Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s long list of scandals has caused unease among some Senate Republicans. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, for example, said in May that Paxton “could reasonably be indicted for a felony.” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina added, “To call Paxton ethically challenged is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.”
Complicating matters for the Texan is that his list of controversies continues to grow. Last week, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported that Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live “while voting in six elections in the past two years.” (A spokesperson for the Republican called the story “a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story” but offered nothing of substance to challenge its accuracy.)
This might not seem especially notable, were it not for the fact that Paxton, just months earlier, reminded Texans that under state law, “you must register to vote using the address where you reside.”
This dovetailed with related questions about why the state attorney general and his now-estranged wife declared three separate homes as their primary residence in mortgage documents, a practice his party has, in other situations, characterized as an outrageous abuse.
Stepping back, however, the reporting sparked a related question: Just how many homes does Paxton own?
His 2026 opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, recently sat down with MS NOW’s Jen Psaki and offered an answer: “Since taking office, Ken Paxton has now become a multimillionaire, while our pay has remained stagnant for years, for decades. He now owns 11 homes, while most Texans can’t afford one,” he said.
Talarico has said this before — as Texans probably know, it’s become a standard line in his stump speech — but it got me wondering: Is that correct?
According to publicly available documents, including financial disclosure filings, the answer is yes. Paxton, either in his personal capacity or through the trust that oversees his assets, owns five homes in Texas, three in Florida, two in Utah and one in Oklahoma. (Those same publicly available materials also point to a lot in Hawaii, although there does not appear to be any structure on the property.)
The Wall Street Journal similarly reported last fall, “The Paxtons now own at least 11 residential properties around the U.S. with an assessed value of $7.5 million.”
To date, Paxton has not made any public effort to contest Talarico’s talking point.
MaddowBlog reached out to the Texas Republican’s Senate campaign multiple times to ask about his real estate holdings and how he came to own so many homes, but these requests for comment have so far gone ignored.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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