After months of warning that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton would be disastrous as the Republican nominee for the state’s U.S. Senate race, Republican groups are scrubbing online comments and pretending they always liked him.
The National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), which supported incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the primary, spent the past year talking smack about Paxton, including statements that his “lies and incompetence keep piling up” and that he was “standing in conservatives’ way.”
But users of social media platform X started noticing a curious thing once results began rolling in for Tuesday night’s runoff between Paxton and Cornyn. Namely, the NRSC’s numerous anti-Paxton press releases suddenly led to ‘404 not found’ pages on its website — meaning they were being deleted in real time.
Poof. Gone as if they never happened. Even the NRSC’s documentation of Paxton’s wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton’s filing for divorce on “biblical grounds” suddenly disappeared.
“What Ken Paxton has put his family through is truly repulsive and disgusting,” the Senate Republican campaign machine wrote at the time the divorce became public, as the Current reported.
“Texas deserves better than Ken Paxton,” another NRSC headline said.
Yet that too has evaporated into the ether.
Majority PAC — a Democratic political action committee — noted that several other prominent GOP accounts on X, including the Senate Leadership Fund, also began taking down prior negative posts about Paxton.
“Across the board, Republicans are mass-deleting their prior posts about Paxton, be it his scandals or his affairs,” Majority PAC Communications Director Lauren French tweeted.
“Republicans have been hitting the delete button hard tonight,” she added in a subsequent post.
Now that the primary is over, it’s clear GOP operatives are circling the wagons and rallying around the nominee, no matter how flawed he is. That’s nothing new in the transition from the primary to the general — for either party.
But this time, many in the Republican Party consider the nominee especially flawed.
Many in the party establishment were nervous about Paxton’s vulnerability due to his long history of scandals, which include allegations of fraud, bribery, abuse of office, infidelity, illegal campaign contributions, theft and more. Paxton was also accused of lining up a job for one of his alleged mistresses.
Even his own staff reported him to the FBI. Those whistleblowers later won a $6.6 million lawsuit against him for wrongful termination.
Then there was his highly-publicized impeachment trial, in which he was acquitted after nine days of embarrassing public testimony and deliberations.
Because of those allegations of corruption, Democrats smell blood in the water. Numerous political observers see a race between Paxton and well-funded, charismatic Texas Rep. James Talarico as the Dems’ best chance in years of winning a statewide seat in Texas — something the party hasn’t done since 1994.
Contrasted against Paxton, James Talarico — a seminarian and former San Antonio schoolteacher — comes off as a Boy Scout, and polls show a close race between the two candidates.
So far, Republicans have so far dug up so little dirt on Talarico that their best insults are to accuse him of being a vegan (he’s not, but who cares), falsely accuse him of being transgender and suggest he’s a multi-hair-colored Starbucks barista disguised as a politician.
Indeed, Paxton has even taken to calling his general election rival “Talafreako,” which Team Talarico has already seized on and turned into merch. Honestly, that kinda slaps. Sorry, Ken.
So far, Democrats also seem to be winning the mud-slinging game. And meanwhile, the best Republicans can do is to pretend they liked Paxton this whole time and weren’t hurling their own insults up until two days ago.
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