Ken Paxton Is Broke, and Trump Is Flying In With a Tin Cup

Politics rewards two kinds of survivor. The first outlasts the scandal. The second outlasts the shame. Ken Paxton has spent a decade proving he is both, an attorney general who beat a securities-fraud indictment, an impeachment, and his own wife's adultery petition, all while getting re-elected statewide three times. Now he has met the one adversary that does not care about acquittals. Arithmetic.

Start with the number, because the number is the whole story. Paxton is trailing where Republican Sen. John Cornyn's fundraising totals were during an equivalent period by more than $13 million, and trailing Democrat James Talarico by more than $59 million⁹. Read that twice. The Republican nominee in the reddest big state in America is getting outraised by a former middle-school teacher by the price of a mid-size office tower.

How bad is it inside the tent? Paxton's own campaign blasted donor emails with subject lines like "This is bad. Very bad!" and "Outraised by over 300%,"⁸ and the man himself went on Fox News to essentially pass the collection plate. "We're trying to get help from all over the country," Paxton said on an August 9 appearance. "We need help."⁷ A CNN panel captured the spectacle with the appropriate incredulity, one analyst noting it is extraordinary to hear a Republican in Texas begging for money on television at this point in the race⁶.

Enter the cavalry, cape and all. Donald Trump is set to headline an August 27 Republican National Committee fundraiser for Paxton in Houston, an event that could generate millions for the cash-strapped nominee.^1,2 The price of admission tells you exactly who this rescue is for. Host-committee tickets are going for $443,000 per couple, and a photo with the president runs $88,600 per couple.³ That is not grassroots. That is a hostage negotiation with a step-and-repeat banner.

Notice the plumbing, because it matters. The event benefits the RNC rather than Paxton's own campaign committee, a workaround made possible by a June 30 Supreme Court ruling that struck down federal limits on coordinated party spending as a First Amendment violation.⁵ Convenient timing for a man who left roughly $1.75 million in his account with three months to go after torching his war chest to bury Cornyn in the May runoff.⁵ He won the fight and set fire to the arsenal doing it.

And the polls keep whispering the same thing. A Texas Southern University survey had Talarico up 47 to 45, with Paxton viewed favorably by 39 percent and unfavorably by 57 percent⁴, a favorability crater confirmed elsewhere. An August Texas Pulse poll found Paxton underwater at 40 percent favorable and 52 unfavorable, and Cornyn donor Erle Nye, a former utility CEO, told ABC News he will not vote for Paxton, let alone write him a check.¹¹ When your own party's money men would rather flirt with a Democrat than sign your card, the problem is not the ad budget.

Meanwhile the receipts keep piling up in categories that will not fit on a bumper sticker. Through June, Paxton's political operation had pulled in at least $448,000 from data-center executives and committees, an industry Texans are increasingly rebelling against, even as Paxton has sat on a Hood County request for six months and called the issue "complicated."¹⁰ Complicated is what grift sounds like when it lawyers up.

So here is the tally. The scandal survivor. The impeachment survivor. The three-time statewide winner. All of it real, all of it his. The one thing he cannot survive is a checkbook, and the fix is a president flying to Houston to charge four hundred grand a couple for the privilege of bailing him out. Muck you, and pass the tin cup.