Texans’ views of Ken Paxton in UT/Texas Politics Project polling as the Texas Attorney General faces impeachment

With the Texas House of Representatives poised to consider 20 articles of impeachment against Attorney General Ken Paxton, we’ve pulled several looks at voters’ views of the Attorney General from the Texas Politics Project archives.

In our most recent April 2023 UT/Texas Politics Project Poll, job approval ratings of Paxton fell in the range within which they have fluctuated for most of his tenure as attorney general. Overall, voters were slightly more likely to approve of Paxton’s job performance than disapprove in the most recent poll, with 39% approving of the attorney general’s job performance, 35% disapproving, and 26% unable to offer a positive or negative evaluation. Among Republicans, 59% expressed approval in the latest poll, while only 11% disapproved; among Democrats, only 17% expressed approval, with 62% disapproving — however, this result represented Ken Paxton’s best overall evaluations among Democratic voters in the time series.

Overall, evaluations of Paxton have been quite consistent over 12 survey items assessing the Attorney General’s job performance between April 2021 and April 2023. Between 32% and 41% of voters have expressed approval of Paxton’s job performance over the time period, while between 35% and 39% disapprove, with notable, durable differences among partisans as well.

While the suspicion that Paxton’s persistent legal jeopardy and other controversies might damage his electoral prospects has hovered over his last two reelection campaigns, the slowly increasing awareness of Paxton’s legal problems between 2016 and 2022 (here and here) never resulted in his defeat in either a primary or a general election (though it did spur a number of challengers in the 2022 GOP primary).

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