The Senate nominee told a dozen donors that the numbers had dropped for everybody. The president, who had not heard the recording, said the convention did four times what the NFL did.
WASHINGTON—Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday about the Paxton audio, a recording in which the Republican Senate nominee in Texas tells donors that the president’s midterm convention “dropped our numbers,” President Trump said he had not heard it and supplied a number of his own, 107 million.
The Paxton audio, obtained by The New York Times, was made on Sept. 24 at a private fundraiser in a conference room near Capitol Hill. Roughly a dozen people attended. One of them, who opposes Paxton’s campaign, recorded the candidate and gave the audio to the paper. On it, Ken Paxton is asked, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” The Times reported that it is not clear from the audio whom the questioner meant.
Paxton answered about the convention. “So to be honest with you, the numbers, when we did that convention, it dropped our numbers,” he said. “Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.” He went on, according to Texas Public Radio: “I wish there was something we could do to turn that around, but there’s obviously nothing.”
Four Times What the NFL Did
“Well, I haven’t heard that, but I can tell you that the convention was amazing, as you probably know,” the president told reporters, according to the Washington Examiner. “Think of this: We had over 100 million views. I think 107. The NFL had 25 million views, so we had four times what the NFL did.” Other people, he added, “were helped greatly” by the two-night event, CBS News reported.
The convention’s first night aired opposite the NFL’s season opener, which NBC Sports said drew 25.1 million viewers. During the president’s speech that night, Fox News averaged 2.5 million viewers, Newsmax about 400,000 and NewsNation about 125,000, according to Nielsen data cited by PolitiFact. Asked to support the president’s claim that the convention “beat the NFL,” a White House spokesperson pointed the fact-checking site to a different measure. It cited TikTok. A Trump adviser had posted that the livestreams there generated “more than 70 million combined impressions” across both nights.
Impressions are “not comparable to Nielsen ratings in any meaningful sense,” Nick Reiners, a senior analyst with the Eurasia Group, told PolitiFact. Justin H. Gross, who directs a data analytics program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, likened an impression to “a lottery ticket for a chance at engagement.”
The Paxton Audio, ‘a Story That Doesn’t Exist’
The Paxton campaign did not dispute that the voice on the recording was the candidate’s, Houston Public Media noted. “This is more manipulated nonsense from The New York Times to create a story that doesn’t exist,” said Nick Maddux, a senior adviser. “Our latest poll from the last week has Ken Paxton leading by three points, and every serious pollster will tell you that our numbers have improved since early September.” The convention opened in Dallas on Sept. 9.
A Decision Desk HQ polling average on Monday showed James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, at 47.4 percent and Paxton at 43.5, The Hill reported. Sen. John Cornyn, whom Paxton defeated in a May runoff after the president endorsed Paxton, responded to the recording on Wednesday with “whoops!” Pressed by CBS News, Cornyn noted that Paxton has not led public polls and said, “it’s a tough environment, period.” He also told the network he did not believe his own numbers would be “dropping” had he been the nominee.
A Boost in the Right Direction
Responding to the Paxton audio, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who chairs the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, said Paxton was “just wrong.” “The truth of the matter is, President Trump and the midterm convention was a boost in the right direction,” Scott told reporters on a Wednesday press call, according to the Examiner. “Frankly, since the midterm convention, what we’ve seen is, and this is really important for us to see it, by the way, we’ve seen Republican enthusiasm across the country increase significantly, and that’s why there is a record number of toss-up races around the country.”
The president had reached the same conclusion a few days after the event. “The fact that we had such a successful convention really helped Ken Paxton,” he said, according to the Times. “He was a big part of it.” He added: “The convention helped Ken Paxton a lot.” From the stage in Dallas, he had told the crowd that Paxton “may not dress right,” “may not talk exactly perfectly” and “may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” before calling him “the greatest attorney general in America.”
Paxton held a prime seat inside the arena and used the convention to raise money for allied groups. Admission to the president’s Sept. 9 donor event in Dallas cost $250,000, and a photograph with him $88,600 more, according to a Republican National Committee invitation reported by The Wall Street Journal. MAGA Inc., the president’s super PAC, has put $20 million behind Paxton’s bid, the Times reported.
Closing Strong in Denton
Paxton “looks forward to closing strong alongside President Trump including when he comes to Texas this week,” Maddux said. The president is scheduled to visit Peterbilt Motors in Denton on Thursday to promote his economic agenda, the White House told CBS News Texas, and Paxton is expected to attend. He missed Vice President JD Vance’s rally in Harlingen on Wednesday, citing an event in Austin with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a rally in El Paso, The Hill reported. In Florida, Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor, redesigned his campaign website last month and removed its most prominent references to the endorsement.
From Denton, the president travels to a rally at the Choctaw Event Center in Durant, Okla. The forecast for North Texas on Thursday called for two to five inches of rain, with isolated totals of up to eight. Flooding was possible, according to CBS News Texas.
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