Paxton Campaign Scraps Alamo Finale on Eve of Texas Senate Vote, Without Explanation
The Republican's two-week 'Come and Take It' bus tour was billed to end at the Alamo, where political activity is banned, and Monday's schedule left no way to get there.
Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton will not hold an event at the Alamo on the eve of Election Day after all, even though his campaign had advertised one as the finale of its statewide bus tour. The campaign has not said why the plan changed and did not respond to requests for comment from CBS News.
The reversal shows up in Monday's schedule. Paxton's listed stops were in Conroe and Allen, both hundreds of miles from San Antonio, where the Alamo stands. The Allen event was set to begin at 6:30 p.m. Central, which would leave no time to reach San Antonio that evening.
Last month the campaign announced a two-week bus tour across Texas called "Come and Take It," a phrase taken from the opening words of the Texas Revolution. Many stops had not been announced, but the campaign said the tour would end Monday, November 2, at the Alamo.
The Alamo is the former fort that the Mexican army besieged for 13 days in 1836, a siege that killed more than 150 people. It is now a World Heritage Site and museum in San Antonio. The site's own website says political activities are prohibited there, which is the likely reason the event could not go ahead as advertised.
Paxton, the state's attorney general, is running against Democrat James Talarico in a race that has become one of the most closely watched in the country. Texas has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988. Recent polls show Talarico with a slight lead, and CBS News rates the contest a toss-up. A Democratic win would end a drought of more than three decades, which is why both parties have poured attention and money into the state in the closing weeks.
President Donald Trump endorsed Paxton in the Republican primary and has campaigned heavily for him in Texas. He held a rally in San Antonio in October, and the week before this report he appeared at events in Corpus Christi and Lubbock. The Paxton campaign did not say whether the Alamo cancellation had anything to do with the venue's rules, and it did not announce a replacement event for the tour's final night.
The tour's name was meant to cast the campaign in the language of Texas history, and the Alamo was to be its backdrop. With voting set for Tuesday, the closing image Paxton's team promised will not happen. Conroe sits north of Houston and Allen north of Dallas, so Paxton's last full day of campaigning is spent in the state's two largest metropolitan areas, according to the schedule described by CBS News. The Alamo, by contrast, would have required a long drive south and a venue whose managers say they do not host political events.
