得克萨斯州共和党围绕肯·帕克斯顿的博弈愈发紧张

The GOP’s game of chicken over Ken Paxton in Texas is getting testy

2026-09-02T22:10:12.555Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/02/politics/texas-senate-ken-paxton-trump

This spring’s Texas GOP Senate runoff was one of the costliest and ugliest Republican nominating contests in recent history.

And more than three months after Attorney General Ken Paxton prevailed over Sen. John Cornyn with President Donald Trump’s backing, Republicans are still struggling mightily to move forward, despite how central the race is to the Senate majority.

Pride appears to be winning out over common purpose, as the party engages in a high-stakes internal game of chicken.

And things are getting increasingly testy.

The big standoff, as CNN wrote over the weekend, is over who is going to help Paxton compete financially with Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, who is raising significantly more money than the GOP nominee.

Senate Republicans have left Texas out of their ad spending reservations in an apparent ploy to force Trump’s political operation to bankroll Paxton. And the message to the president seems increasingly unsubtle: You defeated an incumbent with a less-electable, scandal-ridden alternative, now you get to make sure he holds this red state.

But Trump’s operation has yet to comply. That’s left Paxton outgunned for weeks, with potentially major implications. With two months left, polls show Talarico benefitting from a significant image advantage and the state looking more competitive than it has been in decades.

And if Democrats win Texas, they’ve moved themselves significantly close to a Senate majority.

In recent days, we’ve seen something rather remarkable: Congressional Republicans have stepped forward to more overtly tell Trump’s operation that it needs to pony up.

“We need help from the president,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told Fox News on Sunday. “The president says he has $850 million in his campaign accounts. That’s a lot of jack. I’m hoping that the president’s going to spend $100 or $200 million in Texas, but he hasn’t committed to it yet.”

Paxton on the same show responded to two different questions about the race by pointing to his financial deficit.

By Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune echoed Kennedy on Fox, casting the race as a must-win and saying that “we’re going to need the president and his team to be engaged there.”

Then he repeated: “I think all of our allies out there, including the president and his team and their resources, need to be brought to bear on Texas.”

Hint hint.

On Wednesday, a Fox News host even asked Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, when the president’s groups might spend in Texas.

Former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove recently told the Texas Tribune that the race will “depend mightily” on whether Trump spends hundreds of millions on the midterms.

Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas also told CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday that it “would be incumbent upon [Trump] to spend some money to try to help Ken Paxton.”

For his part, the president said last week, “I’m going to help Ken Paxton, and I’m going to spend a lot of time in Texas.” He added Wednesday that Paxton is “the best attorney general in this country for the last 10 years or more,” although he acknowledged “some people don’t like the way he dresses, or some people don’t like the way he interviews or talks.”

Still, it’s not clear what the financial aspect of Trump’s support will look like.

But Nehls also had some other thoughts on the race, which brings us to the other emerging dynamic. And that’s that this standoff has led to plenty of finger-pointing of late.

Nehls accused Cornyn of rooting for the other side, so he could prove a point.

“He goes to bed, he’s thinking, ‘I need Ken Paxton to lose, because then I can look into the cameras and tell the voters of Texas, I told you, he wasn’t electable,’” Nehls said.

Cornyn has assured he supports the ticket, but he’s also continued to undercut Paxton.

The senator told CNN last week that he won’t campaign for Paxton. And in comments to the Tribune, he labeled Paxton “a poor campaigner” who is “lazy and doesn’t raise money.”

“And he basically is not offering a very compelling case for his election,” Cornyn said. “He’s making this harder than it needs to be. But so be it — we are where we are.”

But Cornyn’s not the only one fighting over the situation the party finds itself in. Conservative commentator Erick Erickson on Tuesday posted similar criticisms of Paxton and his character. And he accused those saying Senate Republicans should spend for Paxton of asking the GOP to sacrifice more winnable races in cheaper states.

That drew Fox News host Laura Ingraham to call Erickson “Another NeverTrump Republican rooting for Talarico”.

Erickson responded by saying he opposes Talarico but that it’s important to be honest, and suggesting Ingraham was a sycophant who said one thing privately and another publicly. (He pointed to documents in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox that showed the network’s stars mocking Trump and his team’s rigged election claims.)

There is good reason for the panic setting in among the GOP. Recent polls show the race within the margin of error, but generally with Talarico ahead by a few points.

And it’s clear that voters just don’t like Paxton. Recent polls show him taking very few independents. He trails among them 37%-11% in one poll, 63%-23% in another and 68%-29% in another.

His image was between 6 and 18 points underwater in those polls. And the last poll, from Fox News, also showed nearly 6 in 10 registered voters — including 66% of independents and 36% of Republicans — were “very” concerned that Paxton lacked the personal character to serve as a senator.

The fear among some Republicans is that these perceptions are being cemented, while Talarico remains unscathed.

But there is also a school of thought that even a modest outside investment could change things pretty quickly — especially by focusing on rather “woke” things Talarico has said. CNN’s KFile reported this week that Talarico in 2020 said Texas oil was “not gonna last” and called capitalism “oppressive.”

Some on the right still think turning Texas blue is simply too tall a task at this point. (Democrats haven’t won a statewide race there in more than 30 years.)

One GOP source familiar with the race said that internal polling indicates that voters in Texas do not know much about Talarico. Republican groups have been watching to see how Democrats decide to spend in the race, which will likely determine the amount of money that’s ultimately invested, another GOP source said.

But it’s surely a gamble to wait this long. And Republicans don’t seem overly convinced Trump is going to ride to the rescue.

You could sure be forgiven for thinking he’s largely focused on himself rather than his party right now, judging by his political operation’s first midterm ads.