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The Texas Senate race.
Good Monday morning and welcome to Tangle. I’m Isaac Saul, excited for a big week in the Tangle universe: the announcement of a new newsletter, a speaking gig at the University of Wisconsin, and then a huge Friday edition that’s been in the works since May. It’s going to be a fun, newsy week. Buckle up.
Today, I’m diving into an issue close to my heart: Texas politics and the state’s Senate race. Plus, a reader question about the foreign emoluments clause and a feel-good story on a 100-year-old Brit who is still dancing.
It’s a 12-minute read.
Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Audrey Moorehead, Carina Pacheco, Russell Nystrom, Isaac Wood, and Bailey Saul edited or contributed to today’s newsletter.
Quick hits.
- President Donald Trump signed an executive order waiving the implementation of sanctions against Russia passed with bipartisan support by Congress last month. The president said he took the action to avoid driving Russia “away from the bargaining table.” (The order)
- On Friday, the White House said that Katie Zacharia is leaving her position as press secretary, five days after she began the job. (The departure)
- U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee condemned an attack by Israeli settlers in the West Bank that injured Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine and several Palestinians. Huckabee called for “investigation, arrest, and prosecution” of the attackers. (The incident) Separately, President Trump endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s elections. (The endorsement)
- Protests and riots continued across France, with police making 2,400 arrests. Approximately 1,000 police officers and hundreds of protesters have been injured, and one protester died from cardiac arrest. (The latest)
- Ukraine launched over 1,000 drones at Russia, striking an oil export terminal and a depot in St. Petersburg. (The strikes)
Isaac here — one thing I’ve learned running Tangle is that two people can read the same news and walk away with completely different understandings of what happened.
That’s why I like Ground News. It pulls together coverage from across the political spectrum and shows you how different outlets are framing the same story. My favorite feature is the Blindspot Report, which highlights stories getting significant attention from one side of the media ecosystem while receiving little coverage from the other.
If you want a better sense of not just how stories are covered, but which stories are being emphasized or ignored, check out Ground News.
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Today’s topic.
The Texas Senate race. With approximately two weeks until the midterm elections, state Rep. James Talarico (D) and state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) are in a tightly contested race that could determine control of the Senate. Recent financial disclosures show that Elon Musk has given nearly $160 million to support Paxton, while Talarico announced his campaign raised $64 million in Q3 2026. Early voting in Texas begins on Monday.
Back up: Talarico and Paxton are running to replace Sen. John Cornyn (R), who Paxton defeated in the Republican Senate primary. No Democrat has won a statewide office in Texas since 1994.
Campaign finance filings released last week revealed that Musk has donated $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, Senate Republicans’ primary super PAC, which has sent the money to Texas PAC, a group supporting Paxton (Musk has given more through other groups). Separately, Talarico’s $64 million Q3 fundraising is the largest third-quarter fundraising ever by a Senate candidate. Talarico has raised $134.3 million in total to date. Overall advertising spending on the race recently surpassed $500 million.
An October CBS News poll found Talarico with a 51%–49% lead over Paxton among likely voters. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Cook Political Report both rate the race as a toss-up after classifying it as “lean Republican” earlier in the campaign.
On Friday, October 9, Talarico resumed public campaigning after a nearly two-week absence while sick with the flu. His campaign said he began feeling ill after a September 29 fundraiser in New York, went to urgent care when he returned to Texas, then spent the beginning of October recovering at home. After Paxton and others began questioning his absence, conservative accounts on X promoted a claim that he was at a mental health facility in Ohio. The facility denied that Talarico had ever visited, and The New York Times confirmed that security footage from outside Talarico’s home showed he had been at his residence during his absence.
Separately, Paxton has been criticized for alleged ethical violations, including a 2015 indictment for securities fraud and whistleblower complaints of bribery and abuse of office, for which he was impeached by the Texas state House. On Monday, October 12, The Wall Street Journal shared video of Paxton at a 2024 New Year’s Eve celebration in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, alongside two men wanted in the U.S. for healthcare fraud and a woman believed to be his mistress. “Like President Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years,” Paxton senior adviser Nick Maddux said in response to the story. “Every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas.”
Below are views from the right, left, and writers in Texas on the Senate race. Then, Executive Editor Isaac Saul’s take.
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What the right is saying.
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In The American Spectator, Buck Throckmorton wrote “Talarico’s political reversals stir trouble in Texas Senate race.”
“Shortly before his disappearance [from the campaign trail,] Mr. Talarico embraced the ‘Trust me, I’m lying’ strategy regarding several of his previous radical positions, trying to temporarily position himself in the mainstream on issues such as sex-change surgery for minors,” Throckmorton said. “This is a fraught strategy that rarely works any longer. It comes across as pandering dishonesty to the moderates he is appealing to, while it is simultaneously received as betrayal by activists who will not tolerate political dissimulation.”
“It will take a near-perfect confluence of events for Talarico to eke out a victory. Disregarding the historic Democrat bias of the polls involved, Talarico would need massive Democrat turnout… [He] also must somehow capture a great many crossover Republican voters,” Throckmorton wrote. “There are not many Trump 2024 / Talarico 2026 voters, but that is what Talarico must have in great numbers.”
In The Washington Examiner, Abigail Ingram argued “Republicans are to blame” if Talarico wins.
“Talarico’s platform is simple. Elites are greedy, and good-hearted people are suffering as a result… Both the GOP and Democratic National Committee have, at times, employed similar messaging to appeal to well-intended voters. What is surprising is the response from Paxton,” Ingram said. “Paxton’s platform focuses, in large part, on the radicalism of his opponent’s political party. His would-be voters are confronted with one ask: keep Texas the same.
“But by campaigning on opposition to progress, Paxton might be inadvertently shooting himself in the foot,” Ingram wrote. “Texas Republicans are falling prey to the very same trap that doomed Democrats during the federal election in 2024… The DNC banked on widespread antipathy toward Donald Trump to keep itself in the White House. Americans lived through the alleged fluke that was Trump’s first presidential term. They would never willingly choose a redo — right? Wrong.”
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What the left is saying.
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In USA Today, Sara Pequeño wrote “polls are shouting in favor of Talarico in Texas. We'll see.”
“As we have learned time and again, polls aren’t always trustworthy. But one thing is clear: Talarico is moving the needle in a state known as a GOP stronghold. Even if we don’t know the outcome yet, it’s clear that he’s making Republicans sweat in a state they normally wouldn’t worry about,” Pequeño said. “The seminarian and member of the state House of Representatives is delivering a message of hope and progress, one that Texas Democrats have longed to hear for years now.”
“In some ways, this Texas Senate race feels like a repeat of the matchup between Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and former Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke in 2018. O’Rourke drummed up a lot of national media attention, only to lose by 2.6 points,” Pequeño wrote. “Talarico is polling better than O’Rourke did, while Trump is polling worse than he was in 2018. It doesn’t mean that Talarico is destined to win — I don’t think anybody believes that, even Democrats — but it’s clear that he has a shot. Republicans certainly seem to think so.”
In Salon, Sophia Tesfaye said “a viral Talarico hoax drowned out Paxton’s corruption story.”
“Right-wing influencers invented a story that Talarico had secretly checked into an Ohio psychiatric facility, and the search traffic around the Democrat exploded. The lie collapsed with almost embarrassing speed, and the people who spread it now face potential legal exposure,” Tesfaye wrote. “By the time the story fell apart, the damage had already been done… a Republican politician facing serious questions about his own conduct had been handed a convenient distraction.”
“The only people who benefit from a manufactured outrage are the people selling it and the politicians who can hide behind it,” Tesfaye said. “And hide is precisely what Paxton needed to do. On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that only days after being indicted for embezzlement, a fugitive donated $25,000 to the attorney general… [The story] was buried under a fabricated tale about his opponent’s mental health.”
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What writers in Texas are saying.
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In Texas Scorecard, Kenny Webster described “the tale of two Talaricos.”
“There appear to be two James Talaricos, and they do not always agree with each other… One of them says he’s against Big Tech, the other voted to give subsidies to data centers and takes money from Silicon Valley billionaires,” Webster wrote. “One of them says fossil fuels are destroying the planet and the Texas oil-and-gas industry is like cassette tapes that aren’t going to last, the other says he’ll protect oil-and-gas jobs and stand up to his own party if they mess with the industry.”
“[Talarico] stated that modern science recognizes six biological sexes. He opposed measures that would have required athletes to compete according to biological sex and called the concern manufactured,” Webster said. “The new Talarico now running statewide maintains that there are two sexes, that he would support a national ban on surgeries for minors, and that he opposes transgender athletes in girls’ sports when safety or fairness is endangered.”
The San Antonio Express-News editorial board argued “Talarico offers Texans a chance to choose integrity for U.S. Senate.”
“The choice before voters is ethical and moral, not merely political,” the board wrote. “Talarico is a Democrat through and through, and yet given the dynamics of this race, he is also a far more fitting successor to longtime Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn… Talarico brings a new brand of optimism in the form of a youthful former public school teacher who wears his Christian faith on his sleeve without feeling compelled to wipe it on others.”
“He is arguing Texans are more alike than they are different, and the most existential struggle in the Texas Legislature and U.S. Congress is not between Democrats and Republicans but rather between the top and the bottom,” the board said. “In Paxton, voters have one of the most breathtakingly flawed, immoral, cynical and ethically challenged candidates ever to run in a Texas statewide race… He has shown little regard for democracy, suing to overturn the 2020 presidential election and wasting millions of dollars to prosecute nonexistent voter fraud.”
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Reminder: This is where we share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, leave a comment or reply to this email.
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My rule for writing about Texas politics is pretty simple: I work under the assumption that it is a red state until that assumption stops being correct. The one time I deviated from the strategy, I got it woefully wrong.
I never got too worked up about the possibility that Beto O’Rourke, MJ Hegar, or Colin Allred could rewrite electoral maps. I won’t overestimate Talarico’s odds here, either, despite how unpopular President Trump is, or how bad of a candidate Paxton is, or how neck-and-neck this race seems.
Still, both candidates’ cases for victory are pretty easy to craft. Let’s start with the case for why Talarico is going to win:
President Trump is historically unpopular. Gasoline prices are high and diesel prices are through the roof, which is going to hurt Trump in a state with many long-haul drivers and pickup trucks. The president won Texas by 14 points in 2024, supported in large part by the Latino vote and anti-Kamala Harris sentiment. Now, Latinos are shifting back to the left, Democrats have a much stronger candidate on the ballot and we’re in a midterm election, which historically hurts the incumbent party. The closest analogue here might be the 2018 midterm race, when Trump was in office and O’Rourke came within 2.6 points of flipping Ted Cruz’s Senate seat, despite polls showing him much further behind. These races come down to turnout, and Democrats seem much more committed to voting than Republicans do this election season.
Speaking of Republicans, Ken Paxton is a disaster. He’s a comically corrupt (alleged) adulterer, in a national environment where voters say corruption is their number-one issue and in a state where traditional marital values are popular. Leaks from Paxton’s campaign portray a candidate who knows Trump is hurting him and can’t find his footing on the trail.
On paper, all the momentum and evidence look good for Talarico. While O’Rourke made noise, he never led a single poll; Talarico has had an advantage in the polls since August and is running in a much more favorable environment. Plus, the concocted conspiracy theory that Talarico was checked into a mental health facility reeks of desperation. If it weren’t for Elon Musk floating Paxton’s campaign, Talarico’s historic fundraising numbers would be a giant advantage and a huge story. In southwest Texas, the administration’s attempt to build a border wall in the Big Bend region and National Park is activating huge blowback from a bipartisan coalition of politicians, ranchers, hunters, river guides, small business owners, and even law enforcement. And while Trump accused Talarico of avoiding a debate, the reality is Talarico’s campaign has repeatedly tried to organize a debate with Paxton, and Paxton keeps dodging him — so much so that Talarico ended up doing a solo town hall with Texas voters that was aired on CNN last Wednesday.
Anecdotally, I’d add that Talarico’s campaign has a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among Democrats in Texas. I live in New Jersey full time but own property in West Texas, where I spent my summers growing up and now spend a lot of my winters. I’ve never felt anything like the current political momentum there, and it’s all going in one direction: an all-out effort to oust Gov. Greg Abbott (R), stop Ken Paxton, and rein in President Trump.
For Democrats, that all sounds pretty exciting. But the case for Paxton is still compelling.
At baseline, Texas is a red state. The state doesn’t collect party registration data, but Trump’s decisive victory in 2024 is one of the best measures of how voters break in statewide elections. A recent YouGov survey has 41% of likely voters in Texas identifying as Republican, 26% as Democrat, and 28% as independent — close, but still a healthy Republican advantage.
Meanwhile, the core issues that are driving Trump’s unpopularity — the war in Iran, affordability, and the immigration crackdown — are all softened in Texas. Yes, diesel prices are high nationally, and Texas has faced its own economic emergency over those costs. But unlike other states, Texas also has an upside from the war: Its oil production is thriving, meaning Texas producers can charge more, juice profits, and provide a lot of jobs. Trump’s nationally unpopular mass-deportation effort has a lot of support in Texas. And Trump, who is still good at turning out his base, has spent a lot of political capital throwing his weight behind Paxton.
And then there’s Musk. With nearly $160 million spent already, he’s single-handedly funding super PACs that are blanketing the state in pro-Paxton or anti-Talarico ads. And, if you watched the CNN town hall, voters were more focused on Talarico’s progressive social views (some from as recently as 2020 and 2021) than on his populist left economic views, which is a problem for his campaign. We’ve seen that focus on progressive social views work for the GOP before, and Republican groups are even running the same “He is for they/them” ad against Talarico that was famously effective against Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race. As I detailed in my latest YouTube video, fear is a powerful and effective campaign strategy, one Texas Republicans are deploying to a much higher degree than Talarico in this cycle (they even have AI-generated ads of Talarico defacing a Bible).
Finally, the “closeness” of the race could be a total mirage, anyway. In 2024, polling showed Trump with a roughly seven-point lead and he won by 14. In that year’s Senate race, polls showed Cruz up about four points on Colin Allred; he won by over eight points. In the 2022 governor’s race, Abbott led O’Rourke by an average of eight points; he won by about 11.
Which is all just to say that the polling may be tight (and point to a Talarico advantage), but I have less confidence in current polls than I have in a long time. I’m holding off on any midterm predictions until we get closer to Election Day, but this race obviously has the potential to tilt the Senate map — and make Texas history.
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Your questions, answered.
Who has standing to enforce the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses? Can any citizen in the United States sue to enforce it? Or is the only remedy the sure-to-fail impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate?
— Richard from Baltimore, MD
Editor Audrey Moorehead: This is a great question with a complicated answer.
For a quick overview: The Foreign Emoluments Clause is found in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution, and it prevents the president from receiving gifts, profits, or titles from foreign entities without congressional approval. The Domestic Emoluments Clause is found in Article II, Section 1, Clause 7, and it prevents the president from receiving any gifts, profits, or titles from Congress or state governments aside from his congressionally approved salary. Taken together, these clauses are intended to safeguard the office of the presidency from the potential for corruption or bribery, whether from foreign or domestic entities.
For most of their history, the Emoluments Clauses weren’t addressed directly in any litigation; instead, they were occasionally cited to make rhetorical points in different Supreme Court cases. That changed in 2017, when three separate lawsuits were filed arguing that newly sworn-in President Trump’s continued ownership of his business ventures constituted violations of the Emoluments Clauses. The nonprofit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed one as private citizens; Maryland and the District of Columbia filed another as states; and a group of members of Congress, led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), filed the last.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the lawmakers lacked standing to sue over the Emoluments Clauses due to insufficient injury, ending the third lawsuit. In the CREW case, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that certain private citizens in the hospitality industry did have standing to sue, but the decision was split. Similarly, a federal district court allowed D.C. and Maryland’s lawsuits to go forward.
Lawyers representing President Trump appealed these decisions to the Supreme Court in 2020, arguing that private citizens and states should not have standing to sue. However, the petition did not reach the Court’s private conferences until December, when Trump’s term was about to end. Then-Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall filed another petition asking the justices to wait until after Biden was sworn in, then vacate the lower courts’ rulings on the basis that they were moot once Trump was no longer president. The Supreme Court did so, vacating the rulings without issuing its own judgment on standing.
In sum, private citizens and states could technically try again to sue the president through the Emoluments Clauses. However, organizations may now think they’re unlikely to succeed because of the length and complexity of the process. Instead, Congressional legislation to better define and enforce the Emoluments Clauses may be the answer.
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The extras.
- One year ago today we had just published a Friday edition highlighting two expert perspectives on the war in Ukraine.
- The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was the new episode of Suspension of the Rules.
- Nothing to do with politics: A photographer is building a “photo ark” of thousands of wildlife species.
- Our last survey: 3,915 readers responded to our survey on the U.S.–Russia diesel deal, with 95% saying they oppose the deal and don't think it will bring down energy prices. “Trump is doing anything and everything he can think of in an attempt to save face in the midterms, while selling out our sanctions leverage. Another move that proves that he values his own interests over the well-being of his country,” one respondent said. “Trump is hoping that making a deal with Putin will make [Putin] think about weakening his ties with China and North Korea… [But] I don’t think this will make Putin a friend of the USA exclusively,” said another.
Have a nice day.
Bernard Gilbert started dancing in 1942, after he broke his leg playing rugby at 16 years old. After his bone healed, he asked the doctor if he’d ever play again, and they told him he might want to go dancing instead. Gilbert said he laughed and told them he’d “never take up dancing.” But he took a class, married a ballroom dancer, and stuck with it. At 74 years old, Gilbert started teaching dance classes. On September 19, at 100 years old, he led over 200 people in a dancing flash mob in Worcester, England, to raise money for an Alzheimer’s charity. Gilbert said, “It was a wonderful event and the crowd did well to keep up with me.” SWNS has the story.