Ken Paxton just stepped in 💩 · Storyflo

There’s one person in America that Ken Paxton absolutely cannot piss off. And he just did it.

Consider this reporting from the New York Times of an audio recording of Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, talking about President Donald Trump and the midterm GOP convention held in Dallas earlier this month:

Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, told a group of conservative donors and lobbyists last week that President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas had hurt Mr. Paxton politically, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times.

The recording, which is muffled at times, captures Mr. Paxton being asked, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” It is not clear from the audio whom the questioner is referring to.

Mr. Paxton responds: “So to be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”

Yeah, not good!

Paxton’s willingness to throw Trump (and the convention that the president masterminded and headlined) under the bus is particularly ironic given that Paxton owes his Senate nomination to the president.

And guess who knows that? DONALD JOHN TRUMP.

Let’s reverse a bit.

Paxton as the Republican Senate nominee is entirely a creation of Trump. Paxton ran against Sen. John Cornyn *expressly * as a MAGA candidate — and painted Cornyn as insufficiently loyal to the president.

After Cornyn finished first — narrowly — in the March primary, there was rampant speculation that Trump would endorse the incumbent in the early days of the two-month-long runoff.

It didn’t happen. Instead, a week before the runoff — and against the wishes of every Senate Republican leader —Trump backed Paxton. And that effectively ended the race. Paxton CRUSHED Cornyn.

The problem? Paxton is a bad general election candidate. He has no obvious appeal outside of the hardcore MAGA base and has shown little willingness to moderate in any way, shape or form.

And did I mention he is a terrible fundraiser? Paxton has been so dramatically outraised (and outspent) by Democratic nominee James Talarico that national GOP groups have had to ride to the rescue — to the tune of $150 million-plus in television advertising.

In short: Ken Paxton isn’t the nominee without Trump. And he isn’t anywhere close to competitive financially without massive spending by Senate Republicans super PAC — with an assist from Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC.

Trump is well aware of that fact. And he will not like Paxton being — to his mind — ungrateful.

(Sidebar: The Paxton people clearly knows their audience. In a statement to the Times, a spokesman said it was “more manipulated nonsense from The New York Times.” While there’s zero evidence the audio has been “manipulated” in any way, alleging that the audio is somehow fake gives them an argument they can make to the president that he might believe.)

There is, of course, another question here: Is Paxton right? Did the midterm convention in Texas hurt his poll numbers and chances of winning?

After all, Trump wasn’t exactly on message during the convention about Paxton!

Here’s one of his riffs on Paxton:

Some people don't like the way I look either. You may not like the way he looks…He may not dress right. He may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best looking guy I've ever seen.

A real ringing endorsement! (Trump did go on to say Paxton was the best attorney general in the country so, I guess, ok?)

Did that actually impact Paxton’s numbers?

Well, here’s where he stood in the polling average against Talarico on September 8 — the day before the two-day convention in Dallas (via ):

And here’s where the race is today:

So, on September 8, Paxton trailed Talarico by 2.5 percentage points. Today, Paxton is behind Talarico by 2.9 percentage points.

Which is basically just noise, a distinction with much of a difference. There is ZERO statistical significance between where Paxton was before the Republican midterm convention and where is is today. NONE.

What’s Paxton talking about then? I would suspect he is — in the finest Trump tradition! — searching for a scapegoat. It’s WAY easier to say “that convention and what Trump said really screwed us” than to admit you are running a terrible campaign.

But, the objective reality is this**: Paxton is currently losing this race because he is a bad candidate running a bad campaign. Which every Republican elected official not named “Donald Trump” knew he would**.

And now Paxton has very likely pissed off the guy he can’t afford — literally — to piss off.

Ken Paxton just stepped in 💩 · Storyflo