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Our verdict

nobody gets our endorsement

Election Day is November 3. Early voting in Texas runs through October 30. This is the whole race — the platforms, the records, the worst claims against each man, and what the sources actually show. LiberalMind endorses none of them. Read the research, and decide which flaw you can live with.

How Texas got here

This seat is open because four-term Republican Sen. John Cornyn lost his own party's nomination. Attorney General Ken Paxton beat him in the May 26 Republican runoff, 63.8% to 36.2% — making Cornyn the first Texas incumbent senator to lose renomination since 1970.

On the Democratic side, state Rep. James Talarico won the March 3 primary over Rep. Jasmine Crockett with roughly 52% of the vote and resigned his Texas House seat to run full time.

The third name printed on the ballot is Libertarian Ted Brown, a retired insurance adjuster from Austin. Four independent write-in candidates are also certified, but their names do not appear on the ballot.

Every major race rater — Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, Sabato's Crystal Ball — calls this a toss-up. Democrats have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1988. A U.S. senator serves six years, votes on every federal law and budget, and confirms federal judges and cabinet secretaries. Whoever wins this seat will be voting on all of that into the 2030s.

Why the seat is open: the Cornyn lesson

You cannot understand this race until you understand why a 24-year incumbent with a conservative voting record was thrown out by his own voters. It was not Donald Trump. It was one bill.

On May 24, 2022, a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In the weeks that followed, John Cornyn became the lead Republican negotiator of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, working with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut. President Biden signed it on June 25, 2022, and Democrats celebrated it — in Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's words — as "the most significant gun safety legislation in 30 years."

Here is what the law actually did, from the Senate's own summary of its provisions:

The negotiators insisted the bill "will not infringe on any law-abiding American's Second Amendment rights." Texas gun owners read the same text and reached the opposite conclusion: the federal government was now paying states to construct firearm-confiscation machinery, and expanding the federal database that decides who may exercise a constitutional right — a right the Constitution says "shall not be infringed." Cornyn had form here: his 2017 "Fix NICS" deal had already, in the words of Texas Gun Rights' later open letter to President Trump, flooded "the federal 'prohibited persons' list with millions of Americans — including veterans — without due process."

The reaction was immediate and it was Texan, not Washingtonian. Cornyn was booed at the Texas Republican state convention in Houston in 2022. The Republican Party of Texas formally rebuked him for the bill. Texas Gun Rights spent the next three years organizing against him, writing to Trump in May 2025 to beg him not to endorse Cornyn's re-election. Cornyn added a second offense in May 2023, telling reporters the party needed an alternative for 2024 and that Trump's time had passed — a remark Trump later threw back at him: "He was not supportive of me when times were tough."

But note the order of events, because the national press gets it backwards. The constituents moved in 2022. The organizing ran for three years. Cornyn narrowly survived the March 3 primary, 42% to 40.5%. Only then — on May 19, one week before the runoff — did Trump's endorsement of Paxton land. The endorsement followed the voters' lead; it did not create it. That is what elected officials are supposed to do, and it is exactly what Cornyn failed to do in 2022: he represented Washington's grief politics back to Texas instead of representing Texas to Washington.

Cornyn's voting record was nearly perfectly aligned with the conservative agenda for 24 years. It bought him nothing, because on the one occasion he reached across the aisle, he reached for the Constitution — and his constituents never forgave it. That is why this seat is open, and it is the standard every man below should be measured against: will he represent Texas, or himself?

Ken Paxton (Republican)

His platform: Work with President Trump to cut taxes, finish the border wall, and carry out deportations. Take on large drug and food companies. Double the child tax credit. As attorney general since 2015, Paxton built his profile filing more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed him on October 18, calling him "a defender of free enterprise and the pro-growth policies that empower American businesses to thrive."

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: He sold his office to a donor. In fall 2020, seven senior officials in Paxton's own office reported him to law enforcement, stating their good-faith belief that he was violating bribery and abuse-of-office laws in his dealings with Austin developer Nate Paul, a $25,000 campaign donor. Four officials were fired and sued. The Republican-led Texas House voted 121–23 to impeach Paxton in May 2023 on 20 articles, including bribery and abuse of public trust. The Texas Senate acquitted him on all 16 articles it tried — conviction required 21 votes, and no article received more than 14. The U.S. Department of Justice investigated and declined to prosecute, a decision made in the final weeks of the Biden administration. Paul himself pleaded guilty in his own case in April 2025, receiving four months of home confinement and a $1 million fine.

But one part of this is not allegation — it is a court judgment. On April 4, 2025, a Travis County judge awarded the four fired aides $6.6 million, finding that Paxton's office violated the Texas Whistleblower Act. Paxton's office conceded liability rather than have him testify under oath in a deposition. He called the judgment "ridiculous," appealed, then dropped the appeal in July 2025, leaving it final. Texas taxpayers will pay it.

Claim: He was indicted for felony fraud. True, with an ending his critics skip. A Collin County grand jury indicted Paxton in July 2015 on three felony counts — two alleging he persuaded investors to buy stock in a technology startup without disclosing he would be paid in shares, and one for failing to register as an investment adviser. He never went to trial. In March 2024 he accepted a pretrial intervention agreement: 100 hours of community service, 15 hours of legal ethics coursework, and roughly $271,000 in restitution — with no plea and no admission of guilt. The charges were dismissed in June 2025. And the SEC's parallel civil case over the same conduct was dismissed by a federal judge with prejudice, in Paxton's favor, ruling he had no legal duty to disclose the compensation arrangement.

Claim: His own wife says he committed adultery. This is a court filing, not an attack ad. State Sen. Angela Paxton filed for divorce on July 10, 2025, after 38 years of marriage, alleging in the filing that her husband "committed adultery," and announced publicly that she had filed "on biblical grounds." The alleged affair partner had been employed by Nate Paul — the connection that tied the personal scandal to the impeachment. In September 2026, Angela Paxton urged Republican women to support him anyway, in her words: "It's not the people, it's the seat."

The flaw, plainly: Paxton's platform is the conservative platform — taxes, border, federal overreach, free enterprise. His history is a decade-long record of legal jeopardy survived rather than innocence established, ending in a taxpayer-funded judgment his office chose not to contest under oath. The risk with Paxton is not what he says he'll vote for. It's whether the man in the seat represents Texas, or himself.

James Talarico (Democratic)

His platform: His first bills, he says, would ban super PACs and corporate PACs and end partisan gerrymandering. He campaigns on letting every American join Medicare, lowering prescription drug costs, and cutting taxes for working families. On the border, he supports more Border Patrol agents and immigration judges, expanded surveillance technology, and targeted enforcement. His legislative record is real: in nearly seven years in the Texas House his name appeared on more than 500 bills, he passed 60 into law — including an insulin price cap — and more than three-quarters of the bills he co-wrote had at least one Republican author or sponsor.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: He supported taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries on young children. This is the lead Republican ad, from Texas PAC, a group connected to the Senate Leadership Fund. PolitiFact examined it and found it distorts his record. The ad cites Talarico's 2023 vote against SB 14, a bill that banned all gender-transition care for minors — puberty blockers and hormone therapy as well as surgery. Surgery on young children is exceedingly rare, and no medical guidelines support it. Talarico voted for all 18 Democratic amendments to the bill and says he supported narrowing it to ban surgeries only — the position he states today.

Claim: He said there are six biological sexes. The quote is authentic. In a 2021 legislative hearing, Talarico said "modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes — in fact, there are six," listing chromosome combinations beyond XX and XY. Chromosomal variations exist; FactCheck.org notes that describing them as six distinct biological sexes is an oversimplification. In September 2026, Talarico disavowed the statement on Fox News: "There are not six sexes, there are two."

Claim: He said God is nonbinary. Also authentic — said during an October 2021 House debate, as a theological argument that biblical descriptions of God include masculine and feminine imagery and that human categories cannot define God. Paxton's advertising splices it together with "God is not a Christian," a line from a different event — an October 2023 sermon — using an AI-generated depiction of Talarico to make separate remarks look like one presentation. FactCheck.org found the quotations real but stripped of context, with wording added to connect them.

The fabricated tier. Two claims against Talarico are not distortions; they are inventions. A White House official posted that Talarico is the Democrats' "first transgender Senate candidate" who is transitioning — false on every factual level; he is cisgender and heterosexual. And according to the New York Times, a covert Russian influence operation known as Storm-1516 has been circulating deepfake videos alleging misconduct by Talarico, which intelligence officials say are unfounded. A separate viral claim that he had checked into an Ohio mental hospital was debunked, and some accounts that spread it apologized.

The flaw, plainly: Talarico's problem is not a quote, and it isn't presentation. It's that his platform is the thing itself: Medicare opened to every American as a first principle, and a worldview — stated in his own words, in the legislature and from the pulpit — that runs against the values of the voters this publication serves. A candidate can walk back a sentence. He cannot walk back what the sentences add up to. Disagreement this deep isn't a flaw to weigh. It's a disqualification. Texas and the nation cannot afford Talarico's destruction.

Ted Brown (Libertarian)

His platform, in his own words: "Personal freedom, economic freedom, digital privacy, legalizing marijuana, the rule of law, limited constitutional government, and a peaceful anti-war foreign policy." His stated top priorities: end deficit spending with massive budget cuts across the board — "the $40 trillion national debt is unsustainable" — and reassert constitutional separation of powers by limiting presidential emergency powers, executive orders, tariff authority, and warmaking powers. He would repeal the federal income tax and abolish the IRS, replacing them with nothing. He would bring all U.S. troops home from overseas and protect Americans' personal data from government surveillance. In an interview this week, he argued for returning to an Ellis Island–style immigration system and ending America's military involvement in the Middle East.

His record: Brown ran for this same seat in 2024 and received more than 267,000 votes — a record for a Libertarian Senate candidate in Texas. He is polling well behind Paxton and Talarico, in a race the raters call a toss-up between the two of them. There are no significant negative claims circulating against Brown, because campaigns do not spend money attacking a candidate they don't fear.

The flaw, plainly: Brown's principles are the right principles — smaller government, constitutional limits, your money and your data left alone. His gap is defense. "Bring all U.S. troops home" is not a defense policy; it is the absence of one. A Texas senator votes on war powers, military funding, and treaties in a world that contains real adversaries, and Brown's answer to all of it is withdrawal. There is also the practical gap: he would arrive in Washington with no caucus, no coalition, and no path to confirming a single judge or passing a single cut. His votes would be statements, not outcomes.

The verdict: nobody gets our endorsement

Three men. Three different flaws.

Paxton's flaw is character: the right policies carried by a man whose own history — conceded judgments, an impeachment by his own party's House, his own wife's filing — says he may represent himself first.

Talarico's flaw is values: not a defect in how he'd do the job, but in what he believes the job is for. For voters who hold the Constitution, the free market, and the Christian faith as the ground they stand on, he is not a lesser option. He is not an option.

Brown's flaw is capability: the right instincts on government, taxation, and privacy, paired with no grip on defense and no machinery to turn a vote into a result.

So we will not tell you this race has a good answer. It has a research answer. Here are the facts, here are the claims, and here is what the sources show — the rest is yours. Vote early. Research your candidates. And then vote for the one whose flaw you can most live with: out of Paxton or Brown, the man whose defect you judge Texas can survive for six years.

The seat is a poison pill. Swallow it with your eyes open.

Sources

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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