{"id":19530,"date":"2026-03-03T10:46:53","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T10:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/how-ken-paxton-magafied-texas-in-his-rise-to-the-top\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T10:46:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T10:46:53","slug":"how-ken-paxton-magafied-texas-in-his-rise-to-the-top","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/how-ken-paxton-magafied-texas-in-his-rise-to-the-top\/","title":{"rendered":"How Ken Paxton MAGAfied Texas in his rise to the top"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

On Jan. 6, 2021, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared to a raucous crowd of President Donald Trump\u2019s supporters, many of whom were moments away from storming the U.S. Capitol: \u201cWe will not quit fighting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Five years later, Paxton\u2019s fighting spirit has him poised to unseat a 24-year incumbent.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a steady journey. As Texas\u2019 top lawyer, Paxton became a hero of the far right by using rapid-fire lawsuits to spearhead their most important causes, from expanding religious influence in schools to attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He presented himself as a foil to the Obama and Biden administrations, filing more than 100 lawsuits over issues like immigration and environmental regulations. And he continues to steer the power of his office toward investigating alleged election irregularities, particularly in Democratic-led cities like Houston.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, the MAGA grassroots that fueled his rise will reach its apex of influence so far: Paxton is well-positioned to finish first against John Cornyn in the GOP primary for his Senate seat, despite being saddled with tons of political baggage and targeted by millions of dollars in attack ads.<\/p>\n

The bare-knuckle Senate primary is likely headed to a runoff, dragging out the party\u2019s own angst over generational change.<\/p>\n

For the far-right in Texas, Paxton\u2019s arc shows the ascendent strength of their movement, which has pushed Republican leaders toward adopting increasingly conservative positions. For Cornyn, it means the potential end of his long career in the Senate, and the near-extinction of establishment Republicans within the party.<\/p>\n

\u201cKen Paxton is more than just an attorney general that’s been MAGA. He is a symbol of the heart of the grassroots MAGA movement,\u201d said Steve Bannon, the former senior adviser to Trump and War Room host who has been broadcasting his popular show from a rented ranch in North Texas in the days leading up to the election.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe’s resilient because folks here know he has fought the good fight for years and years and years,\u201d Bannon said. \u201cHe has resilience because people know where his heart is, and he’s a fighter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cornyn is in serious trouble<\/h5>\n

The MAGA movement is tenacious in protecting its own and knifing its Republican rivals. Paxton has survived an impeachment<\/a> by the GOP-controlled state House, a federal securities fraud investigation<\/a> and slew of ethics complaints<\/a>. Three months after beginning his Senate campaign last year, Paxton\u2019s wife filed for divorce, alleging an extramarital affair. His competitors \u2014 including Cornyn, who has said Paxton is too unethical to serve in public office \u2014 have hammered his trail of scandals.<\/p>\n

And still he\u2019s the front-runner.<\/p>\n

Paxton has continued to lead in polling \u2014 from even before he launched \u2014 despite a concerted effort<\/a> by Republicans in Washington to boost Cornyn.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdeally you want a saint to be your elected leader, and that is something we all hope and pray for one of these days,\u201d said Bo French, former chair of the Tarrant County Republican party, who is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. \u201cBut until that happens, we need people who are going to be warriors for the cause. And he is seen and beloved among Republican primary voters in Texas as a warrior.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Sen.<\/p>\n

Cornyn knows the strong headwinds he\u2019s facing<\/a>, conceding that the composition of primary voters doesn\u2019t reflect his usual base of support. Many Texas Republicans remain angry with the senator for voting in favor<\/a> of a bipartisan gun control package after the Uvalde school shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead. Cornyn was famously booed onstage at the Texas GOP convention in 2022.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf only the most radical people show up in the primary \u2026 then I think that\u2019s going to be a challenge,\u201d Cornyn said in an interview<\/a> Saturday with CBS. His other primary opponent, Rep. Wesley Hunt, who is also running a campaign appealing to the far right, said on X<\/a> that Cornyn\u2019s comments show he has \u201clost touch with the people you\u2019re supposed to represent\u201d and \u201cyour contempt for the voters of Texas is exactly why your career is coming to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has not endorsed in the race, throwing a wrench into any MAGA pickup Cornyn could get \u2014 or that could put Paxton over the line. At an event in Corpus Christi last week, Trump said<\/a> he had “pretty much” decided who to support, but did not reveal that pick.<\/p>\n

Democrats believe Paxton\u2019s baggage makes him beatable in the general election, a view shared by many national Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who is working to keep Cornyn in the GOP caucus.<\/p>\n

Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, said Paxton jeopardizes Republicans at every level of the ticket. \u201cEvery one of these top-tier Republicans in the state is wildly unpopular, and they’ll be led by Ken Paxton,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what puts a lot of these different seats in interesting hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

The MAGA vs. establishment fight has been years in the making<\/h5>\n

Paxton has endured years of legal and personal scrutiny. He also kept winning.<\/p>\n

Texas Republicans have repeatedly reelected both Cornyn to the Senate and Paxton as attorney general, backing the leaders of both wings of the party. But recent elections have shown the growing strength of the MAGA faction.<\/p>\n

Paxton\u2019s reelections have been aided by the deep coffers of Texas megadonors like Tim Dunn and the Wilks brothers in addition to his hyper-conservative supporters. In 2022, he was challenged by Land Commissioner George P. Bush \u2014 the relativegrandson of former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

Bush tried to sell conservative voters on his vision to restore integrity to the attorney general\u2019s office at a time when Paxton was facing years of securities fraud investigations and bribery allegations. It\u2019s a playbook Paxton allies say Cornyn is reusing.<\/p>\n

Voters seemed to prefer Paxton\u2019s combative style. Paxton thumped Bush by a two-to-one margin in that year\u2019s run-off, the clearest sign yet that voters were siding with the MAGA wing and rejecting the old-school establishment.<\/p>\n

In 2022, Paxton agreed to pay restitution and perform community service to settle the securities fraud case, which was brought over allegations that he duped investors in a tech startup. The Justice Department, in the final weeks of the Biden administration, decided not to prosecute Paxton over the remaining bribery charges. That eventually led the GOP-heavy Texas House to impeach him before the Senate voted to acquit.<\/p>\n

As scrutiny over Paxton intensified within the Texas Republican Party, he cast himself as a martyr, a victim of spurious probes that not only threatened him, but also the integrity of the MAGA base. For the far-right, Paxton\u2019s impeachment acquittal only further strengthened his parallels to Trump<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The onslaught energized his supporters. State Rep. Gary Gates, a Republican, learned that firsthand when he publicly recanted his vote<\/a> to impeach Paxton after dealing with blowback from the base.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a certain faction of those that support him that were rather upset,\u201d said Gates, who represents a suburban district outside of Houston. \u201cYou have to deal with that political reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paxton often brags that he was one of the few Republicans to attend Trump\u2019s campaign launch at Mar-A-Lago in 2022, when many in the party had abandoned him following the violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.<\/p>\n

\"President<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you try to take out somebody like those two guys who have fought for our values, and the whole world is weaponized against them, the people are ride-or-die,\u201d said Aaron Reitz, a former deputy in Paxton\u2019s office who, with his backing, is running to succeed him<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope that the establishment wing of the GOP would learn a similar lesson when they have tried to take out Trump, which is they are not in control of this party,\u201d Reitz said. \u201cThe grassroots, the people, are in control of the party, and they have to stop spending their millions.\u201d<\/p>\n

How Paxton got here<\/h5>\n

Paxton\u2019s deep base of support is built in part from his lawsuits against frequent targets of the right \u2014 high-profile cases that were splashed on the front pages of local newspapers from Beaumont to Amarillo. Throughout his decade as Texas\u2019 top lawyer, Paxton oversaw the Lone Star State\u2019s transformation into an incubator for ultra conservatives issues, from defending abortion restrictions<\/a> to warning that Muslims will attempt to introduce Islamic law in Texas.<\/p>\n

At a recent campaign event in the Houston suburbs as early voting was underway, Paxton ticked off his courtroom successes to a group gathered at a \u201csafari ranch\u201d in Richmond with roaming peacocks, zebras and goats.<\/p>\n

Paxton, speaking to the crowd of about 75 supporters, recounted the beginning of his career, starting with when he decided to run for attorney general during his first term in the state legislature because he viewed former President Barack Obama as \u201ca really epic threat\u201d who relied excessively on executive orders to bypass Congress.<\/p>\n

\"State<\/p>\n

In his first AG race, Paxton rode the wave of the Tea Party insurgency to topple an establishment Republican backed by former President George W. Bush. Paxton told the audience, to chuckles, that he sued Obama 27 times in the 22 months they overlapped.<\/p>\n

After Obama left office and Trump took his place, Paxton turned his sights away from the White House and toward Silicon Valley. He sued Google (\u201cwho was doing really bad things\u201d), Facebook (\u201cwe got a lot of money from them\u201d), Twitter (\u201cbefore Elon\u201d) and Pfizer (\u201cthey lied about the vaccine\u201d).<\/p>\n

Then Paxton became fixated on probing voter fraud allegations, making him an instrumental figure in Trump\u2019s unsuccessful efforts to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. He even filed a case directly with the Supreme Court seeking to invalidate election results in Pennsylvania and other battleground states \u2014 though the justices rejected his attempt, ruling Texas did not have standing.<\/p>\n

When Joe Biden was sworn in, Paxton picked back up his onslaught<\/a> against the federal government. Then Trump was reelected in 2024, Paxton said, and he \u201cfelt like I didn’t have a mission. I’d done my three different missions. I felt like 12 years was enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I looked around,\u201d Paxton told the crowd, \u201cand I saw a guy: John Cornyn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adam Wren contributed reporting.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Jan. 6, 2021, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared to a raucous crowd of President Donald Trump\u2019s supporters, many of whom were moments away from storming the U.S. Capitol: \u201cWe will not quit fighting.\u201d Five years later, Paxton\u2019s fighting spirit has him poised to unseat a 24-year incumbent. It\u2019s been a steady journey. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}