Politics

‘A slow-moving car crash:’ Republicans are wary of the $200 million-plus price tag to save Ken Paxton

Published

1 month ago

October 3, 2026

Republicans know they have to spend big to save Ken Paxton. They’re increasingly worried MAGA Inc. won’t throw down in time.

In private conversations over recent weeks, senior Hill Republicans and GOP officials have nudged President Donald Trump’s team to start spending more on the Texas Senate race before it’s too late, according to three people with direct knowledge of those conversations, who were granted anonymity to discuss them.

Those fears escalated after audio leaked of Paxton privately trashing Trump’s midterm convention, with some worrying it could impact whether MAGA Inc. continues spending after a current wave of GOP ad bookings run out Oct. 12.

A Trump operative told Blue Light News that MAGA Inc. and its affiliates are expected to spend near $45 million on direct mail, TV, and digital advertising in Texas through Oct. 12, an increase from its previous $20 million to boost Paxton. But they said the team is still assessing how much more money to send in the final weeks, in consultation with Senate Republicans and their top super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund.

The Trump operative, who like others in this article was granted anonymity to speak candidly, would not commit to any plans when asked by Blue Light News.

With national Democrats starting to finally spend for their Senate nominee, James Talarico, after months of holding off, and as polling of the race tightens, Republicans expect the cost of salvaging Paxton’s campaign will only skyrocket. And, they’ve started to panic.

“It’s a five-alarm fire, no doubt,” one GOP senator said. “Can we put it out? I hope so.”

“This is a slow-moving car crash that we’re witnessing right now,” a Republican strategist in the state said. “And there’s a 75% chance that the ultimate result here will be catastrophic from a GOP Senate majority standpoint.”

A fourth Republican, a national operative, spoke to the urgency factor: “While it’s money we shouldn’t have needed to spend, it needs to be spent now,” said a national GOP operative, describing the state as more winnable than North Carolina, Georgia and potentially Ohio.

Even with a massive war chest, Texas is turning into a huge money sink for the GOP that senators worry could hurt them in other tight races as they work to defend deep-red states and try to flip blue seats in Michigan and New Hampshire.

Trump himself nodded to some of the concerns at a rally just across the Texas border in Oklahoma Thursday night, saying those voters aren’t the ones he’s concerned about.

“We’re worried about Michigan. We’re worried about Texas,” he told the crowd. “We’re worried about a few states.”The president is scheduled to visit Texas again next week for a rally in San Antonio next Wednesday.

SLF poured another $60 million into Texas on Wednesday, bringing its total expenditure there to a record-breaking $131 million. With the MAGA Inc. money and additional GOP ad reservations, the race is already on track to top $200 million from outside Republican groups hoping to save Paxton. Paxton’s own campaign recently announced a $20 million ad buy — one of the largest single media investments in a Texas Senate race.

Some Republicans want MAGA Inc. to take over spending for Paxton in Texas in the final few weeks, so SLF can focus its resources elsewhere. MAGA Inc. could also funnel money into SLF’s recently established Texas PAC. But, according to two people with direct knowledge of that matter, that hasn’t happened.

“At some point I think the people spending that money are going to have to make hard choices and figure out where the money can have the biggest impact, and certainly Texas is the most expensive,” Sen. John Cornyn, who lost to Trump-backed Paxton in the primary, recently told POLITICO.

SLF Executive Director Alex Latcham indicated to Blue Light News the group will keep spending in Texas: “Senate Leadership Fund’s investment through Texas PAC affirms our commitment to maintaining the Republican majority and defeating Far-Left liberals like James Talarico.”

But Republicans’ money concerns have been complicated by Paxton himself. A growing number of GOP senators and top operatives have been stunned by what they described as unforced errors by the Texas Senate nominee. For example, he crossed one of the brightest red lines with Trump, telling a group of donors that “everybody’s numbers dropped” after the president’s GOP convention in Dallas last month, according to the audio leak reported by The New York Times.

“There seems to be very little strategy there,” said another Republican senator, granted anonymity to candidly discuss the race. “Sometimes, I think [Paxton] wants to lose.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump, while on his way to Texas to tour a motor facility on Thursday, told reporters he hadn’t talked to Paxton about his convention comments. Later, he told a crowd in Texas that “Ken Paxton was at my side more than anybody, and I have to always remember that because he can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I’ll be honest.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told reporters this week that he hadn’t seen the audio of Paxton trashing Trump’s convention. He acknowledged the stakes in his home state were high — and that the influx of cash is key.

“The reason that it is a serious race and a close race right now is that for several months the Democrats were massively outspending us,” he said, “and I am glad now that we are seeing money invested in communicating with the voters.”

The White House has attempted to reassure concerned senators, with chief of staff Susie Wiles telling Senate Republicans this week that there will be enough money available for competitive races in the final stretch, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.

GOP operatives in both Michigan and New Hampshire said they feel that some of the cash being shoveled toward Texas should be going to their states instead. Most polls show Republicans running narrowly behind or neck and neck in both states, even though they hold a spending advantage on the airwaves there.

“We’re focusing so much on ‘we’ve got to put this money into Texas.’ Why? We’ve never had a problem in Texas. Let’s focus on taking back a seat we haven’t had in years,” said an ally of former Sen. John E. Sununu, who’s in a tight race against Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas. “There are real chances in Michigan and New Hampshire,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the dynamics.

Sununu’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Latcham, who heads SLF, said that “Texas PAC is a dedicated effort that will not take resources from our other ongoing investments across the Senate map.”

Recent polling still shows the Texas Senate race with a razor-thin margin. Most public polling over the past two months shows Talarico with an edge, though Paxton’s campaign released an internal poll Tuesday that shows Paxton leading by three points among likely voters, 48% to 45%.

“I don’t think the needle has moved in the last month,” said one Texas Republican elected official, granted anonymity to speak frankly. “Unless it’s the worst polling that’s ever been done in political history, all this spend hasn’t changed anything, and I think people have made their mind up.”

Lisa Kashinsky, Samuel Benson, Alex Gangitano and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.

Politics

Stephen Miller’s rise to chief of staff indicates Trump isn’t ready to move on

Published

4 hours ago

November 6, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump’s decision to name hard-line loyalist Stephen Miller as his top aide cemented what many Republicans were already privately fearing: There will be no party-wide GOP reckoning with this week’s midterm bloodbath.

Instead, with Trump still in office for another two years, most have grown resigned to the reality that the president is going to lean in on a confrontational approach with Congress — and is not willing to change course.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and inside the Trump administration are questioning how and whether they can break with the president now after having green-lit much of his agenda, according to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers, senior aides and Trump officials interviewed for this story, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s future.

Trump’s decision Friday to elevate Miller, the architect of his unpopular mass deportation policy and an advocate of fierce partisan confrontation, crystallized the frustration.

“There needs to be some self-reflection for Republicans,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) said in an interview about the midterm losses Friday morning. “There should be some heads rolling at the White House because we lost badly.”

Hours later, heads did roll. Trump announced Miller would replace Susie Wiles as his new chief of staff.

“Horrible decision,” Stutzman said in response.

One House Republican, when informed that Trump had named Miller his chief of staff, replied: “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.”

The immediate aftermath of the election has sharpened the GOP’s core issue for the past decade: They are struggling to navigate the man who they reshaped their entire identity around, and whose record low approval with voters helped to fuel generational losses within the party.

The Iran war is another area where some Republicans are having regrets. Vice President JD Vance identified it as the main reason for the party’s defeat in his election post-mortem.

The problem with Vance’s assessment, one senior Hill Republican said, is, “we’ve been fucking voting for the war since March — because they told us to.”

Republicans and Trump advisers expect the president to wield massive influence in the 2028 GOP primaries, another reason many are staying quiet.

“Everyone is staring at each other and wondering who will speak up and blame Trump first,” said one GOP operative who worked on a battleground race Democrats won. They, like others in this article, were granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But we’ve been here before. I’m not holding my breath. He still controls the party and its primaries, at least for now.”

The White House responded to Blue Light News’s request for comment by referring to Trump’s praise for Miller on Friday. The RNC declined to comment.

Miller wrote on social media that he is “honored beyond words to serve as [Trump’s] White House Chief of Staff” and “the mission now is more clear than ever: Fight with all of our soul to support our President.”

How much lawmakers will distance themselves will be put to the test quickly: House Republicans will have an immediate opportunity to break with Trump and the war next week, when Rep. Thomas Massie said in an interview with Blue Light News he will trigger his articles of impeachment against Secretary Pete Hegseth. “There are a lot of questions about Hegseth,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Friday.

Some senior Republicans are privately nudging Trump officials to ditch Hegseth before the vote, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. The White House is sticking by Hegseth so far, however.

House Republicans will also have a chance to elect new leadership next week, including a new chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. But in a sign of what’s to come, none of the candidates — including Reps. Brian Jack (R-Ga.) and Rudy Yakym (R-Ind.) — nor any other GOP leadership candidates have publicly suggested doing more to break with Trump.

A small group of Republicans on Capitol Hill have privately declared, as of Tuesday night, that “MAGA is over,” and it’s time for a “reset,” as one House GOP aide put it — and yet it’s a sentiment no prominent Republican is willing to say publicly.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), one of the longest-serving members of the House, said he wasn’t going to “blame” others for Tuesday’s losses, which left him as the sole GOP incumbent survivor in his home state. Asked if Republicans were dragged down by the president, Smith replied: “I don’t want to answer that.”

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) went a step further. He declined to name Trump, but he said in an interview that he was tired of GOP leaders “ignoring” voters — a remarkable position for a party that Trump transformed into a working-class coalition.

“We had a lot of Republican leaders out there saying ‘everything’s fine.’ And you kind of had the boomer generation saying, ‘Well, yeah, back in my day, interest rates were 15%, so everything’s good,’” said Davidson, a 56-year-old former Army Ranger. “Well, you had a lot of hardworking young people who felt really ignored, and they they went to the polls and said, ‘Stop ignoring us.'”

Davidson said Republicans need to start discussing their problems quickly, or suffer the electoral consequences again.

“Bad news doesn’t get better with time. So avoiding talking about something doesn’t solve the problem,” he said. He said Vance “walked a pretty good line” by being “candid” in his election post-mortem Wednesday.

Vance and other potential 2028 presidential contenders like Sen. Ted Cruz don’t have much time to waste if they want to chart a new path away from Trump. Cruz issued his own post-mortem that included a call to focus more on voters’ economic concerns. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “this midterm was a rebuke of the president and Congress.”

French Hill, the powerful Financial Services Committee Chair who narrowly survived a strong Democratic challenge in his own deep-red Arkansas seat Tuesday night, pointed to “President Trump’s unfavorability” which hit “races across the country.” Hill added: “He will be considered a lame duck, and that often has members of both political parties looking out at who will be the standard-bearers in the 2028 presidential election.”

Most others have remained silent in public.

One thing is certain: The utter devastation in deep-red seats is stirring deep anger among many Hill Republicans, who believe something needs to change.

It’s fueling private recriminations at Trump’s political operation that his advisers didn’t take early warnings seriously about the extent of the damage in states like North Carolina. Trump’s now-former chief of staff Susie Wiles will join his political operation, the president announced Friday.

Trump’s team has blamed “candidate quality” for the losses, instead of the president himself.

“Candidate quality matters. Unless you’re running for the U.S. Senate. They apparently don’t care if you would lose to a pinecone,” said a House Republican, referring to Trump’s hand-picked North Carolina Senate nominee Michael Whatley.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee declined to comment.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who leads the Senate campaign arm and saw Democrats flip a Senate seat in his own state, did not answer reporters’ questions on Thursday. The South Carolina Republican has a policy of not talking to reporters in the halls — and he didn’t start when Blue Light News and others asked why Republicans lost so badly.

Back in August, some Republicans in seats Trump won by double digits were already telling the White House to keep the president away from their districts. Others publicly broke from the White House on mass deportations and the Iran war.

NRCC Chair Richard Hudson had largely dismissed those concerns when Blue Light News asked him in a hallway interview on Sept. 1.

“Based on our polling, the president’s a net positive in every district. And I’ve been encouraging him to get out and do events and do rallies. I’m going to continue to do that,” Hudson said. “I think the more he talks about his record and incredible achievements he’s made over the last Congress, I think the better.”

Then, Hudson lost his own reelection bid. He is the first ever NRCC chair in history to be defeated in a general election.

Mia McCarthy, Andrew Howard and Samuel Benson contributed reporting.

Politics

The size of Democrats’ wave surprised even their top House super PAC

Published

12 hours ago

November 6, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Even the head of House Democrats’ top super PAC didn’t fully anticipate the size of their massive midterm wave.

Heading into Election Day, House Majority PAC president Mike Smith told Blue Light News Tuesday’s results, which have netted them a whopping 252 House seats with more yet to be called, was “on the very high end” of the group’s expectations.

The group spent at least $283 million on ads this cycle, per ad-tracking firm AdImpact, making them the largest Democratic spender in House races this cycle and a significant force behind the party’s big night.

As Democrats turn their attention to 2028, Smith remains optimistic the party can hold on to its majority.

His confidence stems in part from a projection that Democrats will respond to the affordability concerns that were the core of the party’s promise to voters.

If Democrats don’t make efforts to address the rising cost of living, “then it’s a totally different story,” Smith said.

Q: How were you feeling in the final days before Tuesday?

Obviously this would have been on the very high end of what we expected. Over the last three months, overall our polling has been pretty consistent. Our whole thought was, with the right environment, if we have the right message and the right types of candidates in, not just the 50-50 districts, but like deeper in the map, that we could put those seats in play and we could potentially win.

Going into Election Day, our whole feeling was there’s a clear path to like 235-plus [seats]. We were playing in districts that, if you were to rank them from like one to 435, some of those districts were like 250, 255, right? And I would throw IN-05, CO-03, KY-06, SC-01, some of the Florida races. SC-01 wasn’t ever going to be seat 225. That was always in the 240s and maybe even 250s. But we took a chance because we saw what the national environment looked like. We saw what the data was coming back in within these individual races. So I think we were optimistic. But to be totally honest, in our heads, you have to play in seat 255 to get to seat 240. You have to spread out the map. You have to force Republicans on their heels, and then you start piecing together how you get to the 240-245 range. Once the numbers started coming back, that was the best case scenario for us. Everything came together.

You guys cut reservations in some reach districts, only to go back up in the final few days. On the outside, it appeared like cutting spending in those reach districts was a bad sign. What went into those last-minute spending decisions?

A lot of the places we made reservations back in April, and then continued to add on to that over the course of the summer. Partners and allies in a bunch of different places took over our reservations. We tried to be smart by locking in the lowest possible rates in very expensive markets, [so that] even if HMP wasn’t the entity spending, we still had partners and allies that were taking over their reservations. In doing all that we saved about $130 million that we could reinvest.

The challenge with some of the races was by a week out, our money was spent. And in some of those districts, there weren’t any partners willing to step up and do it. Florida is a good example of that.

That’s where we just had to make a decision that there weren’t the resources there, and we had to leave the reservations on the table. Around that time, Mayor Bloomberg was like, “We can’t let these races get away from us. We need to do everything we can,” and that’s where we went back into some of those places.

Did you feel the need to adjust your messaging at all once MAGA Inc. and Elon Musk’s PAC joined CLF on the airwaves?

The short answer is no. The messaging was fairly consistent. Early on, our whole feeling was we need to reframe how voters perceive Democrats. When voters think about what Democrats are fighting for, the first thing we want them to think about is cost of living, the economy. At the same time, bringing to light Republican policies that are increasing the cost of living, or focus on things that are anything but that.

Over several months, we did a bunch of battleground research looking at ‘how does corruption tie into that,’ which culminated in what we would describe as the cost of Republican corruption, and how that is impacting your day to day and your cost of living. That’s what we went into Election Day with.

Overall, we ran, I don’t know, 1300 different types of ads, whether TV, digital, direct mail, or whatnot. 76% of those ads talked about the economy. 60% of those ads focused on corruption, because in so many of them, those two things were interlinked in voters’ minds.

Republicans continued to focus on the same thing. It was trying to paint Democrats as out of touch or extremists. And again, the theory of the case from the beginning was us focusing on economic concerns, especially when we figured out we could tie that corruption lens into it. That’s going to be more important to voters than folks talking about socialism or anything else.

Democrats were able to prevent Republicans from capitalizing on their redistricting gains. Are you worried about those gains bearing fruit in a less favorable environment, maybe as soon as 2028?

In a different environment, these races are going to come together in a much different way. So I do think it’s something that we need to be hyper-focused on. That said, I don’t think redistricting is going to go away.

I’m actually pretty hopeful that these huge shifts across every demographic group that we just saw, as long as Democrats continue to focus on the issue that matters most to voters.

If we don’t, then it’s a totally different story.

Are you saying the fate of Democrats’ House chances in 2028 to keep these seats is predicated on Congress passing something, even with the current president still in the White House, that addresses affordability issues?

I wouldn’t say passing. Soon-to-be Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, since we won, his message is that Democrats are focused on three things: costs, care and corruption.

When we come into power, we are going to be hyper-focused on fighting to bring down the cost of living for voters. I think Donald Trump is still this outsized X-factor in everything. He’s still the sitting president in the White House. So I wouldn’t say it’s like, “Oh we have to pass 300 bills. That’s the only way we’re going to be successful.” I think we just need to show voters that we are willing to get stuff done, and in instances where we need to, work across the aisle to pass stuff that’s going to be helpful to voters. I think if we do that, then I think we’re setting ourselves up for success going into ‘28, both with the White House and the House and the Senate. Donald Trump is still going to be this huge factor in all of this, and I don’t think voters are going to be like, “Democrats weren’t able to accomplish this,” and think that that was us. They’re going to continue blaming Donald Trump going into Election Day 2028.

To go back to redistricting, do you want Democrats in these states where they have newly-won trifectas to take up redistricting even if Republicans don’t push for it again?

I think Democrats need to do everything that it will take to win, and if that means that in states where we control the state house, the state senate, a governor’s race, we have an opportunity to redraw the map, I think we need to do it.

What were the seats Democrats flipped that surprised you the most?

I would say NJ-02 [Rep. Jeff Van Drew’s seat], It was a district where we had looked at it — we did not think that it was credibly possible, to be totally honest.

I’d say North Carolina as a whole, probably. We felt good about NC-01, NC-11 for a while…. [NRCC Chair and North Carolina Rep.] Richard Hudson, we looked at that district. There was a clear path to winning it. There just wasn’t money, at the end of the day. NC-13, NC-14, same thing. The makeup of the districts, they’re not bad targets for Democrats. It was just, how much can we spread resources out? But the total implosion in North Carolina by Republicans at the federal level, at the state level — that was probably one of the biggest surprises.

A version of this article first appeared in Blue Light News Pro’s Morning Score. Want to receive the newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to Blue Light News Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories.