Texas Senate Race Comparison: Paxton vs. Talarico

A significant US Senate race is coming up soon – James Talarico versus Ken Paxton. Since most people don’t have the time and resources to do a deep dive into the two candidates, I did the work for you. These are ONLY the facts. I’m not pushing either candidate on you. Take a look at their voting histories, whose funding their campaigns, and everything else. Decide who should be speaking for you in the US Senate.

Campaign finance is public record. The FEC publishes every contribution to every federal candidate, and the Texas Ethics Commission does the same at the state level. Journalists have compiled the filings into readable databases. So we’ll take a look at all that data.

How the Money Actually Flows

Three channels matter in a federal race. Direct contributions to the campaign are capped at a few thousand dollars per individual. Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts supporting a candidate but are legally barred from coordinating with the campaign. And dark money groups can fund super PACs without disclosing their own donors.

In this race, direct PAC money to both candidates is minor: about $359,000 to Talarico and $241,000 to Paxton. The meaningful differences are in the composition of individual donations and in who funds each candidate’s aligned super PAC: Lone Star Rising for Talarico, which raised $21.7 million through June 30, and Lone Star Liberty for Paxton, which raised $10.3 million.

Paxton’s Ledger

Per the Texas Tribune’s analysis of the filings, 88% of Paxton’s contributions came from donors giving more than $200. The largest sources of support, from the public record:

• Oil and gas billionaires with a long-term political project. Tim Dunn, CEO of CrownQuest Operating, and the Wilks family, who built their fortune in fracking, have financed Paxton’s career since its beginning. Their PAC, Defend Texas Liberty, raised $11 million between 2020 and 2022, more than $10 million of it from Dunn and Wilks, and it passed $1.25 million plus a $750,000 loan to Paxton. In 2014, Dunn arranged a $1 million loan that reached Paxton in the closing days of his first attorney general primary. Over the past decade these donors have put more than $100 million into groups working to move Texas politics rightward, including efforts to restrict wind and solar development and to advance causes associated with Christian nationalism. Their policy goals are not hidden; they are extensively documented, and they are the reasonable baseline for what this money expects.
• The Milton family. Trevor Milton was convicted of securities and wire fraud in 2022 for defrauding investors in his electric vehicle company. He and his wife had given more than $1.8 million to a pro-Trump group; he was pardoned in early 2025. This cycle he gave Paxton $100,000, and his wife gave $500,000 to the pro-Paxton super PAC.
• Anonymous entities. Three LLCs named Two Toads, SSC, and Baloney Feathers each gave $100,000 to Lone Star Liberty on the same day. All three are registered to a single PO Box in Lubbock and have no other political activity on record. Whoever is behind them chose a structure whose only function is to keep their identity off the filing.
• An industry with active business before the state. Through June, Paxton’s committees received at least $448,000 from executives and political committees of data center companies, during a period when data center growth, and its demands on Texas water and power, has become one of the state’s most contested issues. Paxton’s public position on data centers has remained noncommittal. It’s worth noting that 60% of Texas voters oppose data centers being built near their communities.

Geographically, 83% of Paxton’s itemized contributions came from within Texas, with the largest out-of-state amounts from Florida and Utah.

Talarico’s Ledger

Talarico pledged to refuse corporate PAC money for this race. He’s raised over $70 million from more than 1.5 million donations across roughly 780,000 individual contributors. His campaign reports that 97% of donations were $100 or less and that the most common donor profession is teaching. The Tribune’s independent analysis of the filings found that 51% of his total came from donors giving under $200. By donor composition, this is one of the most small-dollar-driven Senate campaigns in the country with the following exceptions:

• A tech billionaire’s super PAC money. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman gave $10 million to Lone Star Rising, the largest single super PAC contribution of the second quarter. Hoffman is a longtime Democratic megadonor whose stated objective is electing Democrats nationally.
• Pre-pledge interest money. In his 2024 state House race, before the Senate run and the pledge, Talarico accepted $59,000 from Texas Sands PAC, the casino-interest group funded by Miriam Adelson, along with donations from H-E-B chairman Charles Butt, a billionaire whose principal cause is opposing school vouchers. Talarico’s positions on both issues predate the checks, which is the standard defense in cases like this, and here the record supports it: his opposition to vouchers is documented across years of votes and floor speeches. Still, the money is on the ledger and belongs in this accounting.
• Out-of-state money. Roughly 45% of his itemized contributions came from outside Texas (the Tribune puts his in-state share at 55%), led by California and New York. His campaign has been nationalized, and national money followed.

What Each Ledger Predicts, and What the Record Shows

The reason to study campaign finance at all is that money is a prediction about future behavior. So the fair test is to compare each candidate’s funding against his record.

Paxton’s ledger predicts:

• Fidelity to oil and gas interests.
• Resistance to renewables.
• Accommodation of the data center industry.
• Alignment with his patrons’ religious-political agenda.

His record as attorney general is consistent with all of it. It’s the system functioning as designed: sustained, concentrated funding from a small set of interests, followed by policy behavior those interests favor. I’m not suggesting it’s cause and effect, I’m stating there is 100% alignment between what he supports and those who support him.

Talarico’s ledger, dominated by small donors, predicts less. Small donors don’t share a legislative agenda; they share an enthusiasm. So the informative cases are the ones where his votes ran against organized money. Three stand out.

• He has Type 1 diabetes and was the first Texas legislator to file an insulin price cap bill, then helped build bipartisan support for the version that became law, a $25 monthly cap authored by Republican Sen. Lois Kolkhorst.
• When the Legislature moved to ban consumable THC products, a measure opposed by the $8 billion Texas hemp industry but championed by his chamber’s leadership, he argued against it on the floor on limited-government grounds, citing President Trump’s own statements against unnecessary marijuana arrests.
• And when a colleague proposed mandating the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, Talarico, a seminary graduate, opposed it as “unconstitutional,” “un-American,” and “deeply un-Christian.”

I’m an atheist, and I’ve written before about why the United States was not founded as a Christian nation. A sincere believer defending church-state separation against his own coalition is taking a position that costs him and gains him nothing with his critics. That pattern is difficult to reconcile with any theory that he’s not genuine.

Healthcare Money, Both Sides

Since healthcare is the issue where the money question gets asked most, I didn’t rely on anyone else’s summary. I downloaded the FEC’s bulk itemized-contribution data for the 2025-26 cycle and ran the identical analysis on both candidates’ committees: every itemized individual receipt whose self-reported employer or occupation matches healthcare terms (physician, hospital, pharma, clinic, dental, nursing, medical devices, diagnostics, and so on).

Same keywords, same rules, both sides. Refunds and accounting memo entries excluded. For Paxton that covers his campaign, his joint fundraising committee, and his leadership PAC; for Talarico, his campaign and his own victory fund, excluding multi-candidate funds he shares with other Senate campaigns.

Read that carefully, because it surprised me.

• Talarico has taken six times more healthcare money in absolute dollars. But look at the composition. His healthcare money is 13,182 contributions averaging $153, and his top healthcare donors are almost entirely practicing clinicians: physicians at Houston Methodist, Memorial Hermann, and Baylor College of Medicine, a physical therapist, a physician assistant, a dentist. That’s doctors donating the way his teachers donate.
• Paxton’s healthcare money is 411 contributions averaging $808, and his max-out donors are healthcare business owners: the chairman of a Houston hospital operator, a dental-management CEO, a specialty pharmacy owner. His single largest healthcare-linked backer is Jonathan Knutz, CEO of wound-care products company Legacy Medical Consultants, whose $14,000 direct maximum was a rounding error next to the $600,000 he gave the pro-Paxton super PAC, his largest political giving ever.

I’ll label the interpretation as an inference, since occupations are self-reported and I’m reading a pattern from donor lists and averages rather than interviewing anyone. But if you’re paranoid: thousands of physicians, are funding a candidate who wants a public health option and price negotiation, which you’d think runs directly against their own billing interest. And the candidate who plans to leave the existing system untouched is backed by healthcare executives.

Where They Stand: The Side-by-Side

Money tells you who’s invested. Positions tell you what you’re buying. Both candidates have now published economic agendas, so most of this comes straight from their own platforms and the reporting on them.

A few observations the table itself can’t make.

First, on healthcare, the philosophical difference is total. Talarico’s answer to medical costs is to change the system: a public insurance option, restored subsidies, negotiated prices. Paxton’s answer is to leave the system as it is and let you deduct what it does to you. A $25,000 medical deduction is worth the most to someone with high income and high bills, and worth little to a family that doesn’t itemize or doesn’t earn enough for the deduction to matter. Whatever you think of a public option, one of these plans addresses prices and the other addresses tax paperwork. And recall from the donor analysis above which plan the healthcare executives are funding.

Second, on tariffs, one candidate has a position and the other has an allegiance. Talarico’s stance is specific and checkable: repeal, rebate, trade partnerships. Paxton’s platform doesn’t engage the question independently; it commits to the president’s agenda as a package. If tariffs are raising your costs, that difference matters, and Fox News polling shows inflation and prices are the top issue for 37% of Texas voters, double any other concern.

Third, the same asymmetry shows up on war. Agree or disagree with Talarico’s foreign policy, it exists in writing: Iran, Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, NATO, veterans. Paxton’s does not, in a race that could decide control of the Senate during active negotiations with Iran. A voter can evaluate a stated position. Nobody can evaluate a blank page.

The Conclusion the Documents Support

Is big money present on both sides of this race? Yes, demonstrably. A super PAC backed by a tech billionaire supports Talarico; his pre-Senate career includes interest-group money. No serious accounting calls his campaign pure. However, there is no actual corporate money – so in theory, nothing owed to any special interest.

But “both candidates touch big money” and “all candidates are equally bought” are different claims, and the second one fails on the evidence.

• One ledger is 88% large donors, anchored by two billionaires with a documented nine-figure policy agenda, supplemented by anonymous LLCs and an industry with pending business before the government.
• The other is majority small-dollar, led by teachers and, it turns out, thousands of physicians donating against their own billing interest, with its largest concentration of big money coming from a national partisan donor rather than a regulated industry, attached to a candidate whose recorded votes have repeatedly run against organized money.

Those ledgers are not the same, and concluding that they are requires not reading them. Every claim in this post traces to FEC filings, state ethics records, or published analyses of those filings, and the healthcare numbers come from the FEC’s own bulk data, which anyone can download and check.

One final thought – if you think Doctors and Teachers are smart… well, they are clearly supporting Talarico.