DALLAS — Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC affiliated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, is coming off the sidelines in Texas’ U.S. Senate race, placing its first ad buy of the general election in support of Ken Paxton.
Texas PAC, a new group connected to SLF, on Friday purchased an initial tranche of some $32 million worth of broadcast TV ads in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin media markets, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact.
Senate Republicans had previously resisted spending money in Texas. Thune publicly urged President Donald Trump’s political operation to deploy resources to help Paxton, noting how expensive political advertising is in a state with 20 media markets. MAGA Inc., the Trump-aligned super PAC, bought $10 million worth of ad time in Texas over the weekend, its first spending in any general election race.
The new deployment from SLF is an acknowledgment of the tenuous situation Republicans are facing in the Lone Star State, a longtime GOP bastion and rarely a concern for the party’s leaders in Washington. But in a difficult cycle nationally, Paxton now finds himself in the unusual position of trailing Democrat James Talarico in most public polls, while also being vastly outspent by the Austin lawmaker and his allies.
Friday’s ad buys mark Senate Republicans’ first financial engagement in Texas since the primary.
Senators had been loyal to their longtime colleague, Sen. John Cornyn — a strong fundraiser himself — and had supported him over Paxton, arguing the attorney general’s history of legal and ethical scandals would both endanger the seat and make defending Texas a more expensive proposition. OneNation, a dark money group affiliated with SLF that does not have to report its donors, spent millions in the summer of 2025 on positive ads boosting Cornyn.
While Thune and other Republicans got on board with Paxton after the attorney general defeated Cornyn in a runoff, and hosted fundraisers for Paxton over the summer, SLF had stayed out of the ad race.
The group made ad reservations months ago in most of the other competitive Senate battleground states, committing initially to a $342 million spend in eight contests — five where the GOP is on defense, and three Democratic seats the party hopes to flip. SLF has continued to pump more money into races including Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina.
Talarico has used his financial edge to dominate the airwaves, running a mix of ads introducing himself to voters and blaming Republicans for high everyday costs. But the biggest spenders in Republican politics — Trump’s political operation, Elon Musk’s PAC and now Senate Republicans’ outside group — have come online in Texas in the past two weeks, bringing the spending closer to parity.
A spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, Senate Leadership Fund’s counterpart, said Paxton had “dragged SLF into bailing out a seat that was supposed to be sure-footed territory for the GOP.”
“They should be sweating,” the spokesperson, Christyna Thompson, said in a statement. “SLF spent the spring trying to kill Paxton’s campaign. Now they’re stuck with the scam artist Trump forced on them.”
The Paxton campaign, which would receive a lower unit rate on broadcast and radio than the PACs supporting him, has yet to make a major ad purchase on television.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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