Paxton Scraps His Alamo Finale and Adds an Allen Stop Instead on the Last Day of the Texas Senate Race
The 'Come and Take It' bus tour was supposed to end where the slogan was born. Instead, the final day runs from Conroe in the morning to Allen on Monday evening — and the Alamo Trust says it never knew a rally was planned on its grounds at all.
Ken Paxton's closing image was supposed to be the Alamo. His get-out-the-vote bus tour — named 'Come and Take It' for the Texas Revolution slogan — was announced as ending on the eve of Election Day at the landmark in San Antonio. On Saturday, two days before that finale, the plan quietly changed: the Alamo event disappeared from the campaign's listings, and Monday stops in Conroe and Allen appeared instead, the San Antonio Current reported. The campaign's Eventbrite page listed only Conroe, at 11 a.m., and Allen, in the evening, for Monday; its website listed no Monday events; and the campaign did not immediately respond to questions about the change.
There is a practical problem with the original plan, and it is on the record: the Alamo Trust, which oversees the landmark, told Texas Public Radio on Friday that it was unaware of any plans for Paxton to host an event on the grounds, and the Alamo's rules generally prohibit political events there. The Alamo stop is not the tour's only casualty — events in El Paso, Tyler, Texarkana and Mission were also canceled or rescheduled along the way, a pattern Democrats moved quickly to name. 'No one's going to Ken Paxton's rallies, so he's canceling them and hoping Elon Musk will buy this seat for him,' James Talarico said in a statement on Friday — a rival's closing argument, printed here as exactly that.
For Dallas–Fort Worth, the change has a local address. Allen, in Collin County, is one of the suburban turnout counties Paxton himself named as decisive when he called this race 'a tie ball game' over the weekend, and it is now where his campaign spends its final evening — not at a shrine three hundred miles south, but in a restaurant in the Metroplex's northern suburbs, asking the voters he needs to actually show up on Tuesday. In a race the final polls call close in every direction, that is a tell about where both campaigns believe the last movable votes live.
