“那张他在海湖庄园外船上、指着自己下体的照片。你记得那张吧？”得克萨斯州一位资深共和党议员问道。“他头发乱糟糟的，显然喝得烂醉？”我不记得。“你知道的，就是那张他双手各拿一杯酒、指着自己——我存在手机里了。那是我最喜欢的照片之一。”果然，照片发过来，他就在那儿，风光无限：沃伦·肯尼思·帕克斯顿，得克萨斯州共和党美国参议员候选人，也是全球第八大经济体的最高执法官员。
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.
帕克斯顿身穿浅蓝色纽扣衬衫，露出一小撮胸毛，左手拿着两个塑料杯。他的右手向下指着——大概不是故意的，但谁知道呢——自己的阴茎。帕克斯顿头发凌乱，正在和一位金发女子说话。是的，他戴着婚戒。他看起来像在换偶度假村的心内科医生。或者说，他看起来就是肯·帕克斯顿：有点猥琐，有点邋遢。一个习惯了别人替他收拾烂摊子的男人。
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.
如今在得克萨斯，每场谈话最后都会回到帕克斯顿身上。在全国舞台上，人们热议他的对手詹姆斯·塔拉里科——这位干净利落的长老会神学院学生，说不定能赢得民主党自1988年以来在得州的首个参议院席位。他打了一场漂亮的选战。但这个席位与其说是塔拉里科能赢下来的，不如说是帕克斯顿可能丢掉的。帕克斯顿或许是现代以来得州共和党推出的最弱候选人。
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.
唐纳德·特朗普需要他赢，如果他想在任期后半段避免一个由民主党控制的参议院发起调查、甚至更糟的事情，这导致了一场史无前例的昂贵行动，要把这个选举包袱抬过终点线。
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.
然而，帕克斯顿在大多数已进行的民调中都处于落后。《库克政治报告》将这场选战评为胜负难料。这是一个难以接受的局面；毕竟，这里是得克萨斯。多年来，民主党人一直说服自己在这里有机会，但对民主党操盘手和MS NOW的观众来说，这始终像是痴心妄想。如今，私下里，共和党人感到担忧。他们抱怨一个已经得到了获胜所需一切的人——包括来自埃隆·马斯克的超过1.5亿美元——却仍可能输掉选举。
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.
如今在得克萨斯，“帕克斯顿幸灾乐祸”成了一项两党共同参与的活动。“这是有史以来竞选公职的最大混蛋之一，”给我发来那张照片的议员对我说。他带着几分满意地说，他所在政党的民调人员报告称，“世界上没有任何一笔钱能救得了他。”这位议员曾支持其政党在2023年弹劾帕克斯顿的努力，但该努力以失败告终。
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.
他告诉我，他身处一个大型群聊中，群里有其他参与过那场斗争的资深人士，其中许多人因与帕克斯顿作对而付出了沉重代价。这个群聊很活跃。每一个糟糕的民调、每一张糟糕的照片、每一次令人难堪的泄露。“一天四十次，”他说。
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.
长期与帕克斯顿为敌的前众议院议长戴德·费伦告诉我，全州的共和党人都在对他说，他们将在参议院选举那一栏跳过不投。“2018年从未发生过这种情况，”他说，当时贝托·奥鲁尔克仅以2.8个百分点的差距输给了特德·克鲁兹。“我甚至不知道自己是否希望他赢，”一位长期共和党顾问谈到帕克斯顿时说。他说，虽然自己无法支持塔拉里科，但“对我来说，比如我们得到应有的报应，或许会有某种施虐般的快感。”特朗普似乎明白这个问题。
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 deserts.”Trump seems to understand the problem.
帕克斯顿“可能穿着不得体，可能说话不完美，他可能也不是我见过的最英俊的人，”他说。但无论如何，他是特朗普的人。
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.
其他政客或许有一桩丑闻，也许几桩。而帕克斯顿——他未回应置评请求——却拥有一整套丑闻分类学。你可以试着区分帕克斯顿的个人失败（屡次对妻子、州参议员安吉拉·帕克斯顿不忠，导致两人去年离婚）与职业失败（他屡次试图出卖进入其办公室的门路，并与形形色色的被告和已定罪罪犯有牵连）。但这两类失败相互交织。
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.
帕克斯顿的妻子在帕克斯顿的不少涉嫌图谋中都是共同参与者，据称有一次甚至充当接应司机，帮他摆脱送达法律文书的人员。内特·保罗——这位陷入困境的奥斯汀房地产大亨是帕克斯顿因腐败被弹劾案的核心人物，帕克斯顿似乎试图保护他免受联邦调查局调查——在帕克斯顿当时的情妇无法继续在得克萨斯州参议院工作后，帮帕克斯顿给她安排了一份工作；她此前在安吉拉一位同事手下工作。
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.
帕克斯顿的竞选团队一直无法摆脱这些争议，因为新的争议不断涌现。10月，《华尔街日报》发布了一段视频，显示帕克斯顿2024年新年期间在迪拜与他据称的现任情妇、基督教社交媒体网红特蕾西·杜洪一起庆祝，当时他仍与妻子保持婚姻关系。他们身旁是两名逃避美国司法的人，这两人被控在芝加哥实施涉案金额数百万美元的医疗欺诈，而他们恰好还向帕克斯顿的竞选活动捐赠了19万美元。
Paxton’s campaign has not been able to move on from these controversies because new ones keep popping up. In October, the Wall Street Journal released a video of Paxton celebrating New Year’s in 2024 in Dubai with his alleged current mistress, the Christian social-media influencer Tracy Duhon, while he was still married to his wife. Beside them were two fugitives from American justice, accused of millions of dollars of health-care fraud in Chicago, who also happened to have donated $190,000 to Paxton’s campaigns.
在一个不那么热闹的州，这本会是十年来最大的政治新闻，但对帕克斯顿来说这太司空见惯了，以至于社交媒体上的许多评论反而集中在他那件花花公子风格的衬衫领子上。
This would have been the political story of the decade in a duller state, but it was so par for the course for Paxton that much of the social-media commentary dwelt instead on Paxton’s lounge-lizard shirt collar.
负面报道铺天盖地，从未停歇。在华盛顿特区的一场筹款活动上，帕克斯顿发表了一番内容广泛的讲话，谈及自己竞选活动的惨淡处境，包括总统糟糕的政绩如何拖累了他。在场有人录了音，剪成片段，泄露给了六家不同的媒体（截至目前），这确实最大化了伤害。（“他难道不懂竞选是怎么运作的吗？”一名共和党顾问笑道，“第一条规则，所有人的手机都放在另一个房间。”）
The bad press has been relentless. At a fundraiser in Washington, D.C., Paxton delivered wide-ranging remarks about the sad state of his campaign, including the ways the president’s poor record was hurting him. Someone present taped it, cut it into pieces, and leaked them to six different outlets (so far), which did maximize harm. (“Does he not understand how campaigns work?” a Republican consultant laughs. “Rule one, everyone’s phones stay in the other room.”)
《纽约时报》拿到了一份堪称传说的证词笔录，那是帕克斯顿传奇中的瑰宝之一，来自一起案件——他在该案中建议自己的法律客户投资一家欺诈性科技公司Servergy，却没有告诉他们自己因此获得了报酬。这违反了得克萨斯州证券法，并导致他在2015年被重罪起诉。在证词笔录中被问及该公司负责人为何选中他来做这桩脏活时，帕克斯顿说“是上帝告诉他要这么做的”，这证实了上帝行事的方式极其神秘。
The New York Times received a fabled deposition, one of the crown jewels of Paxton lore, from a case in which he recommended his legal clients invest in Servergy, a fraudulent tech company, without telling them he was being compensated to do so. This was a violation of Texas securities law, and it resulted in felony indictments in 2015. Asked in the deposition why the head of the company tapped him to do the dirty work, Paxton said that “God had told him to,” confirming that He moves in highly mysterious ways. (In 2024, Paxton agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution for the case’s dismissal.)
（2024年，帕克斯顿同意支付30万美元赔偿金，以了结该案。）这就是得克萨斯州共和党的旗手，该党是全美最强势、最冷酷的政治机器之一，过去23年来一直对该州实施单方面控制。而现在，这一切都有可能分崩离析，原因是一场持续了十多年的派系争斗，其疯狂与抽象程度足以让美国民主社会主义者组织（DSA）自愧不如。
This is the standard-bearer of the Republican Party of Texas, one of the most dominant and ruthless political machines in the nation, which has exerted unilateral control over the state for the last 23 years. And now it’s all threatening to come apart, thanks to a decade-plus of factional squabbles that are frenzied and abstract enough to put the DSA to shame.
得克萨斯州发生的一切是该州独有的，但也折射出特朗普治下共和党整体的状况——它不断与自己交战，让保守派美国一些最不受欢迎的政客爬到了顶层。帕克斯顿或许就是他们当中最糟糕的一个。
What has happened in Texas is unique to Texas but also indicative of Trump’s GOP as a whole, which is constantly at war with itself, allowing some of the most unsavory politicians in conservative America to clamber to the top. Paxton just might be the worst of them all.
如果帕克斯顿落败，那将是因为共和党内部的不满情绪，而这种不满的根源远比帕克斯顿在参议院初选中击败连任22年的现任议员约翰·科宁更为久远。倾向共和党的选民转投塔拉里科或干脆不去投票，可能会成为左右胜负的关键，但这还不是全部。建制派拥有金钱和人脉，本可以把帕克斯顿从困境中拉出来，但他们不会这么做。一位资深共和党顾问告诉我：“这场灾难从他2014年首次竞选全州公职时就已开始酝酿。唯一能救他的那群人，他花了十多年的大部分时间疏远和攻击他们。”
If Paxton loses, it will be because of discontent within the Republican Party, which goes back much further than Paxton’s victory against 22-year incumbent John Cornyn in his primary Senate campaign. Republican-leaning voters swinging for Talarico or staying home may make the difference, but that’s not all. The Establishment has the money and connections to dig Paxton out of his hole, except it won’t. “This disaster has been in the making since he first started running for statewide office” in 2014, a veteran Republican consultant tells me. “The one group that can save him, he has spent the better part of over a decade ostracizing and attacking.”
这位顾问说，最近在 Highland Park 举行了一场筹款活动。Highland Park 是达拉斯的高档社区，乔治·W·布什就住在这里，这里堪称老派得克萨斯州共和党的精神家园。到场的有顶级金主，即“高层派系团伙”，比如鲍勃·罗林、小罗斯·佩罗、迪克·威克利。他们谈论了全州各地的选情。“帕克斯顿压根就没被提起，”他说，“有三个人本可以改变他的命运。”
There was a recent fundraiser in Highland Park, the consultant says, the top-class Dallas neighborhood where George W. Bush lives and that is a sort of spiritual home of the old-school Texas GOP. Here were top moneymen, the “higher-part mafia crew,” like Bob Rowling, Ross Perot Jr., Dick Weekley. They talked about races all around the state. “Paxton just didn’t come up,” he says. “Three guys who could change his life.”
这位顾问说，初选之后或许曾有过一个窗口期，帕克斯顿本可以尝试安排与共和党贵族阶层坐下来谈谈——甚至可能与“小布什”本人——低头认错，说一句既往不咎。但帕克斯顿不是那种人。
There might conceivably have been a window after the primary, the consultant says, when Paxton could have tried to arrange a sit-down with the Republican aristocracy — maybe even with Dubya — to bend the knee and say, Let bygones be bygones. But that’s not who Paxton is.
肯·帕克斯顿在科林县长大，那是达拉斯以北的一片远郊地区。他并非出身于高地公园那种豪门望族——事实上，他出生在北达科他州。帕克斯顿是上世纪90年代涌入达拉斯-沃斯堡大都会区的数百万奋斗者之一。在麦金尼，钱几乎真的像是从地里长出来的，那里是推动该州人口爆炸式增长的众多郊区新兴城镇之一。帕克斯顿是一名遗嘱认证律师，处理遗嘱和遗产事务，偶尔也会走一些道德上的捷径。
Ken Paxton came up in Collin County, a cluster of exurbs north of Dallas. He was not born into the kind of wealth you see in Highland Park — in fact, he was born in North Dakota. Paxton was one of the many millions of strivers who came to the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex in the ’90s. There was almost literally money growing out of the ground in McKinney, one of the many suburban boomtowns driving explosive population growth in the state. Paxton was a probate lawyer, working on wills and estates and taking the occasional ethical shortcut. (The Houston Chronicle called his handling of a deceased billionaire’s estate “ill-defined and unorthodox.”)
（《休斯敦纪事报》称他处理一位已故亿万富翁遗产的方式“界定不清且不合常规”。）如果说他有点不够档次——如果说他的外套常常看起来可疑地像沙发面料——那他也忠于自己的环境，以及他日益庞大的豪宅。
If he was a little déclassé — if his jackets often looked suspiciously like couch upholstery — he was true to his surroundings and his increasingly large mansions.
2002年，他赢得了一个立法机构席位，当时布什的声望让共和党自重建时期以来首次拿下州众议院。即便在那时，问题就已经存在。“他妈的从来就不在那儿，老兄，”一名共和党前众议院工作人员回忆道。据这名前工作人员说，一位名叫乔迪·劳本伯格的同事投了他的票，而“他本人却回科林县老家做交易去了”。在他通过的少数几项引人注目的法案中，有一项是在得克萨斯州高速公路上竖立标牌，宣布该州为“布什之乡”。
He won a seat in the legislature in 2002, when Bush’s popularity secured Republicans the state House for the first time since Reconstruction. Even then, there were issues. “He was never fucking there, man,” a Republican former House staffer remembers. According to the former staffer, a colleague named Jodie Laubenberg voted for him while “he was back home doing deals in Collin County.”Among the few notable bills he passed was a measure putting up signs on Texas highways declaring the state Bush Country.
2011年，他成功晋升更高职位，成为一群基督教金主的代言人，这些人一心执念于把得克萨斯州众议院共和党议长乔·斯特劳斯拉下马，而斯特劳斯恰好是犹太人。这些捐助者发动了一场叛乱式的战争，要把温和派影响从得州共和党中清除出去，他们为帕克斯顿此后的大部分竞选提供了资金。2012年，他们将他推上了州参议院，2014年，他们又资助了他竞选总检察长的活动。
He secured his elevation to higher office in 2011, when he became an avatar for a group of Christian moneymen who had become obsessed with unseating the Republican Speaker of the Texas House, Joe Straus, who happened to be Jewish. Those donors, waging an insurrectionary war to cleanse the Texas GOP of moderating influences, would fund most of Paxton’s future campaigns. In 2012, they elevated him to the state Senate, and in 2014, they funded his campaign for attorney general.
在克鲁兹的帮助下，他击败了来自富裕达拉斯地区的“建制派”共和党人丹·布兰奇。上任后不久，他就因与Servergy案相关的欺诈指控被起诉，但他最终摆脱了刑事指控——案件被退回他的大本营科林县，那里的官员对帕克斯顿友好，而这些人突然掌控了资助特别调查员的资金。此案拖了近八年，直到最终瓦解。这一事件预示了帕克斯顿的执政风格。
With the help of Cruz, he beat Dan Branch, an “Establishment” Republican from wealthy Dallas. Shortly after taking office, he was indicted for fraud related to the Servergy case, but he ultimately beat the criminal charges, which were kicked back to his home base in Collin County, run by officials friendly to Paxton, who suddenly had control of the purse funding the special investigators. The case dragged on for almost eight years until it fell apart. The episode was a harbinger of Paxton’s style of government.
据报道，他的总检察长办公室管理不善——长期人手不足，案件处理混乱。美联社披露，他的一名副手曾在办公室会议上展示儿童色情内容，以证明儿童色情是邪恶的。
His AG office was reportedly poorly run — serially understaffed, bungling cases. The Associated Press revealed that one of his deputies showed child porn at an office meeting to demonstrate that child porn was evil.
在帕克斯顿任职期间，帕克斯顿夫妇积累了超过15处房产和数千万美元，这些数字是塔拉里科在竞选活动中反复提及的。2020年，他亲手挑选的高级幕僚——其中包括坚定的运动活动人士和资深执法人员——写信给司法部，指控帕克斯顿受贿。帕克斯顿将他们全部解雇，然后试图用纳税人的钱了结他们的不当解雇诉讼。这一事件导致得克萨斯州众议院弹劾他。
Over the course of his time in office, the Paxtons have accumulated more than 15 properties and tens of millions of dollars, figures have been oft-repeated by Talarico on the trail. In 2020, his handpicked senior staff, which included die-hard movement activists and veteran law enforcement officers, wrote a letter to the Department of Justice accusing Paxton of bribery. Paxton fired them all, then tried to settle their wrongful-termination suit with taxpayer money. The incident led the Texas House to impeach him.
审判在得克萨斯州参议院进行。帕克斯顿最大的金主向“法官”——副州长丹·帕特里克——捐赠了300万美元，这似乎是一个很好的信号，表明参议院不太可能特别动用其调查能力。帕克斯顿的律师辩称，帕克斯顿是遭到党内布什派系的陷害。2022年，杰布·布什之子乔治·P·布什曾与帕克斯顿竞选并落败。如今，布什家族、卡尔·罗夫、科宁以及他们的金主朋友们正在实施报复。
The trial was held in the Texas Senate. Paxton’s top donor donated $3 million to the “judge,” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, which seemed a good indicator that the upper chamber was not likely to make any particular use of its investigative abilities. Paxton’s lawyers argued that Paxton had been set up by the Bush wing of the party. In 2022, George P. Bush, Jeb Bush’s son, had run against Paxton and failed. Now the Bushes and Karl Rove and Cornyn and their big-money buddies were getting their revenge.
这在实质上荒谬可笑，但在政治上却很精明。得州的草根保守派早已不再对布什家族抱有任何好感。帕克斯顿比以往任何时候都更清楚地认定，得州的传统共和党人是他的敌人，并誓言今后不再与他们进行任何合作。他被判无罪。
This was substantively ridiculous but politically smart. Grassroots conservatives in Texas no longer had any love for the Bush family. Paxton had identified more clearly than ever before that traditional Republicans in Texas were his enemy and forswore any cooperation with them in the future. He was acquitted.
这一裂痕将产生重大后果。在弹劾期间，科宁曾表示帕克斯顿并未获得他的完全信任。帕克斯顿随即开始暗示未来将发起初选挑战，这促使科宁更直接地嘲讽他，曾发推文称帕克斯顿将很难“从监狱里”参选。但科宁已不再——如果他曾经如此的话——在一个会把帕克斯顿这样的人送进监狱的州里行事。得州共和党人曾经必须推出强有力的候选人来赢得公职，如今却已不再有兴趣管束自己人。正因如此，科宁在今年早些时候惨败。
That rift would have significant consequences. During his impeachment, Cornyn had indicated that Paxton had less than his full confidence. Paxton immediately began teasing a future primary challenge, which led Cornyn to taunt him more directly, tweeting once that Paxton would have a hard time running “from prison.”But Cornyn was no longer operating, if he ever did, in a state that would put a man like Paxton in jail. Texas Republicans, who once had to put up strong candidates to win office, had ceased to be interested in policing their own. For that reason, Cornyn got whipped earlier this year.
发给我那张照片并投票弹劾帕克斯顿的那位议员，同样对共和党做出了错误判断。他说，如果参议院当时判定帕克斯顿有罪，共和党现在的处境会好得多。但如今，展望未来两年民主党控制的国会将调查特朗普，他的党派将“看起来像个腐败的党派，而且我们大概也罪有应得。”他提醒我，德克萨斯州民主党正是因为自身的腐败问题而走向衰落。
The lawmaker who sent me the picture and voted to impeach Paxton had similarly misjudged the party. Had the Senate convicted Paxton, he says, the GOP would be in better shape. Now, though, looking forward to two years of a Democratic Congress investigating Trump, his party was going to “look like the party of corruption, and we probably deserve it.”The Texas Democratic Party, he reminds me, went into decline because of its own corruption problems.
“如果塔拉里科成功了，甚至哪怕他没成功，四到六年后这个州变成紫州甚至更偏蓝，并非不可想象。显然它现在已经是个战场州了。”在大选中，帕克斯顿在集会上显得无精打采。他的竞选团队似乎明白“负担能力”是本轮选举的核心议题，但其行动计划似乎有点偏离靶心（其中包括一项让健身房会员费税前扣除的提案）。
“It’s not inconceivable that this state is a purple state or more in four to six years if Talarico pulls it off, even if he doesn’t pull it off. It’s obviously a battleground state now.”In the general election, Paxton has seemed lethargic at rallies. His campaign seems to understand that “affordability” is the issue of the cycle, but his action plan seems a little off the mark (it includes a proposal to make gym memberships tax-deductible).
有时让人感觉，帕克斯顿的主要愿望只是击败科宁——而他并没有花太多心思考虑接下来该怎么办。
It can feel, at times, like Paxton’s main desire was to knock off Cornyn — and that he hadn’t put a whole lot of thought into what came next.
最近，达拉斯-沃斯堡都会区一位资深共和党政治操盘手，对帕克斯顿的胜算感到不妙，便做了个专业人士该做的事：他组织了一场焦点小组讨论。“我跟老婆说，‘你得去你的麻将聚会，随口提一提参议院选举，’”他说。有几位女士去的是普雷斯顿伍德浸信会教堂，那是帕克斯顿以前的教堂。在德克萨斯州，拥有舒适住所、爱打麻将的达拉斯贵妇们，和喷火布道的基督教会牧师、德州农工大学的啦啦队长一样，一直是共和党联盟的支柱。然而，这些女士每一个都表示，她们会投票给塔拉里科。
Recently, a longtime Republican political operative in the Metroplex with a sinking feeling about Paxton’s chances did what a good practitioner does: He convened a focus group. “I told my wife, ‘You have to go to your mahjong group and casually bring up the Senate race,’” he says. Several of the women go to Prestonwood Baptist, Paxton’s old church. Game-playing Dallas ladies with comfortable homes have been a pillar of the Republican coalition in Texas for as long as fire-breathing Church of Christ preachers and the Yell Leaders of Texas A&M. And yet each of the women said that they would be voting for Talarico.
最关键的因素在于，这些女性把肯·帕克斯顿——用复数形式——视为一种类型。记者可以浪费大量笔墨去区分帕克斯顿的大罪与小过，而打麻将的女士们用一种干净利落的方式切断了这个死结。“帕克斯顿代表了她们不想从丈夫身上看到的东西，”那位政治操盘手告诉我。她们不想最终嫁给这个典型的达拉斯-沃斯堡都会区奋斗者——那个站在船上、双手各拿一瓶啤酒的男人。
The most important factor was that these women knew Ken Paxtons — plural — as a type. Reporters can waste a lot of words differentiating between Paxton’s major and minor sins. The mahjong ladies cut through the knot in a much cleaner way. “Paxton represents what they don’t want from their husbands,” the operative tells me.
（这位操盘手说，帕克斯顿“最坚实的基本盘”是“想成为他的那些男人”。）在其他年份，一名共和党候选人或许能克服这种普遍的反感。但眼下，德克萨斯州共和党面临诸多逆风。除了通胀、关税、油价、战争，以及特朗普的华盛顿倾泻而出的一切之外，还有一场针对数据中心的反弹浪潮，在许多平时支持共和党的德州地区尤为猛烈。
They didn’t want to end up with this quintessential Metroplex striver — the man on the boat, double-fisting beer. (Paxton’s “strongest group,” the operative says, “is the men that want to be him.”) In other years, a Republican candidate could overcome this general revulsion. But right now, the Texas GOP faces many headwinds. On top of inflation, tariffs, gas prices, the war, and everything else coming out of Trump’s Washington, there’s the backlash against data centers, fierce in many parts of Texas that normally turn out for the GOP.
还有“弗洛克摄像头”引发的恐慌。还有德州立法机构意外合法化了四氢大麻酚产品，随后又试图重新予以禁止。移民与海关执法局（ICE）在德州大城市持续向和平移民开枪，而政府想要在大弯曲国家公园腹地修建边境墙。
There’s the Flock camera panic. There’s the Texas legislature’s accidental legalization of THC products and subsequent efforts to reban them. ICE keeps shooting peaceful migrants in big Texas cities, and the administration wants to build a border wall through the heart of Big Bend National Park.
该党整年都在应对离奇丑闻。共和党候选人博·弗伦奇竞选监管该州石油天然气行业的委员会委员，他发布并随后强化了种族主义言论，称德克萨斯大学印度裔美国学生过多，美国已变成罗得西亚——换言之，一个白人可能需要为生存而战的地方。审计长候选人唐·哈芬斯的家族购买了杰弗里·爱泼斯坦在新墨西哥州的牧场，并试图隐瞒该交易。
The party has been contending with bizarre scandals all year. Bo French, the GOP candidate for the commission that oversees the state’s oil and gas industries, posted and then doubled down on racist comments, saying the University of Texas has too many Indian American students and that America has become Rhodesia — in other words, a place where whites might need to fight a war of survival. Comptroller candidate Don Huffines’s family bought Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch and tried to hide the purchase.
接替帕克斯顿的总检察长提名人自称梅耶斯“MAGA”米德尔顿，将自己与一位在该州支持率如同其他地方一样跌入谷底的总统捆绑在一起。下层选情更为惨淡。在第23国会选区——民主党有微弱获胜机会的选区——现任议员在其前情妇自焚身亡后退休。他被一名“枪械博主”取代，后者曾称人类儿童为“精液战利品”。“格雷格·阿博特州长也几乎可能输给其民主党对手这一事实告诉我，这既关乎全国经济和政治气候，也关乎肯·帕克斯顿，”曾管理约翰·科宁2014年竞选活动的共和党顾问布伦丹·斯坦豪泽说。
The AG nominee to replace Paxton calls himself Mayes “MAGA” Middleton, tying himself to a president whose approval rating here, like elsewhere, is in the toilet. Things get bleaker downballot. In the 23rd Congressional District, which Dems have a remote chance of winning, the incumbent retired after his former mistress killed herself by setting herself on fire. He was replaced by a “gun-tuber” who once called human children “cum trophies.”“The fact that Governor Greg Abbott is also kind of maybe nearly losing to his Democratic opponent tells me that this is as much to do with the national economic and political climate as it is with Ken Paxton,” says Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican consultant who ran John Cornyn’s 2014 campaign.
几乎所有共和党全州范围候选人预计都将获胜，哪怕仅以几个百分点的优势，这证明德克萨斯州对民主党依然多么难以攻克。帕克斯顿的看涨理由在于：只要损失不至于太大，共和党可以轻松吸收在南德克萨斯和郊区失去阵地的后果。
It’s a testament to how forbidding Texas still is for Democrats that almost all of the Republican statewide slate is expected to win, if only by a few points. The bull case for Paxton is that the GOP can comfortably absorb a loss of ground in South Texas and the suburbs as long as it doesn’t go too far.
总体而言，在竞选的最后冲刺阶段，共和党内部人士的情绪低落，甚至接近恐慌——其中有时还夹杂着一点“早就料到”的心态。一位奥斯汀的顾问在9月前往达拉斯参加共和党大会，此前他听到了一轮又一轮糟糕的内部民调，本想向党内大佬们讨个好消息。结果他被告知，没有任何好消息。其中一些内部民调确实悲观得令人难以置信。在最极端的情况下，德克萨斯州民主党有机会赢得德州众议院的控制权，并在德州参议院赢得数个席位。
On the whole, the mood among GOP insiders in the closing stretch of the race is sour verging on panicked — sometimes with a little vindication mixed in. An Austin consultant went to the Republican convention in Dallas in September after hearing about bad internal poll after bad internal poll, hoping to ask the big dogs for some good news. There wasn’t any, he was told. Some of those internal polls are, indeed, pessimistic to the point of being hard to believe. At the outside margin, Texas Democrats could have a chance of winning the Texas House and picking up several seats in the Texas Senate.
除了南德克萨斯地区的“回蓝”现象——曾排队支持特朗普的西班牙裔选民似乎已回归民主党——共和党还担心，达拉斯-沃斯堡都会区的四个主要县（达拉斯县、塔兰特县、科林登县和登顿县）可能全都转为蓝色。失去塔兰特县将是毁灭性打击，直到最近它还是全国人口最多的红县，拥有220万人口。（“塔兰特县没了，”一位曾在那里工作的策略师告诉我，意思是永远失去了——追随该州其他已稳固向左倾斜的主要城市县的脚步。）
On top of the blue reversion in South Texas, where Hispanic voters who lined up for Trump seem to be back with the Democratic Party, Republicans worry that all four of the major counties in the Metroplex — Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, and Denton — could go blue. The loss of Tarrant, until recently the most populous red county in the country with 2.2 million people, would be a crushing blow. (“Tarrant is gone,” a strategist who has worked there tells me, as in for good — following the path of other major urban counties in the state that have pulled solidly to the left.)
派克斯顿的对手和共和党怀疑论者可能正在重蹈他们一直以来的覆辙。一位资深顾问表示，反派克斯顿的共和党人“被一厢情愿驱动。他们希望针对一些相当私人的冒犯行为能伸张正义。但事情不是这么运作的。”如果派克斯顿赢了，他将成为全国的麻烦，能在比以往更高的层面达成交易。如果他输了，他依然赢了。多年前，他就立志摧毁德州共和党并彻底改变它。他可能真的会做到，只是方式并非他原本所想。
Paxton’s foes and GOP skeptics may be making the same mistake they’ve always made. Anti-Paxton Republicans, a longtime consultant says, “are powered by wish fulfillment. They are hoping that there will be some sort of justice for some rather personal offenses. But that is not the way things work.”If Paxton wins, he’s the nation’s problem, able to cut his deals at a higher level than ever before. If he loses, he still wins. He set out, many years ago, to wreck the Texas GOP and change it for good. He may do exactly that, just not in the way he intended.