Republicans are growing increasingly worried that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the party's nominee in one of the nation's most closely watched Senate races, could shed crucial support in his contest against Democratic nominee State Rep. James Talarico. But it is not only Talarico who concerns them — some in the party fear a Libertarian candidate could siphon votes from the scandal-plagued incumbent.

Reporting for The Bulwark on Wednesday, Lauren Egan wrote that "Democratic operatives believe that some Republican voters won't feel comfortable backing the scandal-plagued Paxton." She added, "They told me that the contentious GOP primary between Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn only deepened the fracture in the party's base. It piqued a lot of interest when Cornyn posted a local news story to his X account in June about how Libertarian Ted Brown was courting disaffected conservative voters."

Egan quoted a Texas-based Democratic strategist close to Talarico's campaign, who said: "There are a non-insignificant number of Cornyn voters who I think are up for grabs and are uncomfortable with the idea of Ken Paxton—and maybe at this point, after all the ads, could be uncomfortable with [Talarico]. There's a world where Ted Brown gets 3 or 4 percent of the vote in this thing."

Such a result, Egan noted, "would be a significant shift from the competitive 2018 Senate matchup between Beto O'Rourke and Sen. Ted Cruz, when the Libertarian on the ballot received 0.8 percent of the vote. O'Rourke lost that race by 2.6 percentage points."

The arithmetic helps explain why the third-party angle is drawing attention in campaign circles: a Brown performance in the 3-to-4-percent range the strategist described would be several multiples of the Libertarian's 0.8 percent from 2018 and larger than the entire 2.6-point margin that separated O'Rourke and Cruz. It also frames the stakes of the primary fracture Egan's sources described — this is a contest for the Senate seat Cornyn still holds, which is precisely why the disposition of his former primary voters hangs over the general election.

Paxton carries substantial baggage into the general election. His record of controversies spans infidelity and using his office to target political enemies, allegedly accepting bribes, abusing his office to hire a wealthy friend, and fighting for a disproportionately light sentence for a convicted child sex abuser.

More recently, Paxton angered fellow Republicans when a recording surfaced from a private fundraiser in which he suggested that President Donald Trump — whose endorsement helped him defeat incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary — is actually a drag on the ticket.

"Do you feel like he's a little bit of a drag?" Paxton was asked at the event.

"So to be honest with you, the numbers — when we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody's numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good," he replied.

At least one Texas political power broker was furious at the remark. "Paxton was made and invented by Donald Trump," former Texas House Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry said on CNN with Kasie Hunt. "He was his savior. He got him through being impeached as attorney general. He got him the nomination to be senator of Texas. Without, Trump, he's nothing. He's nothing. And this guy is so stupid. He's biting the hand that made him," McHenry said. "… But Ken Paxton is so stupid that he's biting the hand that made him and invented him. He should say, with enormous gratitude, that he's grateful for the president making fun of the way he looks and the way he, as he should, because he wouldn't be even considered for that in this stage of the election cycle [without Trump]."

The questions to watch from here are the ones the reporting surfaces: whether the Cornyn primary voters described as "up for grabs" consolidate behind the Republican nominee, and whether Brown's courtship of disaffected conservatives — notable enough that Cornyn himself shared a local news story about it to his X account in June — develops into more than a strategist's hypothetical.

The report was first published by Alternet.