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Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton are virtually tied in Texas’ U.S. Senate race one week before Election Day, as Texans vote early in record numbers for a midterm.
Talarico, an Austin state representative, leads Paxton, Texas' attorney general, in five of the six public polls released over the past week, though all five races are within each poll's margin of error. The sixth poll, from Fox News, puts both candidates at 49 percent.
No Democrat has won a U.S. Senate race in Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. A Talarico win in a state President Donald Trump carried by nearly 14 points in 2024 would also go a long way toward deciding which party controls the Senate next year.
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More than 4.5 million Texans had cast ballots by midday Monday, and analysts expect total turnout to reach about 10 million, up from 8.1 million in 2022.
James Talarico vs. Ken Paxton: What Latest Polls Show
Talarico's edge in the final stretch of polling runs anywhere from zero to 5 points, and the newest surveys put it at 2 points or less.
The most recent, from ActiVote, found Talarico ahead 51 percent to 49 percent among 400 likely voters surveyed October 17 to 21. Verasight, polling for VoteHub from October 1 to 20, had him up 48 percent to 45 percent among 601 likely voters.
An Emerson College/Nexstar poll of 1,000 likely voters, taken October 17 to 19, put Talarico at 48 percent and Paxton at 46 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. When undecided voters were pushed to choose, the result was 49 percent to 48 percent, with Libertarian Ted Brown at 3 percent. Emerson's Spencer Kimball said Talarico's support has inched up by about a point a month since August, and that Paxton would likely gain if Brown's backers, mostly independents and Republicans, drift away before Election Day.
A Fox News poll conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research from October 15 to 19 found the two candidates tied at 49 percent among 1,398 likely voters. Fox's previous Texas survey, released October 1, had Talarico ahead 51 percent to 49 percent.
Texas Public Opinion Research, a group run by Democrat Luke Warford, found Talarico ahead 51 percent to 47 percent among 969 likely voters from October 15 to 18, a lead one point narrower than its September poll.
The widest margin came from a survey conducted by the Cook Political Report, run jointly by the Democratic firm New River Strategies and the Republican firm GS Strategy Group. It found Talarico ahead 49 percent to 44 percent among 934 likely voters from October 9 to 13, with a 3.2-point margin of error. Amy Walter, Cook's editor-in-chief, wrote that Paxton is "almost twice as unpopular" as Trump among Texas voters.
Taken together, Talarico leads the RealClearPolitics average by 1.8 points. Prediction markets are more confident in him than the polls are. Kalshi traders gave Talarico a 65 percent chance of winning on Monday, and the site's margin market points to a win of about 2.2 points. Polymarket had him at 64 percent.
Ken Salazar, a Democrat who served as Interior Secretary and later as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has heard the same worry campaigning for Democrats, including on the border in McAllen. “Voters are very concerned about the economy, the pain that people are feeling with the high costs of living, gas prices, food prices, housing prices,” he told Newsweek.
“There is a lot of pain.”
...
Latest Developments in Texas Race
Trump returns to Texas on Tuesday for rallies in Lubbock and Waco, both in parts of the state he carried overwhelmingly in 2024. It will be his third visit this month, though he has rarely praised Paxton without slipping in a jab. The president told reporters last week that Paxton had "gone way up in the poll."
Paxton also brought Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz onto the trail over the weekend, while Talarico launched a statewide television ad tying Paxton to corruption and promising to lower household costs. The two men have not debated.
Turnout has blown well past the last midterm. Dallas County alone had cast more than 248,000 ballots in the first four days of early voting, up 81 percent from the same point in 2022. Travis County, home to Austin, was up 50 percent.
"If Paxton doesn't do better than he's doing right now in the suburban areas, he may very well lose," Mark Jones, a fellow in political science at Rice University's Baker Institute, told Newsweek.
Texas voters do not register by party, so analysts track ballots by which primaries a voter has taken part in. Through October 23, voters with a Democratic primary history outnumbered those with a Republican one by about 75,000, Republican data consultant Derek Ryan told The Texan.
"Public opinion is sort of, for the most part, made up," Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist in Texas, told Newsweek this month, skeptical that the late spending changes many minds. "Voters have their minds made up."
The gap should narrow, Ryan said. By his count, roughly 318,000 voters who cast ballots in each of the last four Republican primaries had not yet voted, compared with 147,000 such Democrats, and both groups usually turn out at rates of 95 percent or higher. He has also said Republicans need rural counties to supply at least a quarter of all votes to hold statewide office.
Timing is another reason for caution. In the Texas Politics Project's polling, 63 percent of Democrats said they planned to vote early, compared with 48 percent of Republicans, and 40 percent of Republicans said they would wait for Election Day.
Asked what coverage of the race was missing, Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who has followed it closely, pointed north. "The thing that you should really watch is Tarrant County and Dallas County and the hemorrhaging of Republicans who are leaving and defecting to Talarico and Hinojosa," he told Newsweek. "And what I'm really keeping an eye on is what the turnout rate for Republicans is going to be."
In Madrid's telling, Democrats need three things at once: very high Democratic turnout, "a historic break of independents away from Republicans," and depressed Republican turnout. "You need all three of those to win Texas, and that's why it's so competitive right now," he said.
"This doesn't necessarily mean that a bunch of Republicans have become Democrats in Texas," Steinhauser said. "It's more that Republican voters might not be as enthusiastic to vote this year as they have been in the past."
Biggest Issues Facing Texas Voters
The cost of living tops voters' concerns in Texas, and polls show voters trust Talarico more on prices and corruption, while Paxton keeps an edge on immigration.
About nine in 10 Texas voters in the Cook survey rated corruption, the cost of living and the economy as important to their vote. Sixty-one percent said the same of immigration and the border.
Fox News polling earlier this month pointed the same way. Voters who called the cost of living extremely important to their Senate vote backed Talarico by 19 points, and he led by 18 among those focused on artificial intelligence. The Fox poll found that voters most focused on immigration favored Paxton by 20.
Both candidates spent the weekend talking about prices as inflation tied to the war continues to squeeze households. Talarico has fused the two issues into one pitch. "We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis," he told supporters in San Antonio on Saturday. He has pledged to vote to ban corporate political action committees and to work to overturn Citizens United.
Paxton, at a rally in Georgetown, pitched a $25,000 deduction for each family member's out-of-pocket medical expenses and warned that Talarico's policies would raise taxes. He called his opponent "the most radical Democrat ever to run statewide."
For Steinhauser, two things drag on the nominee at once. The national climate is "weighing heavily on Texas Republicans, especially Ken Paxton," he said, and "Paxton's troubles and obstacles along the way in his political career are also weighing him down."
Why Texas Senate Race Matters in 2026 Midterms
Texas is one of three Republican-held Senate seats where the Cook Political Report's October polling found Democrats ahead, alongside Iowa and Ohio, and all three are central to the party's hopes of retaking the chamber. Decision Desk HQ gives Talarico a 55 percent chance of winning.
The race is also among the most expensive in the country. Talarico raised $64 million in the third quarter to Paxton's $18 million, while Elon Musk gave $158 million to the Senate GOP's main super PAC, which passed the same amounts to a group backing Paxton.
Jones called Paxton "the most deeply flawed candidate that Texas Republicans have run for a statewide office in the modern era." Trump's slide in approval has compounded the problem, he said. A Republican normally starts a statewide race in Texas with "a cushion of somewhere in the high single digits," Jones said. "And that cushion is now down to next to nothing."
The last Democrat to come this close was Beto O'Rourke, who lost to Cruz 50.9 percent to 48.3 percent in 2018. O'Rourke trailed by 6.8 points in the final RealClearPolitics average and finished about 4 points closer than the polls suggested.
Cruz led every public poll of that race from April through July 2018, and O'Rourke led in only about one in 10 surveys over the whole campaign, according to Decision Desk HQ. Talarico has led most polls since the spring.
The 2018 race also produced record midterm turnout. More than 8.3 million Texans voted, and nearly 82 percent of voters with strong Democratic primary histories cast ballots, compared with 54 percent in 2014, Ryan's data showed at the time. O'Rourke carried every major city but only 31 of the state's 254 counties. Analysts now expect about 10 million voters this year.
Steinhauser still thinks his party holds the seat, with a caveat: "I just think it might be closer than we all expected."
Democrats are hedging too. "Texas is still a state that favors Republicans," Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and director of the Lone Star Project, told Newsweek. "It doesn't just fall to us. We have to take it away from the Republicans."
Early voting ends October 30. Election Day is November 3.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Gray R. Thomas
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