Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton is setting off on an 18-day bus tour Saturday that will take him to over 30 stops across the state leading up to Election Day, according to plans first shared with The Texas Tribune Wednesday.
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Paxton will kick off the “Come and Take It” bus tour in Rockwall two days before the start of early voting on Monday.
Evoking the Texas Revolution, Paxton’s closing message to Texans draws on his record as attorney general of suing opioid companies, Big Tech and the Biden administration: “When they come after Texans,” his campaign said, “Ken Paxton goes after them.”
He plans to close out the tour with a stop at the Alamo on Nov. 2, the eve of Election Day.
“In Texas, ‘come and take it’ has never been a slogan,” Paxton said in a statement. “It’s a promise.”
On Friday, Paxton’s opponent, Democrat James Talarico, announced his own get-out-the-vote push, dubbed the “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts” tour — a reference to Texas’ beloved Friday night lights football tradition.
“Texans are tired of being divided into teams — red versus blue, left versus right, rural versus urban,” Talarico said. “That’s why we’re traveling across the state to unite working people onto one team. I encourage Texans across the political spectrum to join us at one of our stops as we work to defeat the politics of division.”
Talarico plans to kick off his swing in Plano on Sunday and hit 20 cities before closing out in Austin the night before Election Day.
Paxton’s callback to symbols of Texan defiance are laden with symbolism as he finds himself in a dead heat with Talarico, who is seeking his party’s first statewide win since 1994. Public polls have shown the Austin lawmaker narrowly leading throughout the race, and Paxton has often framed the campaign as a last stand against a Democratic siege.
In a statement announcing his bus tour, Paxton contrasted his candidacy with that of Talarico, whom he accused of being “bankrolled by national Democrats and Silicon Valley billionaires” — a reference to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s $11.5 million in donations to a super PAC supporting Talarico. (Talarico’s campaign has emphasized that the Austin Democrat “has no control over contributions to any super PAC” under federal law and wants to ban all super PACs.)
“He won’t fight for you. He’ll fight for them,” Paxton said. “So my message to anyone who comes after Texas is the same one Texans have been sending for almost two hundred years: Come and take it.”
National Republican power brokers, including President Donald Trump, Senate Republican leadership and Elon Musk, have poured over $214 million into Texas in recent weeks, tapping affiliated PACs to fund an advertising barrage aimed at promoting Paxton and attacking Talarico, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. Much of that spending has been backed by Musk, the Texas-based Tesla and SpaceX founder and the world’s richest man. In a Sept. 24 audio recording leaked to Politico last week, Paxton complained that his campaign was “all coming from D.C.”
Trump has made several stops in Texas now in a bid to gin up Republican turnout and support Paxton, following a midterm convention in Dallas that prominently featured the attorney general.
A prolific fundraiser, Talarico, meanwhile, is relying on his own campaign account for most of his ad spending, with $81 million booked on the airwaves so far. The super PAC in his corner has dropped an additional $8 million, while Senate Democratic leadership has put $3.5 million into the race so far.
Stops on Paxton’s tour will feature to-be-announced special guests and include events in the following cities: Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, Amarillo, Lubbock, Odessa, San Angelo, Abilene, Wichita Falls, Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Corpus Christi, Victoria, Tyler and Beaumont.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.