Democrat Nathan Johnson flips Texas attorney general’s office

Texans elected a Democrat to serve as the state’s top lawyer for the first time in decades on Tuesday, flipping an attorney general’s office that had become a reliable conservative stronghold under outgoing Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Nathan Johnson, a state senator from Dallas, is poised to become Texas’s first Democratic attorney general in 32 years after defeating Mayes Middleton.

Johnson earned 53.4 percent of the vote to Middleton’s 46.6 percent, with nearly all of the ballots counted as of Wednesday morning, according to Decision Desk HQ .

“This is a tremendous honor, and a tremendous responsibility,” Johnson wrote on the social platform X . “Texans voted for an attorney general who will represent them and the interest of our state, and who will above all uphold the rule of law. That’s what I intend to do.”

Johnson portrayed himself as the antithesis of Paxton, campaigning on a “back to basics” approach that would restore the office’s focus on public safety, consumer protection and investigating corruption. He also pledged to be a legal stopgap against what he described as “the MAGA machine’s assault” on individual rights and overreach from the Trump administration.

It’s a dramatic shift for the largest state attorney general’s office in the South, which aggressively pursued legal action against the Obama and Biden administrations. A Texas Tribune analysis found Paxton and his predecessor sued the Obama administration nearly 50 times over the former president’s two terms, and the office’s own records indicate more than 100 lawsuits filed during Biden’s term.

Middleton, meanwhile, had tied himself closely to President Trump, promising to continue advancing an “America First” legal strategy that focused on border security, defending abortion restrictions and rooting out fraud, waste and abuse in the government, among other conservative issues.

Johnson’s victory was part of a larger blue wave that swept Texas in the midterms, with Democrat Gina Hinojosa taking the governor’s mansion and Democrat James Talarico flipping a Senate seat for the first time in more than 30 years.