That picture of him on the boat off Mar-a-Lago where he’s pointing at his junk. You remember that one?” a senior Republican lawmaker in Texas asks. “His hair’s all messed up and he’s obviously just shithoused?” I do not remember that. “You know, the one where he’s double-fisting and he’s pointing at his — I saved it on my phone. It’s one of my favorite pictures.”

And sure enough, when it comes through, there he is, in all his glory: Warren Kenneth Paxton, Texas’s Republican nominee for United States Senate and top law-enforcement officer of the eighth-largest economy in the world. Paxton is in a pale-blue button-down shirt, a tiny bit of chest hair showing, two plastic cups in his left hand. His right hand is pointing down — probably not intentionally, but who knows — at his penis. Paxton’s hair is tousled, and he’s talking to a blonde woman. Yes, he’s wearing his wedding ring. He looks like a cardiologist at a swingers’ resort. Or, really, he looks like Ken Paxton: a little sleazy, a little disheveled. A man who’s used to other people cleaning up his mess.

In Texas these days, every conversation returns to Paxton. On the national stage, there is much chatter about his opponent James Talarico, the clean-cut Presbyterian seminarian who just might win the Democrats’ first Senate seat in Texas since 1988. He’s run a good campaign. But the seat is Paxton’s to lose more than Talarico’s to win. Paxton is perhaps the weakest candidate ever put up by the Texas GOP in the modern era. Donald Trump needs him to win if he wants to stave off investigations and maybe worse from a Democratic-controlled Senate in the back half of his term, leading to an unprecedentedly expensive effort to hoist this electoral lump over the finish line.

Nevertheless, Paxton has trailed in most polls conducted. The Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up. It is a difficult prospect to accept; it is Texas, after all. Democrats have, for years, convinced themselves they have a chance here, but this has always felt like a pipe dream for Democratic operatives and MS NOW watchers. Now, in private, Republicans are worried. They grouse about a man who has been given everything he needs to win — including more than $150 million from Elon Musk — and still might lose.

Paxtonfreude is a bipartisan business in Texas these days. “This is one of the biggest dirtbags that has ever run for office,” the lawmaker who sent the picture tells me. With a measure of satisfaction, he says that his party’s pollsters report that “there’s no amount of money in the world that can save him.” The lawmaker supported his party’s failed effort to impeach Paxton in 2023. He tells me he’s in a large group chat with other veterans of that fight, many of whom paid a heavy price for crossing Paxton. The chat is active. Every bad poll, every bad pic, every embarrassing leak. “Forty times a day,” he says.

Former House Speaker Dade Phelan, a longtime Paxton foe, tells me Republicans across the state are telling him they’ll skip the ballot line for Senate. “That never happened in 2018,” he said, when Beto O’Rourke lost by only 2.8 points to Ted Cruz. “I don’t even know if I want him to win,” says a longtime Republican consultant about Paxton. While he can’t support Talarico, he says, “there might be a certain sadistic pleasure for me in, like, us getting our just desserts.” Trump seems to understand the problem. Paxton “may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” he says. But he is, for better or worse, Trump’s man.

Other politicians have a scandal, maybe a few. Paxton, who did not return a request for comment, has a whole taxonomy of scandals. You can try to distinguish between Paxton’s personal failures (repeated infidelity to his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, which led to divorce last year) and professional failures (his repeated attempts to sell access to his office and connections with many different kinds of accused and convicted criminals). But the two sets of failures are intertwined. Paxton’s wife was a joint partner in quite a few of Paxton’s alleged schemes, and one time even allegedly served as a getaway driver rescuing him from a process server. Nate Paul — the troubled Austin real-estate magnate at the center of Paxton’s impeachment for corruption, whom Paxton seemed to be trying to protect from an FBI investigation — helped Paxton give his then-mistress a job when it no longer became possible for her to work in the Texas Senate, where she worked for one of Angela’s colleagues.

Paxton’s campaign has not been able to move on from these controversies because new ones keep popping up. In October, the Wall Street........

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