George W. Bush's daughter Barbara Bush donated $2,500 to a political committee backing Democrat James Talarico in Texas's U.S. Senate race, Federal Election Commission filings made public in October show, making her the second member of the Bush family in recent weeks to publicly cross party lines against Republican Ken Paxton. The donation to Lone Star Rising PAC, dated Sept. 23, follows a Facebook post from her uncle Neil Bush announcing he had voted for Talarico instead of Paxton.
A Family Name Splits From the Ticket
Barbara Bush's contribution was first reported by the San Antonio Current. Her move came roughly a week after Neil Bush, chair of the George & Barbara Bush Foundation, posted on Facebook that he had voted for Talarico — a message he said was the first political post he had ever shared on the platform, according to The Washington Sun.
Neil Bush cited Paxton's 2020 attempt to overturn election results in other states as an affront to democratic institutions, per the same report. The Texas v. Pennsylvania suit sought to withhold certified vote counts in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as detailed by Wikipedia's case record.
Decades of Republican Dominance Now Facing a Test
The Bush family's influence on Texas politics runs deep. George W. Bush's 1994 defeat of Democratic Governor Ann Richards opened a 32-year stretch in which Republicans swept every statewide office and controlled both legislative chambers, according to CBS News. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since then, and the state has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988, KSAT reports.
The friction between Paxton and the Bush family is not new. Paxton defeated former Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, Neil Bush's nephew and the son of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, in the 2022 Republican primary for attorney general, a race Hoodline covered in its reporting on the New Texas A&M Poll Shows Talarico Up 4 Points. Paxton reached this year's general election by ousting four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a May Republican runoff.
Impeachment and Legal Fights Shadow the Campaign
Paxton was impeached by the Texas House in 2023, according to Ballotpedia. The Texas Senate later acquitted him. Separately, Paxton faced a 2015 securities-fraud indictment that was later resolved through a diversion agreement. He also helped push Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election results, as reported by KFOX14.
In his Facebook post, Neil Bush wrote that character matters more than party affiliation and that democracy depends on leaders who respect institutions, tell the truth, accept accountability and seek unity, per KFOX14's reporting. He added that Trump and those who enabled him have damaged the Republican Party, and said he worries about loyalty to individuals taking precedence over principle, and about powerful people avoiding accountability.
A Race Within the Margin of Error
The defections land as polling shows an exceptionally tight contest. An October Marist Poll of likely Texas voters found Talarico at 47% to Paxton's 45%, while a CBS News survey found Talarico pulling 5% of self-identified Republicans and 9% of voters who say they typically never back Democrats. Independents favored Talarico 52% to 41% in the same Marist survey.
Talarico's campaign has leaned on a fundraising surge to fuel the challenge, reporting $30 million raised in the second quarter of 2026 from nearly 780,000 individual donors — a single-quarter record for an election-year Senate race, Hoodline previously reported in its coverage of Paxton's sinking honesty numbers. Paxton, meanwhile, has leaned on endorsements from Trump and national MAGA figures to energize conservative base voters, per KFOX14. He said the election was days away and that losing Texas would mean losing America.
Early Voting Surges as Candidates Make Final Pitches
Talarico resumed his public campaign schedule on October 9 at the Austin City Limits Music Festival following a 12-day absence in late September and early October while recovering from the flu, a stretch during which conservative social media accounts circulated a debunked rumor that he had been hospitalized at an Ohio mental facility, according to KSAT. The facility issued a statement confirming he had never been a patient there. At a rally last week, Talarico called Paxton the rot of politics, saying he represents everything wrong with a broken, corrupt system and serves himself rather than the public, KFOX14 reported.
Polling has placed Talarico in a slight lead, amid divisions among moderate suburban voters. Several counties have reported historic early vote tallies since polls opened Monday, and Talarico's campaign is hoping the turnout translates into a November victory in a state that has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in nearly four decades.
