Paxton Calls It 'a Tie Ball Game' in Fort Worth Country: 'If We Lose Texas, We Lose America'
In a Breitbart interview and at rallies from Houston to Fort Worth, the Republican's closing message is not that Texas is safe — it is that Texas is tied, and that only turnout saves it.
Ken Paxton is closing the most expensive Senate race in American history by telling his own voters they might lose it. 'I would say we are in a tie ball game,' the Republican attorney general told Breitbart News Saturday, in an interview reported across the weekend. 'It is a tight race, and if we do not execute, if Republicans do not take this serious, if they sit back and say, Oh, Texas is always Republican, this is one of those years you can't do that.' His summary of the stakes was blunter: 'If we lose Texas, we lose America.'
The detail under the metaphor is a turnout map. Paxton called this his 20th campaign and the hardest of them, likened the year to 2018 — when Beto O'Rourke came within a few points of unseating Ted Cruz — and said he has spent 15 days on a bus tour that has included appearances with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The ground he named is specific: rural West and East Texas, and the suburban counties of Collin, Denton, Montgomery, Fort Bend and Williamson. 'We have the numbers,' he said. 'It's just getting them out.' Two of those named counties sit inside this station's coverage area, which makes Tuesday's suburban turnout in the Metroplex a direct test of his closing argument.
The Fort Worth stop on that tour also produced the weekend's unscripted moment. After Paxton urged the crowd to 'tell them the difference between the parties and the difference between me and James Talarico,' an audience member shouted back, 'Paxton, you take bribes!' — an exchange the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported and other outlets carried. The reference is to allegations made in 2020 by senior staff of Paxton's own attorney general's office, which remain contested; Paxton has called them false, and the exchange is reported here as what it was: a heckle at a rally, in a race where the corruption argument has been central to his opponent's campaign. Polls through the weekend show a margin-of-error race. On Tuesday, the tie ball game gets a final score.
