Over the weekend, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn unloaded on the man who beat him in a GOP runoff over the summer: Ken Paxton.
“Paxton’s a poor campaigner,” Cornyn told the Texas Tribune. “He’s lazy and doesn’t raise money. And he basically is not offering a very compelling case for his election. He’s making this harder than it needs to be. But so be it — we are where we are.”
Oh, is that it?
😂😂😂
You might be tempted to dismiss Cornyn’s comments as simply sour grapes — after all Paxton ended the incumbent’s Senate career over the summer by a whopping 28 points.
And I am sure Cornyn is bitter. But he’s also right!
Here’s are the fundraising numbers (as of June 30) for Paxton and Democratic nominee James Talarico:
Paxton: $9.2 million raised, $7.5 million spent, $1.75 million on hand
Talarico: $68 million raised, $47 million spent, $21.5 million on hand
In case you don’t want to do the math, Talarico has raised seven times more than Paxton and has 12 times as much money left to spend.
And it’s not just Cornyn making that point!
Louisiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy, in an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, bluntly admitted that “money is a problem” in the Texas race, adding: “We in the Senate don't have the money budgeted for Texas. We need help from the President. The President says he has $850M in his campaign accounts. That's a lot of jack.”
Which is interesting!
Because Texas is going to be a — at minimum — $100 million investment by Republicans. Paxton has never been a good fundraiser. He isn’t going to turn into one all of a sudden.
Senate Republicans — as evidenced by Kennedy — don’t want to be on the hook for that price tag because they were very clear that Cornyn rather than Paxton was the better general election nominee. And Trump endorsed Paxton anyway.
Under that line of thinking, Trump — and the $400 million that Maga Inc., his allied super PAC, has sitting in the bank — should be the one to try to spend Paxton out of political disaster.
Except that Trump isn’t super keen on that!
As The Atlantic reported a few days ago:
President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm election.
Republican strategists are concerned about Trump’s low approval ratings and voter anxiety about the economy. One person familiar with the Oval Office strategy meeting put it this way: “When the issues that you typically campaign on don’t move voters—or voters are pissed off at you about those issues—the question becomes: What do you campaign on?” Some GOP strategists favor focusing entirely on specific races in an effort to convince voters of the merits of individual candidates and local issues.
But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.
The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”
You see the problem, right?
While a Paxton super PAC is reportedly going on air to the tune of $15 million this week, the larger question remains: Who is going to pay the $100+ million that it is going to take to (potentially) drag Paxton to victory?
It’s a question on which the Senate majority might tilt.
