Paxton’s attacks on Latino voting groups now shadow Senate bid

Ken Paxton’s bid for the U.S. Senate has put his years-long campaign against Latino voting organizations back under a brighter spotlight, just as he tries to convert that hard-right record into a statewide win. Paxton defeated John Cornyn in the Republican runoff on May 26, 2026, and will face Democratic nominee James Talarico in Texas’s November 3 general election.

The clearest test of Paxton’s claims came with the Jolt Initiative. In November 2025, the Texas attorney general’s office sought to revoke the nonprofit’s charter, accusing it of a systematic unlawful voter-registration scheme. A federal judge later blocked Paxton from shutting down Jolt, saying the office had not shown evidence that the group registered noncitizens to vote. The ruling undercut one of the sharpest examples of Paxton’s effort to police Latino civic groups through election-fraud allegations.

Paxton’s clash with Latino political organizations did not begin there. In 2024, his office raided homes tied to Latino Democrats and activists, prompting the League of United Latin American Citizens to accuse him of oppression, harassment and intimidation. LULAC asked the Justice Department to investigate the office for possible Voting Rights Act violations. In Pasadena, Texas, leaders agreed to pay $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that a 2013 voting plan diluted Latino power at the polls, a reminder that disputes over Latino representation in Texas have also produced costly legal consequences.

The politics around those cases now intersect directly with Paxton’s Senate campaign. Texas is the second-most populous state, and its Latino electorate has long been a pivotal force in statewide races. AP VoteCast, which interviewed more than 120,000 voters across the United States in 2024, including Spanish-language interviews, found Latinos were a major bloc in that electorate. That makes any attempt to intimidate or energize Latino voters politically consequential well beyond the courtroom.

Paxton’s path to the nomination also exposed fault lines inside Texas Republican politics. Donald Trump’s endorsement helped him overtake Cornyn, but some Republican figures who voted to impeach Paxton in 2023 remain uneasy about elevating him statewide. The result is a race in which Paxton’s law-and-order brand, his confrontation with Latino advocacy groups, and the backlash over those tactics are all colliding at once in one of the country’s most closely watched and expensive Senate contests.