An expensive Republican U.S. Senate runoff in Texas officially has a winner. State Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn after a late-stage endorsement from President Donald Trump.
The Runoff
As reported on Wednesday’s AM Update, Republican voters headed to the polls Tueday in the high-stakes runoff election to nominate their candidate for U.S. Senate after neither candidate reached the 50 percent threshold in the March primary.
Cornyn narrowly won the first round with 41.9 percent of the vote compared to Paxton’s 40.7 percent. But President Trump put his thumb on the scale this time around, endorsing Paxton last week despite some concerns that his baggage of ethics scandals could make it harder to beat Democrat State Representative James Talarico in what is expected to be an intensely competitive general election in November.
At the end of the night, voters overwhelmingly opted to go with the president’s choice. Paxton secured the GOP nomination by winning more than 63 percent of the vote with more than 95 percent counted.
According to AdImpact Politics, the race set the record for most expensive U.S. Senate primary with $165 million in ad spending. A whopping $92.5 million spent on ads supporting Sen. Cornyn versus $3.8 million spent on attack ads against him. A comparatively small $11.2 million was spent on ads supporting Paxton versus $1.1 million spent on ads attacking him.
The General Election
And the spending is only expected to rise heading into the general election. Polls currently show a tight race between Talarico and Paxton. The Dem is leading the Republican by 1.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average.
Talarico, a former middle school teacher who is currently a student at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary with one year of class work remaining, has served as a member of the Texas House of Representatives since 2018. He took an academic leave to run for Senate in a state where no Democrat has won statewide office in over 30 years.
While the pre-runoff polling was tight, Talarico is going to have to answer for his past far-left statements about there being six genders, God being non-binary, and Jesus helping him reckon with his whiteness, among others.
Perhaps taking a cue from President Trump, Paxton tried out a few nicknames for Talarico in his victory speech Tuesday night. “My opponent is the most extreme radical the Democrats have ever nominated. He’s even running a vegan campaign, whatever that is,” he said. “He goes by a few names that you may all have heard of. Some people know him as Tofu Talarico. Some people call him Six Gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako, and others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico. No matter what you call him, let me tell you this: James Talarico is a threat to everything we hold dear in this state and in this country.”
Talarico, meanwhile, will try to make the race about Paxton’s character. The state AG has been indicted on securities fraud and even impeached, though he has never been convicted or removed from office.
In a video on X after the runoff was called, Talarico debuted some of his messaging. “Something just happened in Texas. The most corrupt politician in America just became the Republican nominee for the United States Senate,” he claimed. “Three years ago, Ken Paxton was impeached by his own party for using his public office to enrich himself and his donors at the expense of the people. That kind of corruption is the rot at the core of this broken system.”
“Ken Paxton has gotten away with it. They’ve all gotten away with it, but that ends this year,” he continued. “If we the people can come together to defeat the most corrupt politician in America, we can defeat this entire corrupt system. We can start unrigging this economy. We can start raising our pay, cutting our taxes, lowering our costs. We can finally get ahead. It’s time to come together. The people versus Ken Paxton.”
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