Within hours of Ken Paxton defeating Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday’s Senate Republican primary runoff in Texas, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm deleted at least nine press releases and digital ads from its website that had attacked Paxton — an erasure of a monthslong opposition campaign that the committee had waged against the man it will now help elect.
Each page critical of Paxton returned a 404 error on the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s website Wednesday morning. The NRSC’s site appears functional otherwise, with a statement posted Wednesday morning attacking Paxton’s Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico.
The cleanup comes on the heels of President Donald Trump jumping into the race last week to endorse Paxton despite the NRSC spending millions defending the incumbent. Before the runoff, Senate leaders believed Trump would stay on the sidelines.
Representatives for the NRSC and Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Among the deleted NRSC pages was a statement from July 2025 in which NRSC communications director Joanna Rodriguez called Paxton’s conduct toward his wife “truly repulsive and disgusting” after Angela Paxton filed for divorce on what she described as “biblical grounds,” alleging adultery.
A second deleted statement from later that month attacked Paxton over an Associated Press investigation that found that he and his estranged wife had listed three properties as their primary residences, allowing them to improperly lock in lower mortgage interest rates.
“A lot of people who trust Ken Paxton get lied to, so it isn’t shocking to learn he is also cheating on his taxes and personal finances,” Rodriguez wrote at the time. “Ken Paxton’s betrayals of the public trust just keep coming.”
The deleted pages span nearly a year of opposition research. Among those now returning 404 errors: an August 2025 digital ad titled “Cornyn Fights — Paxton Folds"; a September 2025 release calling Paxton’s personal attorney a “deranged Trump-hater"; ads attacking Paxton for directing taxpayer-funded grants to groups providing “gender-affirming” resources to children; and a piece from April amplifying a Daily Caller report on Paxton’s Democratic-linked donor money.
The cleanup reflects the uncomfortable position Senate Republicans now occupy. Throughout the primary, Cornyn and his allies argued that Paxton’s scandals — including an indictment and an impeachment — and weak fundraising would force the GOP to potentially spend over $100 million in Texas — money Republican leaders would rather deploy to swing states like Georgia, Ohio and North Carolina.
With control of the Senate on the line and polling showing Talarico running neck-and-neck with Paxton, some Republicans have begun throwing their support behind a candidate they had bitterly opposed before.
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