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

Texas Senate Race Becomes a Pressure Test for GOP Unity and Trump’s Wallet

Sandego.net – With roughly sixty days remaining before voters head to the polls, the contest between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico has evolved from a straightforward down-ballot race into a full-blown intra-party crisis. What began as a bruising spring runoff — one of the most expensive and acrimonious Republican nominating fights in recent memory — has calcified into a standoff over who pays for the general election, and whether the party can survive its own internal fractures long enough to keep a red state in the Senate.

The stakes are not abstract. Texas is the single largest electoral prize in the 2026 midterms. If Democrats flip the state, they leapfrog into a position where a Senate majority becomes plausible within a single legislative session. Polling in recent weeks shows Talarico enjoying a meaningful image edge, and the race tracking far tighter than Texas has been in decades. That competitive window is precisely what makes the funding vacuum so dangerous: Paxton has been outgunned for weeks, and every additional day without major outside spending widens the gap.

The Money Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Senate Republicans have conspicuously left Texas out of their coordinated ad-spending reservations. The apparent strategy is to force President Donald Trump’s political operation to shoulder the cost of keeping Paxton competitive. The implicit message to the White House has grown blunt: you chose this candidate over an incumbent senator, now you are responsible for making sure he holds the seat.

Trump’s operation has not yet committed dollars to the race. Congressional Republicans, however, have grown increasingly vocal in pressing the point.

“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 himself, appearing on the same Fox broadcast, answered two separate questions about the race by drawing attention to his financial shortfall. By Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune had joined the chorus on Fox, framing the contest as a must-win and insisting that “we’re going to need the president and his team to be engaged there.” He repeated the point moments later: “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.”

The pressure has bled into the president’s own orbit. A Fox News host asked Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on Wednesday when his affiliated groups might begin spending in Texas. Former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove told the Texas Tribune that the outcome will “depend mightily” on whether Trump deploys hundreds of millions toward the midterms. Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas, speaking to CNN’s Manu Raju on Tuesday, said it “would be incumbent upon [Trump] to spend some money to try to help Ken Paxton.”

Trump’s Verbal Support, Financial Silence

The president has offered words. Last week he declared, “I’m going to help Ken Paxton, and I’m going to spend a lot of time in Texas.” On Wednesday he added that Paxton is “the best attorney general in this country for the last 10 years or more,” while conceding that “some people don’t like the way he dresses, or some people don’t like the way he interviews or talks.”

What remains unclear is the shape of the financial commitment, if any. Verbal endorsement without a checkbook, in a race where the opponent is out-raising the GOP nominee by wide margins, may prove insufficient.

Cornyn’s Quiet Sabotage and the Finger-Pointing That Followed

The funding dispute has sharpened an older wound. Cornyn, the incumbent whom Paxton unseated in the spring runoff with Trump’s explicit backing, has continued to undercut his successor. Last week he told CNN he would not campaign for Paxton. In remarks to the Texas Tribune, he called the attorney general “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.”

Nehls, for his part, accused Cornyn of secretly hoping Paxton loses so the former senator could look into cameras and tell Texans, “I told you, he wasn’t electable.”

“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.

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson amplified the criticism on Tuesday, posting attacks on Paxton’s character and accusing fellow Republicans who want party spending directed at Texas of asking the GOP to sacrifice cheaper, more winnable races in other states. The exchange drew a response from Fox News host Laura Ingraham, underscoring how quickly a state-level funding question has metastasized into a national argument about where the party should invest its limited resources.

What Comes Next

The runoff’s aftermath was supposed to be a brief interlude before a unified campaign. Instead, it has produced a three-month limbo in which pride, grievance, and arithmetic collide. Paxton’s team needs money now, not in the final two weeks. Talarico’s operation is already out-raising the GOP nominee. The polls show a state that, for the first time in a generation, could go either way.

Whether Trump’s operation ultimately wires funds into Texas — or whether congressional Republicans find another mechanism to close the gap — will determine not just one seat but the arithmetic of the entire Senate. The game of chicken, in other words, is no longer a metaphor. It is the race itself.