A luxury pen could end up writing a chapter in American electoral history. Fourteen years after he pocketed a $1,000 pen that did not belong to him, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is seeing the incident resurface at the worst possible moment — in the final stretch of a Senate race that could determine control of Congress.
Paxton, the Republican nominee backed by Donald Trump, is locked in a tight contest with Democrat James Talarico, a 37-year-old former teacher and seminarian endorsed by Barack Obama. Recent polling cited by The New York Times on October 14 put Talarico ahead in the race for the Texas Senate seat. The newspaper noted that “the national attention on Mr. Talarico has given this pen affair unprecedented resonance.”
What Happened in 2012
On August 14, 2012, Paxton — then a member of the Texas Legislature — walked into a Collin County courthouse near Dallas and picked up a $1,000 pen that belonged to attorney Joe Joplin. Surveillance footage shows him pocketing an object as he passed through a security checkpoint. Paxton quickly returned the pen to its owner and has maintained ever since that it was a simple misunderstanding.
The episode might have remained a footnote. Instead, it has been exhumed repeatedly by the Texan’s political opponents as a symbol of his ethics. In 2018, Democrat Justin Nelson ran a video declaring: “Vote for Justin Nelson […] he won’t steal your pen.” In 2025, outgoing Texas Senator John Cornyn used the incident against Paxton in the Republican primary, calling the pen a “symbol of depravity.”
A Campaign Prop and an Endorsement
In August, on the fourteenth anniversary of the incident to the day, Talarico revived the surveillance footage and added a coup de grâce: Joplin, the attorney whose pen was taken, appears in the ad endorsing the Democrat. “Vote for James Talarico. He won’t steal your pen,” the campaign clip concludes. Talarico’s team is also selling its own pens, inscribed: “This is not Ken Paxton’s pen.”
The day after Paxton won the Republican primary on May 26, Talarico described his rival on X as “the most corrupt politician in America,” adding that he “embodies the broken system we are fighting against.”
Scandals Beyond the Pen
The 63-year-old Republican, an ultraconservative figurehead of the MAGA movement, is mired in controversies that dwarf the pen affair. In 2023, the Texas House of Representatives — controlled by his own party — impeached him on grounds of fraud and abuse of trust; he was later acquitted. Despite that history, he was nominated for the Senate and received Trump’s endorsement, with the president praising him on Truth Social as a “terrific senator, full of common sense and respected by all.”
Trump’s camp has staged rallies across the state, including one in San Antonio on October 8 attended by the president. But that support is no guarantee of victory. The president’s popularity has fallen sharply since the start of his second term, and polls suggest Congress could swing to the Democrats — particularly if Talarico wins in Texas, a Republican stronghold for more than 30 years.
With the midterms set for November 3, all 435 House seats and a third of the Senate are up for renewal. A Democratic flip in Texas could cost Trump his Republican majority in Congress — and a single pen, it turns out, may carry more weight than anyone anticipated.
