Ken Paxton

In the midst of the most contentious Texas US Senate race in a generation, Democratic nominee James Talarico suddenly and mysteriously dropped off the campaign trail on September 29, and has yet to return, though his campaign claims a resurrection is coming tomorrow.  ​Talarico last appeared in public at a fundraiser alongside Robert DeNiro in New York City, which isn’t in Texas. On September 30, he showed his face on Zoom at a forum for the Hispanic Business Council, and said he had the flu. “I was ready to eat my favorite quesadilla tacos, but I was starting to feel kind of under the weather a few days ago, and last night it got so bad that I went to the urgent care here in Dallas,” he said.

With the retirement of North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, the Republican with the heaviest Senate primary burden in 2026 becomes John Cornyn. The Texas incumbent faces off in a contest against MAGA favorite Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is relying on backlash against some of Cornyn’s more centrist moves in recent years and a range of financial backers who poured nearly $3 million into his campaign coffers in the first quarter, a number Cornyn exceeded – but not by a lot. It’s too close for comfort for some Republicans, who are concerned the clash puts Texas at risk of a rare turn from red to blue.

Former president Donald Trump helped out the GOP establishment with his latest round of congressional endorsements — including one particularly notable one where he passed over a guy he endorsed in the last election cycle.Just two years ago, Trump endorsed Darren Bailey for governor of Illinois, snubbing the state’s GOP establishment, which had been firmly behind Aurora mayor Richard Irvin. Bailey blew Irvin out of the water in the primary — thanks to additional support from Democrats who successfully meddled in the primary —and was dismantled by J.B. Pritzker in November.This time around, Trump is backing Congressman Mike Bost, who’s been fending off a primary bid from Bailey.

Lauren Boebert first gained notoriety back in 2019 as the pint-sized, gun-toting citizen who confronted Beto O’Rourke over his “hell yes” pledge to take our AR-15s and AK-47s. Since then, of course, Boebert has been elected twice to the US House of Representatives, where her behavior — “clashing with Capitol Police after setting off metal detectors,” feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene on the House floor — habitually makes headlines.   Yesterday, news broke that Boebert and a companion had been escorted out of a musical adaptation of Beetlejuice in Denver for “vaping, singing, recording and ‘causing a disturbance’ during the performance.

“Everything’s bigger in Texas” is one of those clichés that happens to be entirely true. With the diminution of the importance of impeachment as a political issue on the federal level, the Lone Star State seems obliged to take up the slack — and the impeachment of controversial Attorney General Ken Paxton is turning into a process that pits the highest-paid power lawyers in Texas against each other in a duel to the death. There's been plenty of color in the proceedings, and not just from Paxton attorney Tony Buzbee, whose heavily tanned appearance led him to take to Instagram to accuse "reputable media organizations" of editing his skin tone in photographs (watchers had started passing around memes of Buzbee as an Oompa Loompa). "So you think the news isn’t bias [sic]?

For years, in both sympathetic and unsympathetic parts of the press, DeSantis has been hyped as “Trump without the baggage,” “Trumpism without Trump,” “Trump without the brains.” But the first few days have proved these formulations to be, at best, oversimplifications, and perhaps even mischaracterizations. In an especially smart Washington Free Beacon column, Matthew Continetti argues that DeSantis’s launch event, once it got past the embarrassing glitches, demonstrated that the clash between Trump and DeSantis over the GOP nomination “is also a struggle between two concepts of the New Right, pitting the former president’s MAGA populism against the Florida governor’s institutional culture war.