Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton thanked an audience member for a lone clap during a campaign stop in Odessa on Wednesday. Paxton stopped at Mama’s Kitchen in Odessa for the first of three campaign events in West Texas on Wednesday. The stops were part of Paxton’s "Come and Take It" bus tour.
It is touring the state in the closing days of his Senate campaign against Democrat James Talarico. The Texas race is crucial because it could help determine control of the U.S. Senate, challenge decades of Republican dominance in Texas, and shape the future direction of American politics.
During the stop in Odessa, Paxton spoke to an audience of just a few dozen people about the biggest cases he has led as the state’s attorney general, including against Facebook and Google. "We made them pay because they were invading your privacy. They were taking information from you without telling you, and they were monetizing it without telling you.
So they were making the money. They weren’t telling you. They were being dishonest," he said.
"Facebook, similar: they were stealing our facial geometry and so we sued them. We recovered billions of dollars, $3 billion, almost $3 billion between the two," Paxton said. He paused for a moment after just one person in the audience clapped.
Thank you for that one clap," he said, prompting others to also applaud. Newsweek has contacted the Paxton campaign for comment via an email sent outside regular business hours and is awaiting a response. The moment led some online to compare it to the infamous moment when Republican Jeb Bush asked a silent crowd to "please clap" at a campaign stop during his 2016 presidential campaign when an applause line fell flat.
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