Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide since 1994. Washington Republicans still found a way to make this race nervous.
By late summer, Ken Paxton had gone dark on television.
But Elon Musk’s team made one phone call, and what followed embarrassed the GOP establishment.
One Phone Call Put Ken Paxton Back on Texas Television
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate nomination the hard way. He knocked off incumbent US Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) in a May runoff after President Trump endorsed him. And he did it while Cornyn’s allies buried him under more than $70 million in primary spending, according to the Texas Tribune. The pro-Paxton side spent about $4.4 million.
The establishment never got over it.
Axios reported that by late August, Democrat state Representative James Talarico owned the Texas airwaves. His ads painted Paxton as one of the most corrupt politicians in America, a line Talarico keeps pushing even though the Texas Senate acquitted Paxton at his 2023 impeachment trial.
Paxton had nothing on TV to answer it. Polling seen by Musk’s team and the Senate Leadership Fund, the top Republican super PAC in Senate races, showed his chances sliding.
So Musk’s top political adviser, Chris Young, called Senate Leadership Fund president Alex Latcham with an offer. Musk would put $5 million into a pro-Paxton super PAC if that group raised a matching $5 million.
Latcham asked for more. Would Musk go to $10 million if the Paxton group raised $5 million and the Senate Leadership Fund chipped in another $5 million?
Young said yes. Within days Republicans had $20 million ready to put Paxton back on the air.
Musk Wrote the Checks Washington Kept in Its Pocket
And that deal turned out to be the warm-up act.
Musk handed the Senate Leadership Fund $158 million in September, in one check for $75 million and another for $83 million. That one donor covered nearly 58% of the $273 million the super PAC raised in the third quarter.
He also sent $10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, the main group backing Paxton, and more than $76 million to his own America PAC, which knocks on doors in Texas and other battlegrounds. The New York Times first put Musk’s giving since July at $276 million, which makes him the biggest known donor of the midterm cycle.
The Senate Leadership Fund has now poured well over $100 million into Texas, according to CNN. MAGA Inc., the pro-Trump super PAC, jumped into the ad war too.
But here’s the detail that ought to stick with every Trump voter. The New York Times reported that the Senate Leadership Fund spent months keeping its distance from Paxton and only dropped that reluctance after Musk’s money landed.
John Thune Backed the Loser and Sent Texas the Bill
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) backed Cornyn in the primary. Axios reported Thune feared Paxton’s legal fights and personal scandals would hand Democrats easy ammunition.
The Senate Leadership Fund went further. In a spring 2025 memo to donors, the group warned that electing Paxton could cost $150 million to $200 million, far more than a Cornyn general election.
Read that memo now and it sounds less like a budget forecast and more like a warning shot. Pick the wrong guy, and good luck finding the money.
Texas Republicans picked him anyway. By a wide margin.
And Cornyn still won’t help. In late August he told the Texas Tribune he planned to raise money for Republicans in New Hampshire, Michigan, and Alaska. Texas didn’t make his list.
“Paxton’s a poor campaigner,” Cornyn said. “He’s lazy and doesn’t raise money.”
That’s a four-term senator talking about his own party’s nominee for his own seat with the general election barely two months away. An Axios review of campaign finance filings found that among nearly 100 major Cornyn donors, none appeared to cut a check directly to Paxton’s campaign or its allied PACs after the runoff.
Cornyn’s record explains plenty. He led Republican negotiations on Joe Biden’s 2022 gun control law, and he spent years chasing deals that would hand amnesty to DACA recipients. Paxton ran against that whole package, and Texas voters sided with Paxton.
Polls have shown a tight race for months. Those numbers say more about who sat on their wallets all summer than about where Texans actually stand.
Thune, for his part, now tells donors that holding Texas is vital to keeping the Senate majority. He made that pitch at a donor lunch during the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas in September. Funny how the urgency arrived right about the time Musk’s money did.
Chuck Schumer Swallowed His Pride in Michigan
Compare all of this to the Democrat Party in Michigan.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer endorsed Representative Haley Stevens in that state’s Senate primary. Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the rest of the Democrat machine lined up behind her too.
Abdul El-Sayed beat her anyway, running as an unapologetic progressive.
And Schumer didn’t pout. He told reporters Democrats would unify to beat Republican Mike Rogers, and Stevens promised to help El-Sayed win. Nobody in Schumer’s orbit went to the press to call their own nominee lazy.
Democrats close ranks around their left-wing upstarts. The Republican establishment treats its America First upstarts like a hostage negotiation.
But Musk’s money did more than rescue one race. Axios reported that without it, propping up Paxton could have forced Republicans to drain cash from other Senate battlegrounds. Instead, the GOP freed up resources for unexpectedly close fights in Kansas and South Carolina.
The SAVE Act Tells the Rest of the Story
One more line in the Axios report deserves a second look. Musk kept good relations with Thune even while he pushed President Trump’s SAVE Act, the commonsense bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Republicans haven’t been able to get it through Thune’s Senate.
So the leadership happily cashes Musk’s checks. It just doesn’t seem nearly as eager to pass the bills Musk and Trump actually care about.
Musk and Trump had their own nasty falling-out in 2025. In May of that year Musk said, “I think I’ve done enough,” and plenty of folks figured he meant it. The two men patched things up, Musk started giving again in December, and Trump recently handed him the National Medal of Science.
And the bigger lesson reaches well past one billionaire. The Washington crowd warned Republican voters not to nominate Paxton, then dragged its feet when voters did it anyway. One donor had to step in and float the party’s own super PAC to defend a seat in one of the reddest big states in the country.
When November comes, plenty of people in Washington will line up to take a bow. The receipts show who paid for the stage.
Sources: Axios, “Scoop: Inside Elon Musk’s massive Texas rescue mission”; The New York Times, as reported by Raw Story and the Associated Press; CNN, “Elon Musk emerges as the top booster for Republicans with $276 million in donations”; The Hill; Texas Tribune, reporting on Cornyn-Paxton fundraising (April and August 2026); Washington Examiner, “John Cornyn calls Ken Paxton ‘lazy’ and a ‘poor campaigner’”; Axios Austin, “Cornyn donors largely keep distance from Paxton”; NBC News, “Abdul El-Sayed wins Democratic Senate primary in Michigan”; Associated Press, “After bitter primary, El-Sayed seeks to unite Democrats”
