It’s crazy to see their respective campaign strategies.
Talarico soft-shoeing it like mad all over the state.
Paxton jet setting to gin up as much campaign cash as his briefcase can carry, so he can fund a bunch of “Talarico Secretly Had Bottom Surgery in Ohio” Facebook ads into November.
And yet the race is still competitive. Texas has some truly vile people.
For a lot of texans all they know about paxton is that he goes to church, and according to their pastor hes fighting for their religious liberty! Thats it. Thats all thats allowed to penetrate their bubble. Thats why he wont debate talarico, he cant afford for his supporters to get any other information about him.
It’s absolutely insane how this pig is still a contender
And yet the race is still competitive.
I mean, we’ll see what the polls say when the last vote is tallied.
But, as has been pointed out a thousand times in Texas, this isn’t a Red State or a Blue State. It’s a Non-Voting State. Texas regularly posts loosey turnout even in wave years, and that’s by design. Voting is deliberately made frustrating, confusing, dangerous, and meaningless through a variety of mechanisms ranging from felony disenfranchisement/police harassment to broken voting machines/obnoxious mail-in ballot rules to truly henous gerrymandering to outright state takeovers of municipal bodies (Greg Abbott seizing the HISD board and rushing it through privatization being a textbook example).
Idk what’s going to happen in 2026, but I guarantee we’re going to see some extreme fuckery by election day. Whether that rises to the level of Brooks Brothers Riot mostly boils down to how badly the GOP performs. But I only think this state is competitive because of generations of disenfranchisement and voter caging. Absent that, it would look at lot more like North Carolina or Maine.
Anyone else feel like Republicans dangle Paxton out there to see if they can figure out just how much disgusting behavior they can get away with? Figure out where that maximum-grift line is?
I felt that way about Mark Robinson, the candidate for NC governor in 2024.
“Let’s see, porn addicted? Acceptable, okay. Anti-trans? Win in our book! Nazi sympathizer? Yeesh, okay. We can work with that. Wife had an abortion? Well, we’ve all been there, haven’t we? Pro-slavery? Well, okay— wait, he’s black??? Gotta pull the plug.”
We’ll see how much more bullshit GOP voters will swallow for a white guy.
Anyone else feel like Republicans dangle Paxton out there to see if they can figure out just how much disgusting behavior they can get away with?
Paxton’s part of a new wave of white nationalist Texas Republicans that have broken away from the old Bush coalition of the 90s. He represents a wedge between more traditional business-focused oil money ex-Dixiecrat conservatives and the Millennial-Era internet-poisoned fascist radicals that are taking over the party.
We’ll see how much more bullshit GOP voters will swallow for a white guy.
I mean, they’ve lost Karl fucking Rove. But it helps to remember that Rove worked for Pappa Bush, who was a liberal Republican from Connecticut before carpet bagging down to Houston in the 60s.
Modern Democrats are more than happy to let you turn a national park into an oil well, just so long as you remember to hire a few of their constituents and kick back a few bucks along the way. Modern Republicans want to deport 100 million people, because they saw someone unseasonably tan celebrating at a college football game.
But past that, voters will buy whatever bullshit being sold. It’s a two-party system, after all.
Paxton is being dangled as red meat for a new kind of GOP base. It’s not a question of what the voters will get away with. Paxton beat John Cornyn with this strategy. The base clearly prefers him. It’s more a question of how many GOP voters Texas will have left, once they’ve finished purging themselves of anyone who fails the Paper Bag Test.
Huh he’s a boundary test, probably not intentionally, probably he got the nomination because of some dumb internal Trump spite, but he’s a boundary test all the same.
“Every time you think Ken Paxton couldn’t get worse, he finds a way to prove you wrong,” the Democratic Senate Majority PAC wrote on X. “Turns out, Paxton partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.”
Just living up to Republican Christian values.
I mean, unironically.
This is Righteous Gemstones behavior.
To call Ken Paxton ethically challenged is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder
- A Republican senator.
I voted for Paxton
- Every Republican senator
“God sends imperfect messengers, we have to vote for them” -every Christian voter when their candidates and incumbents turn out to be the worst human beings ever
Starting to wonder if Paxton could actually be more hated in the senate than Cruz is. Cant remember who said it but I remember a quote or at least paraphrased quote, saying you could murder Cruz on the Senate floor and have 99 people not witness it.
I think you’re thinking of this fantastic quote by Lindsey Graham:
“If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”
“I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”
- Al Franken
Such a perfect quote. We can only hope the one for Ken Paxton will be as good or better.
I’d rather hope that he never makes it to the Senate
And yet all the republicans voters will cry fake news and vote for him anyway.
Cigarettes might kill you. But one cigarette won’t. Wash rinse repeat 20 times per day.
At least this time he didn’t free up another child rapist. Not a good look but he rarely goes a day without being a complete piece of shit.
As bad as it seems, every time you see a headline you ask “who is this for and who does it work on”.
If you are a ken Paxton voter in Texas last week you are a ken Paxton voter in Texas this week. This headline isn’t for Paxton voters. so who remains?
People who are going to vote Talitico, they’re postivists. People who vote on negative sentiment are already voting for Paxton. So who is left?
This headline is for liberals and coasters.
Undecided voters are who will determine whether Talarico or Paxton becomes senator. While Talarico has had an impressive fundraising operation, it is no match for the hundreds of millions out-of-state Republicans are funneling into the race. The next best thing to matching that level of fundraising is a continuous stream of widely-distributed reports documenting Paxton’s corruption.
You can’t underestimate the people who will choose not to vote.
The race is so close that the Republicans that are fed up with the bullshit Maga - hats are pulling are likely to stay home.
Not a huge percentage, but enough to make a difference and those ads help support that. I just think the ads suck. They are so cut and paste, that they may as well be fake
Weʻre in the time period where money basically doesnʻt matter any more. And no, its not undecideds who will determine who is Senator, its turnout. Preference doesnʻt determine elections, and hasnʻt since the year 2000. Only turnout determines elections. So since you failed to answer the question: *Who is this headline engineered to operate on? What is its purpose?"
While I assume that most readers of this article will already have been convinced Talarico voters, its potential impact is moreso preventing Paxton votes than enticing Talarico votes.
Focusing on turnout alone assumes that if all eligible voters voted that the less conservative candidate would win, something that cannot be assured for Republican strongholds in the South and Midwest. Increasing turnout without convincing voters of who will best serve their interests in the Senate will just mean that many of the undecided voters overwhelmed by a deluge of anti-‘socialist’ propaganda (for candidates who aren’t socialist to begin with) will vote Republican merely because they are lied into believing that even the most conservative Democrat wants to turn the U.S. into Cuba. While the lifelong impact of anti-socialist propaganda is difficult to counteract, demonstrating that candidates like Paxton are corrupt and untrustworthy can at the very least prevent Republican votes, if not encourage votes for Democrats like Talarico.
A mixture of ‘push’ (to dissuade Republican voters) and ‘pull’ (to entice Democratic voters) strategies will be necessary to win the Senate seats in Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Michigan, Alaska, and Maine and secure a Democratic majority in the Senate (with a comfortable margin to account for traitors like Fetterman). Turnout is part of the picture, but not all of it.
