Here is the number that should make anyone with a savings account sit up: $47 million (about £35 million), sent by Elon Musk’s political action committee, a group that pools money to back candidates, into Ken Paxton’s campaign. That is a serious amount of money. It is also, as of this writing, a serious amount of money that has not visibly moved Texas.
The mechanism is simple enough. A PAC collects large sums and spends them on advertising, staff and getting supporters to the polls, betting that the candidate it backs wins and that the winner remembers who paid. Texas has leaned Republican for decades, so the plan presumably was that enough cash could push a contest over the line. Instead, the state has spent the cycle behaving like a place that does not enjoy being bought.
So what does this mean for you? Probably nothing about your own vote. Yours costs nothing and counts exactly as much as his. The useful lesson is about the spending. When one donor can outspend a campaign and still find the electorate unimpressed, the money is clearly buying airtime, not conviction. Keep your own savings in the boring place, because a boring index fund has a much better track record of doing what you paid it to do.