Ken Paxton Corruption & Ethics Controversy Texas

A New Poll Says MAGA Voters Will Forgive Almost Anything. Texas Already Proved It.

Two-thirds of MAGA voters say they'd stick with a Republican accused of sexual assault. Ken Paxton is what that looks like on an actual ballot.

MAGA Report Cards · Jul 31, 2026

A New Poll Says MAGA Voters Will Forgive Almost Anything. Texas Already Proved It.

POLITICO published a poll on July 30, 2026 that should stop you cold.

It asked voters a simple question: if your party's candidate got caught up in a scandal, would you still vote for them? Then it ran through a list of a dozen scandals — a DUI conviction, taking gifts from lobbyists, faking a military record, domestic violence, sexual assault, antisemitic posts online.

For MAGA voters, there was no line. Not one scandal on the list caused a majority of them to walk away.

Two-thirds — 66 percent — said they'd still back a Republican accused of sexual assault. Seventy-two percent said they'd still back one accused of domestic violence.

That's not a hypothetical. Texas just ran the experiment for real.

Meet the test case

Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas. He got there in May by beating a four-term sitting senator by 28 points.

Here is the record he beat him with:

He was indicted on three felony securities fraud counts in July 2015, months into his first term as the state's top law enforcement officer. He stalled the case for nearly nine years. Three weeks before trial he cut a deal — community service, ethics classes, about $271,000 in restitution — with no plea entered and no admission of wrongdoing. A jury never heard it.
Eight of his own senior deputies — conservative lawyers he hired himself — reported him to the FBI in 2020 for bribery and abuse of office. He fired them.
The Texas House impeached him 121–23 in May 2023, on 20 articles covering bribery, abuse of office and obstruction. Sixty Republicans voted to impeach him, including the speaker. The Texas Senate later acquitted him.
A Travis County judge ruled his office broke the Texas Whistleblower Act and ordered $6.6 million paid to the fired aides. Paxton dropped his appeal in July 2025, which means the state pays the bill — plus another $1.2 million in interest if payment slips to 2027.
Public records show he claimed three different homes as his primary residence on mortgage documents. Making false statements to get a mortgage is a federal and state crime. Prosecuting it was his job. He didn't respond to requests for comment.
His wife of 38 years, Republican state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce in July 2025, listing adultery as the grounds.
And this May, his own office offered a man accused of repeatedly sexually abusing a young boy a plea deal — drop the first-degree felony, plead to two misdemeanors, serve one day in jail, never register as a sex offender. The judge wouldn't take it. "One day. Seriously?" he said. "Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it." He imposed 60 days instead.

Republican primary voters saw all of that. They picked him anyway, 64 percent to 36.

His own party said it out loud — and then fell in line

The most damning part isn't that voters forgave him. It's that the Republicans who knew better said exactly what he was, and it changed nothing.

Sen. John Cornyn, the man Paxton beat, called him "a flawed, self-centered and shameless candidate." He told NPR that Paxton is "unrepentant for all the scandals he's been involved in and who doesn't really care about anything else other than himself."

Sen. Susan Collins, quoted in that same NBC News report, put it plainly: "He is an ethically challenged individual."

Then, on May 19, Donald Trump posted his endorsement on Truth Social:

"Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate."

That was the whole argument. Not a defense of the record — an instruction to ignore it. A week later Paxton was the nominee, and the senators who'd called him ethically challenged were quiet.

The poll and the primary say the same thing from two directions. Ford O'Connell, a longtime Republican strategist, told POLITICO that "scandal doesn't mean what it did 15 years ago. The rules have changed, and Republican voters know it."

Arizona ran the same experiment two months later

On July 21, Arizona Republicans in the 5th District picked former Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb as their nominee for Congress — after the Arizona Republic reported that several women said he sent them explicit messages and nude photos, and that when they tried to come forward, he threatened to use his position as sheriff to open investigations into them. Lamb's campaign denied the allegations. Trump had endorsed him last year and reaffirmed that endorsement earlier in July.

Lamb won anyway. The seat is a deep-red open district, so the primary was effectively the election.

Two states, two months, one pattern: the damaging record was on the table, Trump said back him anyway, and Republican voters did.

The part where the standard flips

Here's the number in the poll that gives away the game.

Ask Republican voters whether a Democrat accused of sexual assault should drop out of the race, and 71 percent say yes.

Ask the exact same question about a Republican, and it falls to 52 percent.

Same accusation. Same question. A 19-point gap that depends on nothing but the letter after the name. That isn't a principle. It's a weapon that only points one direction.

And it's worth noting how differently the other side behaved this cycle. Democrats in Maine stuck with Senate candidate Graham Platner through months of ugly stories — old Reddit posts, a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol — and only abandoned him after a woman said he forced her to have sex with him, an allegation he denies. He dropped out. Paxton — facing not allegations but an impeachment, an indictment and a court judgment — stayed in and won by 28 points.

Why this matters beyond one race

It's tempting to file this under "polls are depressing" and move on. Don't.

A party that will nominate anyone is a party that can't be held accountable by anything except losing. Every internal check — the impeachment vote, the whistleblowers, the indictment, the judge who wouldn't sign the plea deal — did its job in the Paxton story. Republicans in the Texas House voted to remove him. Career prosecutors turned him in. A court found for the people he fired.

Every one of those checks worked. And then 64 percent of primary voters overruled all of them at once.

That's what the POLITICO poll is measuring. Not that voters don't know. That they know and have decided it doesn't count.

What it costs

This isn't abstract. Look at who actually pays in the Paxton case:

Texas taxpayers are on the hook for $6.6 million because his office retaliated against the people who reported him.
A child in Waco would have seen the man accused of abusing him walk out with a one-day sentence and no sex-offender registration, if the deal Paxton's office offered had gone through. It took a judge to stop it.
Eight senior lawyers — the ones who went to the FBI — were fired or pushed out for doing the right thing.

A man who used the attorney general's office this way is now asking for a seat in the U.S. Senate — a six-year term, subpoena power, a vote on every federal judge in the country.

The poll says most MAGA voters would back him through anything. The primary says they already did. The general election in November is when the rest of Texas gets a say.

We deserve better.