The Republican who won Texas’s Senate primary with Donald Trump’s backing is now hoping the president and Senate Republicans will help him keep the seat from falling into Democratic hands in the midterms. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won a contentious primary against the incumbent senator, John Cornyn, and secured the GOP nomination in May. Since then, he’s been running neck and neck with Democratic state Rep.
James Talarico, who led Paxton by six points in a poll from a Democratic-linked polling firm published on Thursday. And he says he needs Trump’s cash to put him over the finish line. Paxton said in an interview Sunday that his campaign’s own internals showed the race to be a different picture, but conceded that it was a close fight.
We have our own polling that suggests maybe a little different result, but we definitely have a close race,” he told The Sunday Briefing on Fox News. He added that he needed a cash infusion from Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. PAC, which has a war chest of more than $800 million but has been sparing in doling out funds this cycle.
He declined to say whether he has spoken with the president about fundraising during Trump’s campaign stop to Texas last week, though he said he expected money to come in from Senate Republicans to help keep the seat from becoming “California’s third senator.” Senate Republicans aren’t coming out in waves to support Paxton, who ousted one of their own closely tied to leadership and whose scandal-plagued background has already been the target of millions in negative ad spending by their campaign arm as they sought to protect Cornyn from his challenger. Cornyn himself has signaled that there’s no love lost between the two men, telling reporters repeatedly that he won’t campaign or raise money for Paxton. And he basically is not offering a very compelling case for his election.
Cornyn said Paxton is “making this harder than it needs to be.” On Sunday, Republican Sen. John Kennedy stressed that the Senate GOP’s campaign arm — the National Republican Senatorial Committee — didn’t have any money budgeted to protect the Texas Senate seat as Republicans find themselves fighting off a number of credible Democratic challenges. "We in the senate don’t have the money budgeted for Texas.
We need help from the president,” Kennedy told The Sunday Briefing on Fox News. I’m hoping that the president’s gonna spend $100 or $200 million in Texas. But he hasn’t committed to it yet,” Kennedy said.
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