The world’s richest man is pouring cash into saving Texas’ most unpopular Senate candidate so far this century.
Tech broligarch Elon Musk is using his mountains of cash to try to mop up the mess Donald Trump has made of the GOP’s Senate hopes in Texas.
Musk, 55, had his team call party operatives in the deep-red state earlier in August to discuss salvaging scandal-ridden MAGA candidate Ken Paxton’s campaign, Axios reports.
Political advisers to the world’s richest man told the Republican Senate Leadership Fund that the SpaceX founder would be willing to give $5 million to a Paxton-aligned group if it pledged to raise the same amount on its own.
Paxton has consistently been behind rival James Talarico in the polls.
Joel Angel Juarez/REUTERS
Officials on the other end of that call then begged Musk’s team to double his input to $10 million if the leadership fund threw in the extra $5 million. He agreed.
Despite the major cash injection, Paxton trails his Democratic rival James Talarico by 3 points in the polls with just 18 days to go until the midterms.
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The episode is just one part of Musk’s frantic, multimillion-dollar scramble to save Republicans from a wipeout at the Nov. 3 midterms driven by Donald Trump’s cratering approval ratings.
Trump’s low approval rating is not helping Republican candidates.
The 80-year-old president is at 32 percent favorability, the worst of his political career so far and below even where he stood after the Jan. 6 riots. Democrats hold a 9-point lead less than three weeks out from the race for control of the House and Senate.
Musk has thrown an astonishing $366 million at groups backing Republican candidates in his effort to stave off an electoral disaster for the party, the New York Times revealed on Tuesday.
Talarico is in the lead in what is traditionally a red state.
Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspap/Houston Chronicle via Getty Imag
His contributions to Paxton’s campaign were crucial in preventing the GOP from exhausting its resources on a race that strategists warned ahead of time would cost a fortune to win and ought not to have been competitive in the first place, Axios reports.
Trump threw his backing behind Paxton in the primary against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, despite panic that even Republican voters would shun the deep-red state’s Attorney General over the litany of scandals he has faced over the past decade.
Prosecutors slapped Paxton with felony securities fraud charges after he took office in 2015, which it took him nine years to eventually settle without admitting guilt.
The Republican-controlled Texas House later impeached him in 2023 over allegations of bribery, corruption, and abuse of office. The Senate proceedings that eventually acquitted him the following year revealed he was allegedly having an extramarital affair. His wife is now divorcing him on “biblical grounds.”
Those scandals have led GOP-aligned groups to spend more than $206 million trying to keep his campaign afloat.
Paxton himself has done little to improve his chances ahead of the Nov. 3 showdown.
He’s been caught in at least five leaked audio clips from a D.C. fundraiser in September trashing the president, complaining about the White House hijacking his campaign, blaming Trump for voters’ woes, and laughing about mandatory federal spending cuts.
He’s also now revealed to have spent New Year’s Eve 2024 partying with his lover and two fugitives from U.S. justice in Dubai.
The Daily Beast has contacted Paxton’s campaign and Musk’s representatives for comment on this story.
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