DALLAS — Senate Management Fund, the tremendous PAC affiliated with Senate Majority Chief John Thune, is coming off the sidelines in Texas’ U.S. Senate race, inserting its first advert purchase of the final election in help of Ken Paxton.
Texas PAC, a brand new group related to SLF, on Friday bought an preliminary tranche of some $32 million price of broadcast TV adverts within the Dallas-Fort Price, Houston, San Antonio and Austin media markets, in response to the media monitoring agency AdImpact.
Senate Republicans had beforehand resisted spending cash in Texas. Thune publicly urged President Donald Trump’s political operation to deploy sources to assist Paxton, noting how costly political promoting is in a state with 20 media markets. MAGA Inc., the Trump-aligned tremendous PAC, purchased $10 million price of advert time in Texas over the weekend, its first spending in any common election race.
The brand new deployment from SLF is an acknowledgment of the tenuous state of affairs Republicans are going through within the Lone Star State, a longtime GOP bastion and barely a priority for the occasion’s leaders in Washington. However in a troublesome cycle nationally, Paxton now finds himself within the uncommon place of trailing Democrat James Talarico in most public polls, whereas additionally being vastly outspent by the Austin lawmaker and his allies.
Friday’s advert buys mark Senate Republicans’ first monetary engagement in Texas because the major.
Senators had been loyal to their longtime colleague, Sen. John Cornyn — a powerful fundraiser himself — and had supported him over Paxton, arguing the legal professional common’s historical past of authorized and moral scandals would each endanger the seat and make defending Texas a costlier proposition. OneNation, a darkish cash group affiliated with SLF that doesn’t must report its donors, spent thousands and thousands in the summertime of 2025 on optimistic adverts boosting Cornyn.
Whereas Thune and different Republicans acquired on board with Paxton after the legal professional common defeated Cornyn in a runoff, and hosted fundraisers for Paxton over the summer season, SLF had stayed out of the advert race.
The group made advert reservations months in the past in a lot of the different aggressive Senate battleground states, committing initially to a $342 million spend in eight contests — 5 the place the GOP is on protection, and three Democratic seats the occasion hopes to flip. SLF has continued to pump more cash into races together with Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina.
Talarico has used his monetary edge to dominate the airwaves, working a mixture of adverts introducing himself to voters and blaming Republicans for top on a regular basis prices. However the largest spenders in Republican politics — Trump’s political operation, Elon Musk’s PAC and now Senate Republicans’ exterior group — have come on-line in Texas previously two weeks, bringing the spending nearer to parity.
A spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, Senate Management Fund’s counterpart, mentioned Paxton had “dragged SLF into bailing out a seat that was presupposed to be sure-footed territory for the GOP.”
“They need to be sweating,” the spokesperson, Christyna Thompson, mentioned in an announcement. “SLF spent the spring attempting to kill Paxton’s marketing campaign. Now they’re caught with the rip-off artist Trump pressured on them.”
The Paxton marketing campaign, which might obtain a decrease unit fee on broadcast and radio than the PACs supporting him, has but to make a significant advert buy on tv.
This text first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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