Paxton’s Biggest Donors Keep Wallets Closed in Tight Senate Race

AP Photo/Eric Gay, File

Two West Texas oil billionaires have donated millions of dollars to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over the years, but have kept their checkbooks slammed shut this election cycle, even though the Republican nominee for Texas’ U.S. Senate seat is in the fight of his political life.

Paxton scored President Donald Trump’s endorsement over the incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) — and with it, the primary win — but that victory required a runoff, burned through campaign funds, and put a spotlight on the series of scandals, lawsuits, his bitter divorce from his state senator wife, and other controversies that have dogged Paxton for years.

As a result, Paxton is widely viewed as a weaker candidate in the general election due to the seemingly unending parade of messy headlines and the downward drag of Trump and the GOP’s poor polling on key issues like immigration and the economy — not to mention the significantly larger fundraising haul of the Democratic nominee, State Rep. James Talarico (D).

Democrats have not won a major statewide race in Texas since the late 1990s, but polls have continuously shown Paxton lagging behind Talarico — a mathematical situation that previous Texas Democrats who ran for statewide elections since the GOP locked in majority control, like former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), never achieved.

Cornyn is dedicating his massive fundraising network to contested races in other states and not inclined to drop a penny to help the guy who forced his retirement from the Senate. The NRSC and other national GOP groups spent more than $100 million to boost Cornyn in the primary; conservative commentators are now looking skeptically at Texas’ multiple expensive media markets and openly pondering if their money wouldn’t be more effective shoring up Republicans in other states.

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson called Paxton’s primary win a “Pyrrhic victory long ago predicted” and spelled out how the mess of having Paxton as the GOP nominee “could cost Republicans the Senate” because Texas GOP voters had “chose[n] between a safe seat and a coin flip, and they took the coin flip on purpose.”

Paxton’s supporters now insist everyone else must carry him. They want the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the outside groups, the donor class, and President Trump to spend whatever it takes, even if the money spent in Texas costs Republicans Alaska, Iowa, Maine, and Ohio, and even if it forecloses winnable pickups in Michigan and New Hampshire. Saving Paxton, they say, matters more than saving the country from a Democrat controlled Senate. That is nonsense. I said it in the primary, and I stand by it now.

Senator John Kennedy went on Fox and put the number at $100 million to get Paxton across the line.

That is not a rounding error. Every dollar of it is a dollar not spent defending Alaska and Maine, not spent in Ohio against Sherrod Brown, and not spent contesting a Michigan seat where Democrats nominated Abdul El-Sayed. Republican money is finite. The President is sitting on the sidelines of the Texas race for now, which ought to tell Texas Republicans something about how people who count votes for a living see this.

So where are Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks? The two oilmen, who live in Midland and Cisco respectively, have a vast, decades-long history of bankrolling various conservative candidates, causes, and organizations across the country but especially in the Lone Star State. Some of that support has earned praise, like Dunn’s donations to criminal justice reform projects that have received bipartisan support. (Disclosure: this reporter previously worked for one of those projects at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.)

Other involvement by these two men has been far more controversial. Money donated by Dunn and Wilks, their spouses, and families has been directly credited for helping push Texas politics to the far right, as they’ve spent millions of dollars to boost their preferred candidates and primary any Republican they’ve viewed as too moderate.

A CNN report in 2022 found that Dunn, his wife Terri Dunn, Wilks, his wife Jo Ann Wilks, his brother Dan Wilks, and Dan’s wife Staci Wilks, had taken full advantage of Texas state campaign finance law allowing unlimited donations to political candidates by spending staggering sums to support their chosen legislative candidates, sometimes even representing the majority of all the funds those candidates raised. The Wilks brothers and their wives also donated about two-thirds of the total money raised by a Super PAC backing Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) 2016 presidential campaign.

Dunn and Wilks have been documented by multiple Texas media outlets as Paxton’s biggest donors throughout his scandal-plagued political career, universally viewed as being responsible for propelling him through primaries he would have lost and shielding him from political consequences.

“There is no Ken Paxton without Tim Dunn, period,” Scott Braddock, a Texas political reporting veteran and the editor of the Quorum Report, told me during a previous interview, noting how Dunn had “collateralized a $1 million loan for Paxton” through the Empower Texans PAC he funded and that boosted Paxton through the open GOP primary during his first run for Texas AG in 2014.

Empower Texans was later rebranded to the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, still enjoyed generous donations from Dunn and Wilks, and still dropped major bank to help Paxton. When the AG was facing an impeachment inquiry from his fellow Republicans in the legislature, Defend Texas Liberty gave $3 million to Lt. Gov Dan Patrick (R), whose position entailed him presiding over the impeachment proceedings. The funds were provided in the form of a $1 million contribution and a $2 million loan and were donated a month before Paxton’s impeachment hearings.

But Dunn and Wilks have kept their powder dry during this Senate race. Several Texas-based political observers have opined that this is because the billionaires liked Paxton where they had put him, in the AG’s office.

In February, Texas Monthly reported on how Dunn had given “seemingly limitless support” to Paxton for decades, but had “disappeared” after the AG decided to run for Senate. Another Texas Monthly article in April noted that Wilks “appeared largely absent” from political donations altogether this election cycle.

A search of the FEC’s campaign finance records for this election cycle (defined as from Jan. 1, 2025 to today) shows that Wilks’ brother Dan and wife Staci each donated $7,000, the federal maximum donation, to Paxton’s Senate campaign on July 21, 2025, but none for Farris Wilks to any candidate or PAC during this period.

As for Dunn, he has made millions of dollars of political contributions to PACs and Republican candidates around the country. Some of his top donations this election cycle include:

$5,000,000 to GLCF, Inc. (Great Lakes Conservatives Fund), a super PAC backing GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI). This represents about two-thirds of all contributions to GLCF, Inc.

$2,000,000 to Jefferson Rising, another PAC that has backed GOP candidates like Kari Lake’s failed Senate campaign in 2024. Dunn is the main donor to the PAC and the only donor during this election cycle.

$1,970,900 to Grow the Majority, Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) PAC to support House Republican candidates.

$620,200 each to the Republican National Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee

$20,000 each to the state GOP parties in Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, New York, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

$10,000 each to the state GOP parties in California, Oregon, and Texas.

Dunn has also given the federal maximum individual contribution to a long list of Republican U.S. House and Senate candidates across the country, including Rep. Nick Begich III (R-AK), Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI), Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ), Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-NJ), Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), Speaker Johnson, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE), Rep. Rob Wittman (R-PA), and Maine Gov. Paul LePage, who is running for Congress.

But none for Paxton.

The sole exception seems to be a $110,000 independent expenditure by Dunn’s Jefferson Rising PAC on July 31, to send text messages criticizing Talarico. Texas Monthly reported on the expenditure, describing it as Dunn getting involved in the race “indirectly” and noting that it was “unclear what the messages, which were sent [Aug. 3, 2026], contained or whom they targeted.”

“In the context of what Dunn has donated elsewhere [this election cycle], the money he just spent against Talarico is peanuts,” wrote Texas Monthly’s Robert Downen. “It’s certainly chump change compared to his historic support of Paxton, but it might indicate that Dunn thinks his onetime ally is vulnerable. If it’s the start of a bigger trend, it could dramatically alter the race.”

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