Ken Paxton’s victory in Texas on Tuesday transformed the deep red state into the nation’s newest political battleground, expanding the Senate map, previewing lines of attack from both parties and offering a test of President Trump’s influence in the general election.
Democrats still face an uphill battle in their quest to turn Texas blue, even with the excitement surrounding their nominee, James Talarico, a state legislator and seminary student who is pitching a brand of inclusive politics.
But the ascension of Mr. Paxton, a scandal-plagued state attorney general who trounced Senator John Cornyn after receiving the “Complete and Total Endorsement” of President Trump last week, promised a general election clash as big as, well, Texas.
Expanding the map.
Many Democrats, and some Republicans, said that they thought the nomination of Mr. Paxton could put Texas into play for Democrats, joining the relatively small number of battleground states that could decide control of the Senate.
With the Republicans holding 53 seats in the Senate, Democrats will have to defend all the seats they currently hold and flip four more seats in order to win control in November. Party leaders initially focused on flipping Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio. But with Mr. Trump’s approval rating sagging, some now see Texas as offering another possible path.
And, already, there are signs that the role Mr. Trump played in ousting another incumbent Republican senator — the president backed the challenger who defeated Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana this month in a primary — risks hampering his agenda on Capitol Hill.
Opening with attacks.
Both Mr. Paxton and Mr. Talarico framed the Texas race in existential terms on Tuesday night. Mr. Paxton cast Mr. Talarico as a “weird” liberal, while Mr. Talarico described Mr. Paxton as a tool of billionaire donors stealing public resources from regular working people.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, I will be the Democrats’ number one target in November,” Mr. Paxton told supporters at his victory night party.
Moments before Mr. Paxton took the stage in Plano, Texas, Mr. Talarico’s campaign released a video calling his opponent the “most corrupt politician in America.”
“For 50 years, megadonors and their puppet politicians like Ken Paxton have stolen from us with their bribes, bailouts, and billionaire tax breaks,” Mr. Talarico said. “That ends this year. In this state. In this race.”
Can Democrats finally put Texas in play?
No Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994. But many Democrats said that they believed the nomination of Mr. Paxton, with all his baggage, could offer them their best chance of victory in years.
While Mr. Trump’s late endorsement helped propel Mr. Paxton’s decisive victory in the low-turnout Republican primary, it is not clear how it will play in the general election, given the president’s low approval ratings, the unpopular Iran war and rising gas prices.
“Paxton doesn’t know how to broaden his appeal,” said Matt Mackowiak, a senior adviser to Mr. Cornyn. “He runs generals like they’re primaries. I don’t know that he’s run in an environment like this.”
Former Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who came within three points of knocking out Senator Ted Cruz in 2018, predicted Mr. Paxton’s appeal to Republican primary voters will not translate to the much broader electorate in November.
“He’s too extreme and he’s too tied to Trump, whose popularity continues to decline,” Mr. O’Rourke said.
Bobby Pulido, a moderate Democrat and Latin Grammy Award-winning Tejano singer who is running for Congress in South Texas, said that he thought the race would be competitive. “The Rio Grande Valley has conservative voters that are not necessarily MAGA,” he said. “And Paxton is definitely a MAGA candidate.”
Mr. Talarico was quick to extend an invitation to Mr. Cornyn’s supporters on Tuesday night, thanking the senator for his service to the state and telling his backers in a social media post that they have “a place” in his campaign.
A record-setting race is about to get more expensive.
After waging the most expensive Senate primary campaign in the country’s recent history — with $128 million worth of ads run in the Republican contest — both sides are preparing for a general election contest that strategists estimate could cost tens of millions of dollars more.
Mr. Talarico has proved himself to be a prodigious fund-raiser, raising about $40.2 million from September through the end of March. Mr. Paxton, who is polarizing even among Texas Republicans, has struggled to meet his own financial goals for the primary race. He fell far short of the $20 million he previously suggested he would need to unseat Mr. Cornyn.
But even as he was heavily outspent, Mr. Paxton was able to cruise to victory in the primary.
Some Republicans supporting Mr. Cornyn had warned that nominating Mr. Paxton would require the party to spend millions more to defend a seat they had previously seen as safe — diverting money from other competitive races around the country.
Talarico has work to do with Black voters.
Black voters, who are the most loyal constituency in the Democratic coalition, overwhelmingly backed Mr. Talarico’s opponent, Representative Jasmine Crockett, in the March primary.
Since then, Mr. Talarico has taken steps to reach out to Black voters. He attended the Chicago funeral for the Rev. Jesse Jackson and ate tacos in Austin with former President Barack Obama. He gave the commencement address at Paul Quinn College, a historically Black college in Dallas. And he met with Opal Lee, the 99-year-old voting rights activist who led the movement to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.
But to Ms. Crockett, Mr. Talarico’s public emphasis on appealing to moderate Republicans who are repelled by Mr. Paxton and Mr. Trump has come at the expense of talking to her supporters across the state.
“He is struggling with some of our consistent Black voters,” she said Tuesday. “I am pretty doubtful that infrequent Black voters will be motivated, as I’m not convinced that they are a target. The target seemingly has been disaffected MAGA.”
Talarico has baggage …
Already, Republicans have spent weeks positioning Mr. Talarico — or “Tala-freak-o” as some G.O.P. officials and operatives have tried to brand him — as culturally out-of-touch with Texas voters.
They’ve blanketed podcasts, social media platforms and right-wing media outlets with video clips of him using the story of Jesus Christ’s conception to defend abortion rights, saying “God is nonbinary,” supporting transgender rights and warning of the dangers of “radicalized white men.”
An ad released on Tuesday night by a group affiliated with the conservative Club for Growth offered a new slogan to describe Mr. Talarico: “Woke weirdo for Senate.” In his victory night remarks, Mr. Paxton tried a few more Trumpian-style nicknames, deriding Mr. Talarico as “Tofu Talarico” and “six-gender Jimmy James.”
The effort is an attempt to cast Mr. Talarico, who has made his faith a centerpiece of his campaign, as too liberal in a state where evangelical Christian voters hold considerable sway.
Mr. Talarico’s aides have said that Republicans are taking some of his remarks out of context. But Mr. Talarico has stood by many of his comments, while regretting how he expressed some of them.
“Those are certainly principles and values that I still hold, and that stem directly from my faith,” he said in an interview shortly after winning the nomination. “But I think I probably would have said them differently now.”
… but so does Paxton.
Most of the opposition research file on Mr. Paxton is well documented. He was indicted on felony securities fraud charges, he was impeached, he was once accused of stealing a $1,000 pen, his wife is in the midst of divorcing him “on biblical grounds.”
That’s not even getting into the things Mr. Paxton has done in service of Mr. Trump.
He organized a legal effort to try to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election Mr. Trump lost, and Mr. Paxton spoke at the Jan. 6, 2021, rally near the White House just before Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol.
Mr. Paxton and his wife, Angela Paxton, a state senator who represents his old seat north of Dallas, have entered into mediation to dissolve their marriage.
The Paxtons have tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the details of the case under wraps. After convincing the court to seal the case, they agreed to open it back up after several media organizations took issue with the secrecy.
A trial is scheduled for late June if the Paxtons cannot come to an agreement. A public airing of the breakdown of the marriage, in the midst of a general election, would be quite undesirable for Mr. Paxton as he faces Mr. Talarico, who has built his campaign on his squeaky-clean image as a Presbyterian seminarian.
Hours before Mr. Paxton swept the primary race, Ms. Paxton circulated her endorsements. Her estranged husband went notably unmentioned.
Lauren McGaughy and Theodore Schleifer reporting.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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