Texas Republicans haven’t lost a statewide race since 1994.
Yet the party’s big-money machine sat on its hands for months while Ken Paxton took a pounding.
Then Elon Musk started writing checks, and the timing tells a story the GOP establishment would rather keep quiet.
Two Checks, Two Transfers, and One Very Convenient Calendar
Elon Musk poured $158 million into the Senate Leadership Fund in September. That’s the super PAC closely aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD).
He split the money into two pieces. The first, $75 million, landed on September 9. The second, $83 million, arrived on September 23.
And then something interesting happened.
According to CNN’s Patrick Svitek, the Senate Leadership Fund turned around a day after each deposit and shipped the identical amount to Texas PAC, a group backing Paxton in his race against Democrat state Representative James Talarico. That meant $75 million on September 10 and $83 million on September 24.
New York Times reporter Teddy Schleifer spotted the match and didn’t mince words on social media.
“Those contributions are IDENTICAL in size and timing to the amounts that SLF transferred to Texas PAC, strongly suggesting that Musk’s donations directly led to the decision by SLF to spend for Paxton through Texas PAC,” Schleifer wrote.
And he didn’t stop there. Schleifer pointed out that “Texas PAC is 100% funded by the Senate Leadership Fund,” then connected the last dot. “All money is fungible, yeah. But Elon Musk, indirectly, financed Texas PAC for Paxton.”
Republican groups spent $122 million backing Paxton in September alone, according to Mediaite. A big chunk of that firepower traces back to one man’s wallet.
And CNN describes the contest as a tight race, in a state where Democrats haven’t won statewide in over three decades. That alone should have had Washington Republicans moving a lot sooner.
Where Was the Cavalry All Summer?
To understand why those dates matter, rewind to the spring.
President Trump endorsed Attorney General Paxton in May against incumbent US Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). The Associated Press noted at the time that the endorsement put Trump at odds with a party establishment convinced Cornyn was the safer November bet.
Cornyn’s camp treated Paxton like a five-alarm fire. Pro-Cornyn groups vastly outspent Paxton on advertising, and the AP reported that most of that money went to attacking him. Cornyn himself warned that Paxton would be “a weak nominee who jeopardizes everything we care about.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee went all in for Cornyn during the primary and only switched to Paxton once he won, the Texas Tribune reported.
But switching sides on paper and spending real money are two different things.
The Tribune reported that Senate Republicans had been reluctant to spend in Texas before the Thune-aligned super PAC finally placed its first general election ad buy. Raw Story put it more bluntly, reporting that Musk’s $158 million gift came before the group ended months of reluctance and launched what grew into a $149 million pro-Paxton ad campaign.
And Cornyn? He still won’t put his fundraising muscle behind the nominee. The Tribune reported that Cornyn plans to help Republican senators in other states instead.
“Paxton’s a poor campaigner,” Cornyn told the paper, adding, “This is unfortunately shaping up to be a close and I hope not disastrous election.”
A person close to Paxton told the Tribune that the Attorney General reached out to Cornyn multiple times and got nothing but silence back.
That’s an odd way to treat your own party’s nominee for a seat Republicans have held for decades. Then again, Cornyn helped negotiate the 2022 gun control package Joe Biden signed into law, so grassroots Texans have never exactly confused him with a MAGA warrior.
Schumer Didn’t Make Michigan’s Radical Wait This Long
Now look at how the other party handled its own primary upset.
Over in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed beat Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI) for the Democrat Senate nomination in August. US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had recruited Stevens, and the party machinery lined up behind her.
El-Sayed ran on Medicare for All and collected endorsements from Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. He even told voters, “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m dangerous.”
But Schumer didn’t sulk. He said he would work with El-Sayed as Democrats try to retake the Senate, according to C-SPAN.
Think about that for a second. The Democrat leader embraced a nominee who wants Washington running every doctor’s office in America, the same model that leaves patients in Canada and Britain stuck on waiting lists, and he barely blinked.
Republican leadership looked at a Trump-endorsed conservative in Texas and needed a nine-figure nudge from the richest man on the planet.
Maybe it really came down to cold math about which races to fund. Maybe. The Senate Leadership Fund insists its Texas spending comes out of a “dedicated” fund that doesn’t drain other races, CNN reported.
But that dedicated fund appears to have one very familiar name on it.
The Receipts Tell Republican Voters Plenty About 2028
Democrats, naturally, spin all of this their own way. A spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC told the Tribune that Paxton had “dragged SLF into bailing out a seat that was supposed to be sure-footed territory for the GOP.” The same spokesperson claimed that “SLF spent the spring trying to kill Paxton’s campaign.”
Paxton’s critics also point to the controversies trailing his campaign, including a Wall Street Journal report featuring video of him celebrating New Year’s Eve in Dubai with two men facing federal criminal charges. Others note Musk’s heavy business interests in Texas, and that Paxton, as Attorney General, investigated Musk opponents like Media Matters, according to Raw Story.
Texas Republican primary voters heard tens of millions of dollars’ worth of attacks against Paxton before the primary, the Tribune reported. They picked him anyway.
And Musk isn’t only routing cash through Thune’s operation. He handed $10 million directly to Lone Star Liberty PAC, the main pro-Paxton group, at a time when opponents badly outspent Paxton. His own America PAC has spent more than a third of its disclosed budget in Texas, Raw Story reported.
President Trump went to Houston to raise money for Paxton at a Republican National Committee fundraiser. MAGA Inc, the Trump-aligned super PAC, bought $10 million in Texas airtime, its first general election spending anywhere.
Reuters reported that Musk has now spent $336 million backing Republicans this cycle, blowing past the roughly $290 million he spent in 2024.
So the picture comes into focus. Trump and Musk showed up early and kept showing up. The establishment showed up late, and only after somebody else picked up the tab.
That pattern won’t disappear after November. The same Washington operatives who fought Paxton in the spring already have one eye on a post-Trump party in 2028, where they decide which nominees get help and which ones get left on the curb.
Texas just gave Republican voters a preview of how that sorting works. And now the receipts are public.
Sources: Mediaite, “Elon Musk Has Gone All In on Ken Paxton”; CNN via KION, “Elon Musk emerges as the top booster for Republicans with $276 million in donations”; Raw Story, “Ken Paxton gets an Elon Musk-sized life raft in Texas’ nastiest Senate race”; Texas Tribune, “Senate Republicans finally mobilize with big money for Ken Paxton in Texas”; Texas Tribune, coverage of John Cornyn and Paxton fundraising (August 2026); Associated Press, “Trump endorses Ken Paxton in Texas GOP primary”; Axios, “Abdul El-Sayed wins Democratic Senate primary in battleground Michigan”; CBS News, Michigan Democratic Senate primary results; C-SPAN, “We Are Not a Purple State” newsletter; The Hill via KXAN, “Musk throws $276M behind Republicans in midterms.”