Texas Senate Race Features Fictions About Talarico vs. Plentiful Paxton Scandals

The Texas GOP used to be really, really good at ruining Democratic candidates. Today’s GOP? Not so much.

This year’s Texas Senate race continues to astonish and amaze.

The Democrats have nominated State Representative James Talarico, a slightly less smarmy, not-gay Pete Buttigieg-type who has managed to offend virtually no one despite battling and beating the noxious Jasmine Crockett in a racially charged primary.

For their part, the Republicans nominated the once-impeached, often-indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton after a $130 million primary.

You have to give Texas Republicans some credit; almost 1.3 million of them voted against Paxton in the first round of the primary. Unfortunately for the GOP, only a little more than 500K of them showed up for the runoff, and Paxton’s hardcore MAGA supporters came out in force, nearly matching their opening round numbers, crushing the incumbent US Senator 63.8% to 36.2%.

Even with Paxton’s extremely checkered past featuring everything from accusations of stock fraud to multiple sex scandals and a tabloid-friendly “Biblical divorce,” Paxton might have cruised to victory had it not been for Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran and the ensuing rise in gasoline prices around Labor Day.

Or maybe it was the $40M in ads Talarico and his allies ran between the May runoff and the GOP’s September convention vs less than $27 million by Paxton-aligned groups. Not long after, a desperate GOP poured over $122 million into ads in September, but that doesn’t seem to have mattered much.

Perhaps it’s because the modern Texas GOP doesn’t know what it’s doing.

For comparison, let’s review the résumé of one Karl Rove. Though commonly derided as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) today, Rove was the most feared and most successful political operative of his era.

Not only did he propel the utterly mediocre George W. Bush to two Texas gubernatorial terms and two terms as POTUS, but Rove also ratfucked an entire generation of Texas Democrats.

Karl Rove, King of the Ratfuckers

Rove systematically targeted the most talented young Democrats — with a special eye for Hispanics — and took them out with career-ruining capers that ensured the once-dominant party would go down and stay down for decades.

Here’s a quick and dirty run-through of his résumé:

• 1970: Using a false name, Rove got into Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon’s campaign office, took letterhead and printed fliers for Dixon’s headquarters opening promising “free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing.”
• 1986: Running Bill Clements’s race against Gov. Mark White, Rove announced on the morning of the only debate that a bug had been found in his office. The FBI never charged anyone; reporters at the time suspected Rove planted it.
• 1989-93: FBI agent Greg Rampton, who had worked the Rove bug case, led investigations into Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower’s office; Rove was consulting for Rick Perry, who beat Hightower in 1990.
• 1992: Railroad Commissioner Lena Guerrero’s false claim of a UT degree reached the press; the Houston Chronicle says Rove, advising her opponent Barry Williamson, leaked it.
• 1994: Bush’s race against Ann Richards featured a whisper campaign that she was a lesbian; a Bush regional chairman attacked her for appointing “avowed homosexual activists.”
• 1994-96: In Alabama Supreme Court races, a former Rove staffer told The Atlantic’s Joshua Green that Rove had anonymous fliers attacking an opponent’s family printed, and that the campaign spread a rumor that a family-court judge was a pedophile.
• 1996: While on Philip Morris’s payroll, Rove helped shape a tobacco-industry push poll aimed at Attorney General Dan Morales over his tobacco suit; Rove admitted in a 1997 deposition that he suggested questions.
• 2000: South Carolina voters got push-poll calls asking whether they’d back John McCain if he had fathered an illegitimate black child. Rove denied any role.
• 2003: Rove was a source for the columns that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joe Wilson. He was not charged; Scooter Libby was convicted.
• 2004: After CBS aired forged memos on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, DNC chair Terry McAuliffe said reporters should “ask Karl Rove” and Rep. Maurice Hinchey said he believed Rove was behind the documents, which ended Dan Rather’s anchor career. Rove: “Obviously, you know the answer is no.”
• 2006-07: Rove’s White House was at the center of the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and the prosecution of Alabama’s Democratic former governor Don Siegelman.

I was directly involved in the 60 Minutes caper, having helped break the story that Ben Barnes, the Vietnam-era Speaker of the Texas House and later Lt. Governor, had admitted to helping George W. Bush get into the Texas National Guard. We thought that the 60 Minutes story would be a critical blow against Bush in his re-election campaign, and instead the story somehow became a tale of a forged version of a real document that right-wing bloggers instantly caught, supposedly by catching an on-screen glance that revealed a font face that didn’t exist at the time of the document’s creation.

60 Minutes thought it had carefully vetted the story and established that the document was true, but they never thought to check and see if the copy of the document they had was a forgery. Turns out that Bush’s people had had extensive access to his National Guard records in the 1990s and presumably left many such Easter eggs behind.

Point being, the guy was dangerous and a master of narrative manipulation who would stop at nothing to win elections and destroy his political opponents.

Now let’s compare and contrast with today’s GOP.

The Talarico Ohio Hospitalization Farce

The TL;DR version: James Talarico caught the flu and was off the campaign trail for 9 days. While he was away, a cast of online nitwits spawned a rumor out of whole cloth that he was in an Ohio mental hospital, and multiple big-time right-wingers, including Laura Loomer, Stephen Miller, the Paxton campaign, Elon Musk, and Paxton himself, amplified the tale.

This account did some interesting forensics on how the calumny spread online:

Watch MAGA X invent a scandal about James Talarico in real time.

For four days they teased it and built up to the big day. Paxton called him “missing.” Spencer Pratt’s “sources” put him in a mental health facility. Then, at 1:05 pm, Nick Sortor posted that an Ohio mental hospital “confirms” Talarico was discharged.

50 accounts pushed the claim within 20 minutes. Those posts have 9.3 million views.

The white dots are copy-pasted posts. There are 605 of them. One account posted the same text 83 times in under 2 hours.

The hospital says Talarico never received treatment there. Talarico says he’s never even been to Ohio.

This story eventually even made it to MSM. This is MAGA manufacturing an alternative reality in real time.

Full breakdown with the data here:
https://t.co/4ya0qvi14b

I pay for this data myself. If you want more of these, support links are in my bio.

@jamestalarico
@TeamTalaricoHQ
@krassenstein

— Louis Riel (@theGhostOfRiel) October 12, 2026

The masterminds are getting some richly deserved attention:

Behold, the Felonious Four, masterminds of the horrifically-botched Talarico Mental Health Hoax: @nicksortor, @RheinAmacher, @KenPaxtonTX & @TickleTexts. I don’t understand why such a wholesome, honest group would do something so dishonest. https://t.co/IkfRHzAYVw

— John Bourscheid 🇺🇸 🚀 (@bourscheid) October 12, 2026

Jacqueline Sweet has some juicy allegations about Nick Sortor. Transphobic journalist Jesse Singal has quite a bit of dirt on the woman on the lower right who goes by @TickleTexts

The caper is being linked directly to the Paxton campaign.

Karl Rove, they ain’t.

But the kerfuffle seems to have unleashed a whole torrent of no good, very bad press about Paxton, all of which has the nasty trait of being fact-based.

Paxton’s Remarkable News Cycle

I’m just going to bullet point the headlines, because the dude is drowning in scandal:

• Ken Paxton took campaign funds from donors with interests before his office, Washington Post
• Ken Paxton Partied in Dubai With Fugitives Ahead of High-Stakes Texas Senate Race, Wall Street Journal
• Ken Paxton’s Security for Travel Cost Taxpayers Millions. Just 1 in 6 of His Trips Had a Stated Business Purpose, ProPublica

He’s also closely tied to his peers at the top of the GOP ticket:

• How Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton Trumped Up Fraud Charges Against a Muslim Community, Texas Monthly
• How Dan Patrick Saved Ken Paxton’s Career, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

All I can say is, if Texas voters send this rancid scumbag to the US Senate, we deserve what we get.

Polling Shows Something Very Unusual

But the latest ReconMR/Siena poll has one particularly encouraging bit of news. It shows Talarico up 48% to 44% for Paxton, with Talarico down a point since September. But the cross-tabs showed something very interesting:

Dem: Talarico 92-2
Republicans: Paxton 87-7
Indies: Talarico 60-30

White: Paxton 49-45
Black: Talarico 67-19
Hispanic: Talarico 50-41

Austin region: Talarico 74-21
DFW: Talarico 49-41
Houston: Talarico 46-44
Rural: Paxton 55-37
San Antonio/South: Talarico 56-39

As former Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith pointed out, no Democrat running statewide has cracked 25% among rural voters in six straight elections.