Autarkh

In Texas these days, every conversation returns to Ken Paxton. On the national stage, there is much chatter about his opponent James Talarico, the clean-cut Presbyterian seminarian who just might win the Democrats’ first Senate seat in Texas since 1988. He’s run a good campaign. But the seat is Paxton’s to lose more than Talarico’s to win. Paxtonfreude is a bipartisan business in Texas these days, writes Christopher Hooks. The state’s Republican nominee for United States senate has trailed in most polls conducted. It is a difficult prospect to accept; it is Texas, after all. Democrats have, for years, convinced themselves they have a chance here, but this has always felt like a pipe dream for Democratic operatives and MS NOW watchers. Now, in private, Republicans are worried. They grouse about a man who has been given everything he needs to win — including more than $150 million from Elon Musk — and still might lose. Recently, a longtime Republican political operative in the Dallas area with a sinking feeling about Paxton’s chances did what a good practitioner does: He convened a focus group. “I told my wife, ‘You have to go to your mahjong group and casually bring up the Senate race,’” he says. Game-playing Dallas ladies with comfortable homes have been a pillar of the Republican coalition in Texas for as long as fire-breathing Church of Christ preachers and the Yell Leaders of Texas A&M. And yet each of the women said that they would be voting for Paxton’s opponent in the race, James Talarico. The most important factor was that these women knew Ken Paxtons — plural — as a type. Reporters can waste a lot of words differentiating between Paxton’s major and minor sins. The mahjong ladies cut through the knot in a much cleaner way. “Paxton represents what they don’t want from their husbands,” the operative said. Read Hooks on how Warren Kenneth Paxton became so deeply unpopular in his home state and within his own party: nymag.visitlink.me/jQYSi5