Trump's best attorney general in Texas history trails by six points in the seat he handpicked him for.

…(cont) I want to be careful here, because I keep coming back to that word and I know it. I'm not accusing anyone of anything. Were the diagnosis and the pitch about the same person, filed thirteen days apart? I'll let you sit with that the way I sit with a fan belt.

I've got one half off in the garage right now, and I logged the job when I started it — forty-five minutes, a receipt from the parts store, the time written on the back in pencil. That's how I know when a job is done and how long it took. Eighteen hours a day is a number too, and it came from the man himself, on a Sunday show, with nothing behind it but the saying of it. What's that number checked against?

Here is where the story goes next, and I only got here by following the dates. The reversal came from inside the party that made the pitch. Senator Thom Tillis, on CNN, called the whole Paxton endorsement — not the man, the endorsement — a colossal mistake. That's Tillis's word, not mine, from September 27th, and Tillis is a Republican senator saying it about his own president's choice. On that same Sunday, Joe Manchin went further, on NewsNation, and said if character means anything, you can't vote for Ken Paxton. Manchin isn't in the party that made the pitch. Did he need to be, to notice that best in history and colossal mistake don't sit still next to each other about a race for the same seat?

Then the numbers, which I always save for last, because numbers don't apologize for themselves. Marist had it on September 24th: Talarico 50, Paxton 44. Four percent undecided, two percent somewhere else. That's six points, in a state where the President made this one his own, stood on a stage, and said the sentence about history.

I keep a card in my glovebox for the fan belt job, so when somebody asks how long it took, I don't have to guess. Excuse me — before you go — eighteen hours a day, and six points down in the very seat he got the best-in-history send-off for. Which one of those numbers is the one that isn't lazy?