Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton is setting off on an 18-day bus tour Saturday that will take him to over 30 stops across the state leading up to Election Day, according to plans first shared with The Texas Tribune Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Paxton will kick off the \u201cCome and Take It\u201d bus tour in Rockwall two days before the start of early voting on Monday.<\/p>\n
Evoking the Texas Revolution, Paxton\u2019s closing message to Texans draws on his record as attorney general of suing opioid companies, Big Tech and the Biden administration: \u201cWhen they come after Texans,\u201d his campaign said, \u201cKen Paxton goes after them.\u201d<\/p>\n
He plans to close out the tour with a stop at the Alamo on Nov. 2, the eve of Election Day.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Texas, \u2018come and take it\u2019 has never been a slogan,\u201d Paxton said in a statement. \u201cIt\u2019s a promise.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Friday, Paxton\u2019s opponent, Democrat James Talarico, announced his own get-out-the-vote push, dubbed the \u201cClear Eyes, Full Hearts\u201d tour \u2014 a reference to Texas\u2019 beloved Friday night lights football tradition.<\/p>\n
\u201cTexans are tired of being divided into teams \u2014 red versus blue, left versus right, rural versus urban,\u201d Talarico said. \u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re traveling across the state to unite working people onto one team. I encourage Texans across the political spectrum to join us at one of our stops as we work to defeat the politics of division.\u201d<\/p>\n
Talarico plans to kick off his swing in Plano on Sunday and hit 20 cities before closing out in Austin the night before Election Day.<\/p>\n
Paxton\u2019s callback to symbols of Texan defiance are laden with symbolism as he finds himself in a dead heat with Talarico, who is seeking his party\u2019s first statewide win since 1994. Public polls have shown the Austin lawmaker narrowly leading throughout the race, and Paxton has often framed the campaign as a last stand against a Democratic siege.<\/p>\n
In a statement announcing his bus tour, Paxton contrasted his candidacy with that of Talarico, whom he accused of being \u201cbankrolled by national Democrats and Silicon Valley billionaires\u201d \u2014 a reference to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman\u2019s $11.5 million in donations to a super PAC supporting Talarico. (Talarico\u2019s campaign has emphasized that the Austin Democrat \u201chas no control over contributions to any super PAC\u201d under federal law and wants to ban all super PACs.)<\/p>\n
\u201cHe won\u2019t fight for you. He\u2019ll fight for them,\u201d Paxton said. \u201cSo my message to anyone who comes after Texas is the same one Texans have been sending for almost two hundred years: Come and take it.\u201d<\/p>\n
National Republican power brokers, including President Donald Trump, Senate Republican leadership and Elon Musk, have poured over $214 million into Texas in recent weeks, tapping affiliated PACs to fund an advertising barrage aimed at promoting Paxton and attacking Talarico, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. Much of that spending has been backed by Musk, the Texas-based Tesla and SpaceX founder and the world\u2019s richest man. In a Sept. 24 audio recording leaked to Politico last week, Paxton complained that his campaign was \u201call coming from D.C.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has made several stops in Texas now in a bid to gin up Republican turnout and support Paxton, following a midterm convention in Dallas that prominently featured the attorney general.<\/p>\n
A prolific fundraiser, Talarico, meanwhile, is relying on his own campaign account for most of his ad spending, with $81 million booked on the airwaves so far. The super PAC in his corner has dropped an additional $8 million, while Senate Democratic leadership has put $3.5 million into the race so far.<\/p>\n
Stops on Paxton\u2019s tour will feature to-be-announced special guests and include events in the following cities: Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, Amarillo, Lubbock, Odessa, San Angelo, Abilene, Wichita Falls, Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Corpus Christi, Victoria, Tyler and Beaumont.<\/p>\n
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton is setting off on an 18-day bus tour Saturday that will take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[75195,1967,82,84,83,3602,92,3028],"class_list":["post-469203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-james-talerico","tag-ken-paxton","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news","tag-texas-tribune","tag-top-story","tag-typedaily"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}