Most polling shows Texas’ U.S. Senate race between state Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate, and Austin state Rep. James Talarico, his Democratic opponent, as extremely close. That potentially creates an opening for a third-party candidate, Libertarian Ted Brown, to shape the outcome.
When Brown last ran for the Senate in 2024 against incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and then-Democratic U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, Brown pulled more than 267,000 votes statewide. That was a record for a Libertarian candidate, but not enough to shift the balance in a contest in which Cruz beat Allred by nearly 1 million votes.
This year’s contest is likely to be significantly tighter, in part due to lingering bitterness toward Paxton among voters for incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary runoff.
“Assuming that Talarico and Paxton run a fairly close race, which is what the polling now suggests, even a 2 or 3 or 4 percent vote for Brown, given that it would likely come disproportionately from Republican voters who can’t vote for Paxton, it could affect the outcome of the race,” said political science professor Cal Jillson of Southern Methodist University.
Brown is confident that he can do at least as well this time as he did two years ago, if not better.
“There are a lot of Republicans that didn’t vote for Paxton in the primary, and a lot of them are not coming around,” Brown said. “Some of them are saying they’re going to vote for James Talarico, or they’re not going to vote in that race. Usually, though, when Republicans start going to vote, they’re probably not going to vote for a Democrat. So, that’s where I have somewhat of an opening for people that aren’t satisfied with the primary results, but they just can’t bring themselves to vote for the other party.”
Brown, a retired insurance adjuster, is the former chair of the Libertarian Party of California and currently the vice chair of the Libertarian Party of Travis County, in the Austin area. He is not simply framing himself as the anti-Paxton option for disaffected conservatives.
“The Libertarian approach, and my approach, is to attract people who believe in limited government, more freedom and less government, personal freedom, economic freedom, and a non-interventionist foreign policy,” Brown said. “Republicans are just big government. They do whatever [President] Donald Trump says, and I think there’s a lot of actual fiscal conservatives out there that are looking for a candidate that really wants to cut the size of the federal government.”
Brown rejects the notion that he is a spoiler in the Senate race, an accusation that many Cornyn supporters leveled against U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston during the first phase of the Republican primary in March.
“Frankly, you can’t spoil something that’s rotten and putrid to begin with,” Brown said. “Republicans always seem to think that Libertarians are taking votes away from them. In fact, that’s why Republicans in the Texas Legislature have done their best to try to keep Libertarian candidates off the ballot.”
