Tim Dunn's Enterprise Wants To Bill Everyone Else for Ken Paxton

Erick Erickson opened this week's newsletter with the only scene that mattered:

"In the middle of the Senate race his own supporters call existential, Ken Paxton got on a plane to Europe with his girlfriend. He is legally married. And the timing was also interesting — he spent his own nation's 250th birthday headed to the nation from which we rebelled. Nobody has explained who paid for the trip, which is a relevant question when Paxton travels."

That's the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Texas, three months out, while Michael Quinn Sullivan spends his days insisting the only thing standing between Paxton and victory is a stingy national party.

Erickson called this outcome during the primary itself: Paxton could beat Cornyn, and dragging him across the finish line in November could cost Republicans the Senate. On September 1 he put a price on it. Sen. John Kennedy went on Fox and said it would take another $100 million to get Paxton across the line, on top of the $100 million-plus the party already burned trying to stop him. "Republicans did not choose between a squish and a fighter," Erickson wrote. "They chose between a safe seat and a coin flip, and they took the coin flip on purpose." Paxton, he added, "has a string of mistresses, but he has no coat tails."

For saying it out loud, Erickson got the same treatment as everyone else who won't write the check: within hours, Texas state Rep. Andy Hopper was quote-tweeting him as proof that "nationally-focused Republicans" don't care about Texas. Nobody has a rebuttal. They have a target list, and it grows every time someone points at the receipt.

The Ask

Here's the part he'd rather you not clock: Sullivan isn't arguing Paxton is a good candidate. He's arguing somebody else should pay for him. Call it what it is, once: a protection racket. Tim Dunn spent years building Paxton's cover and cashing in on the primaries it let him win. Now the cover is gone, and everyone downstream is supposed to pick up the tab.

Luke Macias said the quiet part on August 30. Sen. John Kennedy raises money from Texans every year, Macias wrote, then turns around and says he and his fellow senators believe Texas has a real race "but they don't have any money."

That is the tell: The Senate Republicans will not write the check, so please be angry at the Senate. Ignore everything else.

Sullivan's version was the purity-test remix. Back on February 27 he quote-tweeted a World / WNG reporter who suggested Christian voters might sit Paxton out against James Talarico. Sullivan's answer: no Democrat can win statewide in Texas, the allegations against Paxton have already been "litigated before the public," and Christian media was "shilling" for Democrats.

That post was never about ad budgets. It was about making the refusal to subsidize Paxton look like heresy. Same job, different costume.

The Math

Dunn's math was simpler than anyone's given him credit for: spend nothing in fresh direct contributions. The NRSC and the rest of the national apparatus did the spending instead, more than $100 million against Paxton in the primary, $128 million in ads for Cornyn by one tracking firm's count. None of it worked. Texas runoff turnout is a sliver of the electorate, 8.2 percent of registered voters statewide in the 2022 cycle, and that sliver is the base The Enterprise spent a decade building. Provoke the runoff, let the true believers show up, and Paxton wins for free. He beat Cornyn by more than 25 points without a new dollar from Dunn.

The timing tells you everything. Three months out, with polls showing a dead heat against Talarico, Dunn's PAC Jefferson Rising made its first move of the cycle on July 31: $110,000 on anti-Talarico text messages. That is not Dunn writing a check. That is a PAC buying texts, two months after the race it actually needed to win was already decided.

It's also not the whole ledger, and cycle-true is not career-true. Dunn and fellow Midland oilman Farris Wilks gave Paxton $755,000 and $425,000 personally, $1.18 million combined, and funneled $9.696 million and $4.66 million respectively into Defend Texas Liberty PAC, the vehicle that has bankrolled Paxton's legal defense for a decade. Since January 2025, Dunn has put roughly $11.5 million into other Republican Senate candidates around the country. Paxton is the exception. Wilks, for his part, has all but vanished from 2026 Texas primaries after years of flooding them with cash. One donor going quiet could be caution. Two donors going quiet is a network decision.

The Job Description

Dunn could write the Senate check himself. He built this network; he can afford to cover it. He is nickeling and diming it instead, and that is the tell: he never wanted Paxton in the Senate. He wanted him at the Attorney General's office, where the cover was already bought and paid for. Texas Monthly reported the exact words: when Paxton approached Dunn about the Senate run, Dunn told him, "I don't want you to be a senator; I want you to be a good attorney general." Dunn's relationship with that office goes back over a decade: a $1 million loan to Paxton in 2014, with $750,000 of it still carried as owed to Defend Texas Liberty PAC years later. The AG's office was the shield during the years that mattered, the Ethics Commission fine, the Nate Paul investigation, the impeachment defense that DTL bankrolled with a $3 million payment to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in the month before he presided over Paxton's Senate trial.

Because Paxton ran for Senate anyway, the succession fight for that AG chair mattered. Aaron Reitz, Dunn’s chosen successor and Paxton’s former deputy attorney general for legal strategy, resigned in mid-2025 to run for the seat. He finished fourth in the March 3 primary with about 14 percent of the vote. Reitz endorsed the runoff's front-runner, Mayes Middleton, on March 25, praising his "staunch support of President Donald Trump" and saying Middleton had "the mind, heart, and willpower to keep his foot on the gas after Attorney General Paxton leaves office." Reitz was sworn in July 9 as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, the largest federal district in the country. That is a real federal placement. It is not the AG's office, and it is not something the public record ties to Dunn.

Middleton is not a random continuation candidate, and he is not a Dunn product either; he is a peer. He self-funded roughly $16 to $17 million of his own oil-and-gas money into the AG race, more than any rival could match, and beat Chip Roy in the May 26 runoff. He is a longtime donor in the same PAC network Dunn helped build: more than $300,000 over three years to Michael Quinn Sullivan's Empower Texans PAC, plus $255,000 to Defend Texas Liberty PAC. That is coverage by kinship, a co-funder of the same infrastructure winning the same party's nomination, not coverage by invoice.

It's also not a clean story of alignment.

In 2022, Middleton's money backed two separate primary challenges against Paxton himself: he was the main funder behind state Rep. Matt Krause's run at the AG's office, and when Krause dropped out, Middleton redirected $300,000 to Louie Gohmert's campaign instead. The next year, during Paxton's impeachment, Defend Texas Liberty's Jonathan Stickland put Middleton on a list of six sitting senators warned they would face a primary challenge if they voted to convict; Middleton was reportedly among the senators considering it before he ultimately joined the majority and voted to acquit. Whatever warmth exists between Paxton's network and Middleton now, including leaked audio reported by the Texas Tribune in which Paxton says he plans to vote for him, is recent.

Paxton's own chosen successor lost the primary outright and landed in a federal courthouse instead; the state party's actual nominee is a former rival who has since made peace with Paxton's donors. That is the map Dunn appears to be acting as if he has, a friendly nominee at the OAG, a former Paxton deputy in Houston federal court, while he nickels the Senate race he never wanted. "Acting as if" is the honest verb here.

The Talarico Card

Talarico's campaign has been putting out its own version of the receipt. Some of it is campaign paint: the specific real-estate tally on that card, a claimed count of homes and their combined value, comes from the opposing campaign's own graphic, not from a filing this outlet has independently verified, so it stays off the record here.

The rest of the card holds up against public documents:

• Paxton's own party impeached him on twenty counts including corruption, bribery, and abuse of public trust.
• His own deputies reported him to the FBI, alleging he used the office to benefit a donor, and he fired them.
• A court later hit the state for more than $6.6 million for retaliating against those whistleblowers.
• He took office already carrying felony securities-fraud charges.

These are not talking points. They're why the NRSC will fundraise with Paxton on paper and still won't write the check that would make this a fair fight.

Lost Levers

Here's the part the The Enterprise mouthpieces don’t want you to notice. In June, Paxton's network lost the two people who could have sold an "election was rigged" fallback story. Nate Schatzline was the frontrunner to replace Jane Nelson as Secretary of State, the office that certifies Texas elections and would have put a friendly hand on any dispute Paxton needed blessed. This outlet named exactly why that appointment mattered the day after it broke: Schatzline had never sat on the House Elections Committee, and the move looked built to occupy the certifying office rather than run it. A month later, Abbott didn't make the appointment. Schatzline got a $275,000 senior-advisor title instead, and Robert Howden got the Secretary of State's office. Draw your own conclusion from the sequence: the exposure came first, the retreat came second. Schatzline is reportedly still in line for Secretary of State once the Senate race is decided in November, a claim this outlet hasn't independently confirmed, so treat it as a lead worth watching, not a fact yet earned. Then, at the June convention, Abraham George, The Enterprise's hand-picked party chairman, lost his reelection bid to D'rinda Randall. Between them, Schatzline and George were the two levers: one would have had the institutional standing to bless a dispute, the other had already built the narrative to sell it. Both are gone.

This outlet asked back in June who would even be in a position to call the race rigged, when Texas Republicans have run every part of the election machinery for thirty years. The honest answer, now that Schatzline and George are both out of the levers that mattered, is that nobody credible is left to make that call, and the fallback has quietly become blaming everybody else instead.

The fallback runs through the same machine that sold closed primaries. It doesn't need the election to be stolen. It needs an audience that will treat a lawful open primary as fraud, and the numbers don't cooperate: a statewide analysis of the 2022 primaries found about 5 percent of GOP primary votes came from past Democratic primary voters, and even the state party's own count on Dade Phelan's 2024 race, their favorite example, topped out at 9 percent. Neither moved a single statewide race; Abbott won his primary by 54 points, Patrick by nearly 70, Paxton's runoff by 36. The numbers were never the point. The asset is the amplification network, Scorecard, the podcasts, the X accounts, that can inflate a legal process into a delusion the base won't fact-check.

If You Break It, You Buy It

The Enterprise has spent years using purity tests to knock out Republicans who wouldn't fall in line. When the deck is cleared and there's nobody left to primary, the movement has to say what it actually stands for. Here is what it actually stands for: Dunn would not underwrite the Senate seat, and the AG chair he wanted is still just a bet on November.

Texans don't stand for that. The complaint about "nobody supporting Paxton" isn't a betrayal story. It's a confession.