It marked a screaming milestone in a two-decade political career that has seen Paxton harness the state’s increasingly conservative politics — and later the rise of Donald Trump — to stay in power longer than his vulnerabilities would suggest.
Like Trump, he retains a political base that is willing to overlook his personal failings as long as he’s a leader in fighting the left. And like Trump, he was impeached by the House but saved by a Senate where fellow Republicans were uninterested in crossing that influential base.
Maddux added that the House “made a tremendous miscalculation” on how the Senate would view the impeachment. “All they did was make [Paxton] stronger in the party,” Maddux said. “People don’t trust the allegations against him because people don’t trust institutions anymore,” Rinaldi said. He did not spend much time in the Senate, though, launching a campaign months later to replace Greg Abbott as attorney general in 2018. He went to a primary runoff against then-state Rep. Dan Branch, a more moderate Republican allied with the Bush family. Boosted by an implicit endorsement from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a rising star in the party, Paxton won the runoff by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.
If any of the charges bothered Republicans, they did not show it. Paxton did not draw any primary opposition in 2018. He still had an unexpectedly close general election, notching a 4-percentage-point win against Justin Nelson, a Democratic lawyer who had plastered Paxton’s mugshot on billboards across the state.
As Paxton’s problems worsened, he tied himself closer than ever to Trump. He filed a failed lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Trump’s reelection loss in four battleground states, and he spoke at a Washington, D.C., rally before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The Texas Bar Association has since sued alleging professional misconduct related to his effort to delegitimize the president.
Caleb Milne, a longtime Democratic activist in Collin County, said it has been “continuously frustrating” to watch Paxton evade accountability for so long, especially at the ballot box.
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