John Cornyn is currently wiping the floor with Ken Paxton, at least when it comes to the only metric Lubbock’s elite actually care about: cold, hard cash. Cornyn pulled in a staggering $9 million this quarter, while Paxton managed to scrape together a measly $2.2 million. Apparently, being the “establishment” guy pays significantly better than being the guy who spends half his life in a courtroom.
Cornyn is backed by the old-school Texas monarchy—George W. Bush and Karl Rove are opening their checkbooks like it’s 2004 and we’re all still pretending to enjoy the War on Terror. Meanwhile, Paxton is trying to spin his financial dehydration as a “grassroots movement,” which is political speak for “nobody with a yacht is returning my calls.” It’s a classic Lubbock-style showdown: the guy with the country club membership versus the guy who’s just happy he hasn’t been served with new papers today.
While these two are slap-fighting over millions, Democrat James Talarico is sitting on a $27 million mountain of cash. He raised triple what Cornyn did, which is truly impressive considering half the people in West Texas still think a “Democrat” is a mythological creature like the chupacabra or a Lubbock driver who actually uses a turn signal. While the Republicans burn their cash trying to out-conservative each other, Talarico is just over there building a war chest that could probably buy out every cotton gin in the South Plains.
The runoff is already turning into a deluge of negative ads, mostly funded by Cornyn’s well-heeled PAC friends. They’ve spent millions to remind us why we should find Paxton’s legal drama exhausting, while Paxton’s PAC has spent about $22,000 on airtime. For those of you doing the math at home, that’s barely enough to rent a single billboard on I-27 for a weekend. If you haven’t seen a “Ken is a Crook” ad yet, just wait—Cornyn has enough money to make sure you see them in your dreams.
Isn’t it heartwarming to know that while our local potholes are deep enough to swallow a Tahoe, we’re spending upwards of $70 million just to decide which millionaire gets to ignore us from D.C. for the next six years?
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