conservatives have even accused him of being a closeted vegetarian, a charge that he denies. In March, his campaign posted a photograph, hostage-style, of Talarico eating barbecue.

This month Talarico disappeared from the campaign trail for more than a week, prompting Democratic concerns as well as wild Republican rumors that he was secretly seeking mental health treatment in Ohio; his campaign has said that he had a bad flu, and had never been to Ohio. The campaign went so far as to provide the New York Times with time-stamped security camera footage from the days-long stretch that he was convalescing at home.

‘The hide of a rhinoceros’

Flipping a Texas Senate seat or governorship is a holy grail of the Democratic party: a seismic political victory that many hope could set the party on a path to winning the second-largest state in the union in a presidential election. The last time that happened was 1976.

For Republicans, losing to Talarico would be psychologically shattering – though there are those who might argue, perhaps with some credence, that Paxton was a uniquely flawed candidate.

Yet the memory of Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 longshot bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz still haunts Democrats. O’Rourke attracted enormous Democratic enthusiasm and money but ultimately lost by 2.6 percentage points. Democratic donors felt burned. After a short-lived presidential bid, O’Rourke ran again in 2022 – for Texas governor, against incumbent Greg Abbott – and lost by an even larger margin.

Despite Paxton’s tainted image and tight poll numbers, there are factors in his favor.

One is money. Nationally and in Texas – and even as Democrats are reporting impressive fundraising in key races – Republicans have a considerable advantage in campaign spending. To protect the seat of Governor Abbott, a Republican fighting for re-election against the Democratic state representative Gina Hinojosa, a conservative political action committee has been spending, by one estimate, nearly $1m a day.

“Paxton or any other Republican on the ballot is a beneficiary” of Abbott’s spending, Miller said, “because what that money does is find Republicans under every bush and rock and make sure that they’re motivated and they vote.”

And Elon Musk is personally bankrolling a Super Pac to back Paxton’s Senate bid.

Republican get-out-the-vote efforts, meanwhile, seem aimed less at reaching undecided voters, according to Henson, the political scientist and pollster, and more at “shoring up support and enthusiasm among a probably relatively small, but still crucial, band of Republican voters who might be considering either sitting this election out entirely or at least not voting for Paxton”.

Even Angela Paxton has now appeared in a political ad urging Republican voters to support the ticket. “Either we hold every Republican seat, or we hand the future of Texas to the other team,” she argued. She did not mention her ex-husband, but the message was clear.

The other advantage Paxton holds is the political composition of Texas. Although the state’s major cities tilt Democratic and the state has become more diverse, urban and “purple” in recent years, a slightly higher percentage of its population is rural compared with other large states such as Florida and California. “Those small communities”, Miller said, were “not purple, they’re not orange, they’re blood-fucking-red”.

So far, according to polling, Democrats in Texas are seeing higher enthusiasm from their base than Republicans are seeing from theirs, Henson said, though Republican enthusiasm has begun to pick up. In a few weeks, Texas will find out the results. Even if Paxton loses, he will no doubt land on his feet somewhere in Maga political world.

“They say you need the sensitivity of a violinist and the hide of a rhinoceros to be good in this business,” Miller said. “Well, I don’t know if he has the sensitivity of a violinist, but he’s damn sure got the hide of a rhinoceros.”