Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate, missed Vice President JD Vance’s South Texas swing at the Harlingen Convention Center on Wednesday afternoon. Vance visited Texas to boost Republican candidate Eric Flores in his race against Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) over the state’s 34th Congressional District.
Page A3From§Eachthe early bird edition — 30 September 2026
Paxton skips the rally meant to save the campaign he privately says the party already sank.
As it ran on the front
On September 5, the Washington Examiner reported that Republicans in Texas and Washington were fed up with their own Senate nominee, Attorney General Ken Paxton, a scandal-tainted, once-impeached candidate they got stuck running anyway. Three weeks later, on September 27, that frustration showed up in numbers: a Texas Public Opinion Research poll had Democrat James Talarico at 49 percent, Paxton at 44, a five-point lead reported the same day by both the Washington Examiner and The Hill.
Leaked audio published by the New York Times and picked up Wednesday by ABC News and CBS News caught Paxton telling donors at a fundraiser that President Trump's own midterm convention had hurt his campaign. Not Talarico. Not a crossover ad. The party's showcase event, according to its own nominee, took points off its own candidate.…
…(cont) Governor Greg Abbott skipped it. So did Paxton. The man running five points behind, in the week his own recorded voice explained why, did not show up to stand next to the one Republican sent to help him.
Line these up and the order does the work: frustration reported in September, a five-point gap by the 27th, a leaked complaint about the party's own convention by the 30th, and then the empty chair at the rally built to close the gap. Nobody wrote Paxton's script. He wrote it himself, on tape, to donors, and the tape traveled faster than any ad Talarico's campaign has had to cut.
The polling number is not the interesting part. Five points is recoverable. What is not recoverable is a nominee whose own private assessment of his campaign leaked before his opponent had to say a word about it. Talarico did not need to explain why Paxton is losing. Paxton explained it, and then skipped the one event scheduled to argue otherwise.
This is the paranoid read, and this week it doesn't require paranoia — the receipts carry it themselves. The candidate's own doubt is now doing the opposition's job for free, and the rally chair he left empty is the only ad anyone needed to run.
“Paxton didn't need an opponent's ad to make his campaign look broken — he recorded himself saying it, then stayed home from the one event built to patch it. That's not a leak problem, that's a candidate problem, and the five points already on the board say Texas voters noticed before the tape ever ran.”
“Skipping one rally means nothing, candidates have scheduling conflicts all the time — did I say "nothing"? Fine, it means something, but plenty of nominees privately gripe about their own party's convention, that's just normal party friction — that's not a talking point, forget I said that.”
The receipts
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was caught commenting on the GOP midterm convention in leaked audio published by The New York Times. CBS News' Fin Gomez has the latest.
GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton told donors at a fundraiser that President Trump’s midterm convention had hurt him politically ahead of the midterm elections.
· Talarico holds 5-point lead over Paxton in Texas Senate race, poll shows from the morgue, 27 Sep 2026
· Talarico leads Paxton by 5 points in Texas Senate race poll from the morgue, 27 Sep 2026
· The GOP’s Texas-sized Ken Paxton dilemma from the morgue, 5 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.