Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was heard on leaked audio complaining that he has little control over his U.S. Senate campaign, saying key decisions and messaging are being directed from Washington. He also said in the leaked audio that securing votes in Texas “comes down to your messaging, which in a federal race comes from other people a lot of times, which you don’t control.” The recording, obtained by Politico, surfaced amid growing tensions between Paxton and President Donald Trump, who has endorsed the Republican nominee and publicly criticized him on the campaign trail.
The leaked remarks surfaced as Paxton battles to close the gap in a tight contest against Democratic state Representative James Talarico just four weeks before Election Day on November 3. Newsweek has reached out to the Paxton campaign via email on Monday afternoon for comment. The latest recording is not the first leaked audio to complicate Paxton's campaign in recent weeks.
Last week, The New York Times published leaked audio that it said revealed Paxton telling conservative donors and lobbyists that the midterm Republican National Convention in Dallas on September 9-10 had damaged his campaign. In the audio, someone asks, “Do you feel like [Trump's] a little bit of a drag?” to which the man purported to be Paxton replies: “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.” In response to the remarks, Nick Maddux, a senior Paxton adviser, told reporters: “This is more manipulated nonsense from The New York Times to create a story that doesn’t exist.” This is a breaking news article. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Gabe Whisnant and Dave Siminoff.
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