Trump’s MAGA super PAC pours $10M into Ken Paxton’s Texas Senate race after polls show him trailing Dem Talarico

Ten million dollars is a lot of money to spend defending a seat that Republicans shouldn't be sweating in the first place. Texas hasn't sent a Democrat to the Senate since the 1980s, and yet here's MAGA Inc. writing a check that size because the polling has Paxton and James Talarico running neck and neck. That's not a rounding error. That's a warning light on the dashboard.

Paxton has been a walking liability for a while now, and the party knows it. He survived impeachment, he's tangled up in a messy divorce and securities fraud allegations that never fully went away, and Republican voters in Texas have watched all of it play out for years. None of that disqualifies him automatically, but it does explain why a guy running in ruby-red Texas needs a nine-figure air cover operation to stay competitive against a state legislator most of the country had never heard of a year ago.

Talarico, for his part, is running the kind of campaign that should worry Republicans more than they're letting on, leaning into a folksy, faith-inflected populism that doesn't sound like the usual Democratic script. That's precisely why national money is flooding in now. When the guy you're trying to disqualify is hard to caricature, you spend more, not less.

None of this means Paxton loses. Texas is still Texas, and $10 million buys a lot of television time between now and Election Day. But the fact that this race required intervention at all says something about candidate quality that the ad buy can't fully paper over. Voters there deserve a nominee who wins on his own merits, not one who needs a national super PAC to bail him out of a race his own baggage created.