With U.S. Senate control at stake, Republicans fear the once-unthinkable: a blue Texas

The last time a Democrat won statewide in Texas, James Talarico was in kindergarten.

More than three decades later, in a state strewn with failed Democratic hopefuls once proffered as party saviors, the 37-year-old Austin Democrat is running neck-and-neck with Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the most expensive U.S. Senate race in the country. Having failed to crack Talarico’s narrow yet stubborn polling edge, and with signs of tepid GOP turnout in early voting, Republicans are heading toward Election Day anxious about the once-unthinkable: Texas, the crown jewel of their national base, going blue.

In the short run, control of the U.S. Senate could come down to the Lone Star State amid a tightly contested national map. But both parties are also weighing the ripple effects that will stretch for years beyond Tuesday, depending on how the election shakes out.

For Democrats, the conditions may never be better: a midterm under a Republican president whose approval has been dragged down by an unpopular war and high gas prices, an opponent whose own party spent nearly $100 million calling him unfit for office, and a Democratic nominee raising more money than any Senate candidate in the country.

A Talarico loss in this environment could extinguish the dream of a blue Texas for cycles to come, making the state a tough sell for future national investment. And it could embolden the insurgent wing of the GOP, who chose Paxton despite the establishment’s protests that he was a liability, to go further in their takeover of the party and the state.

On the flip side, a Talarico win could prompt a rewriting of the national political map as soon as the 2028 presidential race, and just as Texas is poised to gain more congressional seats and Electoral College votes after the 2030 Census. Republicans have not had to seriously contend with the possibility of losing Texas in a presidential election in decades, yet could find themselves in an arms race for the second-largest prize on the presidential map, one they cannot win the White House without.

And for Texas Republicans, who have moved further to the right without electoral penalty in November, a loss of this magnitude would inflame existing tensions between the uncompromising MAGA wing that has remade the party and the old guard whose prophecies of electoral doom have gotten louder as their influence has waned.

“This is one of the most difficult political challenges in the world,” said Manny Garcia, a former executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “The whole world changes when you break through and win a statewide race in Texas.”

The stakes of the race — on top of the contrast cut by Talarico, an aspiring Presbyterian minister whose primary vulnerability has been a deep archive of progressive statements, and Paxton, a consummate MAGA warrior plagued by scandals — has made for a wildly competitive contest that has pulled unprecedented money, attention and wishcasting onto the state.

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have headlined six campaign events since Labor Day in mostly deep-red parts of Texas in a bid to juice turnout, and national Republican groups, funded almost entirely by Elon Musk, have poured north of $272 million into the race.

Talarico, meanwhile, used his record-breaking fundraising — aided by a robust outside spending effort previous statewide Democrats lacked — to drive home his message tying a broken economy to billionaire and corporate political influence and casting Paxton as its “embodiment.”

The combined $408 million in advertising since the primaries has fueled a split screen Texans were hard pressed to miss over the past few months: from Talarico, a pitch for cross-partisan and working-class unity in a faith-based, “top versus bottom” vision of politics; and from Paxton, a warning to the GOP base that his loss would surrender Texas and its conservative identity to the radical left.

Despite all the spending and stumping for Paxton down the stretch, Talarico has maintained a slim polling lead — an unheard-of position this late in the game for a statewide Democrat in Texas. Talarico’s favorability rating dipped as millions of dollars in attacks blanketed the airwaves, as captured by some recent polls, but he otherwise held onto his polling average lead. Part of the explanation: Paxton’s own favorability has settled so underwater as to make him the GOP’s only battleground U.S. Senate nominee less popular than Trump in their own state, according to the Cook Political Report.

A Talarico victory hinges on turning out the Democratic base akin to a presidential election, running up the score with independent and Latino voters, and persuading a degree of Republicans to cross the aisle for him or skip the Senate race on their ballots — a balancing act no Democrat has pulled off this century.

Paxton’s path is simpler: turn out the party faithful and persuade Republicans who aren’t fully in his camp that a Senator Talarico would be worse than any alternative. But with headwinds buffeting Republicans, from Trump’s approval to backlash against Texas-specific issues like data center development, even that is no sure thing.

In public and in private, Republicans were sweating out the final days of early voting.

“Texas is excruciatingly close,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said on his podcast Friday. “We could lose every single statewide race in Texas. That’s how close these numbers are.”

The race helped prompt more than 6.8 million voters to cast ballots through the first 11 days of the 12-day early voting period — exceeding the number of votes cast at the same point in 2022, the last midterm election, by over 40%, according to totals from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

In parsing the totals, Republicans issued warnings of disaster if their supporters did not show up to the polls in big enough numbers to counter Democratic enthusiasm.

“You need to be scared, and you need to be concerned — the early vote is not in our favor,” Texas Comptroller Don Huffines, who is on the ballot for a full term, said Thursday at a rally in Weatherford headlined by Vance. “This is about saving the nation. When we lose Texas, we will lose the USA, and when we lose the USA, you will lose the free world.”

In their closing campaign pitches, the Senate candidates also cast the race in dramatic terms as they conjured vastly different visions of Texas and its mythology.

On his “Come and Take It” bus tour during early voting, Paxton, at barbeque joints and breweries around the state, evoked the Alamo and cast the true tradition of Texas as firmly conservative — and under siege. He offered himself as the bulwark against a blue Texas and, calling up the Continental Divide, contrasted himself with Talarico, “the most radical Democrat to ever run in Texas history.”

“If you vote for a guy like James Talarico versus me, we end up 3,000 miles apart,” Paxton said in Lubbock last week. “And that’s why these elections have become life-saving for the country and for Texas.”

Talarico’s final swing on his “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts” tour rendered the race as a David-versus-Goliath quest in pursuit of a politics more inclusive than the “extremism and corruption” laced throughout today’s politics of division. In coloring that vision, Talarico drew from his Christian faith, the state’s motto of “friendship,” and Texas icons like Barbara Jordan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Sam Houston and Selena. His final call was for Texans of all political stripes to come together against the efforts of the richest man in the world and usher in a new guard.

“This election should be about chasing a vision of what this state can be: Texas public schools that are the envy of the nation, a Texas economy that is second to none and Texas families that are stronger and healthier than they’ve ever been before,” Talarico said at his own rally in Lubbock last week. “This won’t happen overnight — but a giant state deserves giant dreams.”

From a bruising primary to a quiet summer

Democrats entered this cycle knowing they had an opportunity to compete, with midterm elections typically favoring the party out of power.

But several factors that have made the race so close were harder to predict, from the war in Iran that spiked gas prices at home to the strength of Talarico’s fundraising. And while the Republican primary promised to be fierce, few envisioned from the outset that it would become the most expensive and bruising contest in recent memory.

Over the course of that primary, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and his allies hammered Paxton over everything from the rise of his net worth in office to his alleged affairs to a controversial Waco sex offender case prosecuted by his office. It didn’t work: Trump endorsed Paxton over the longtime senator in May, catapulting his strident ally to the nomination in a runoff election Paxton would win by nearly 30 points.

But the scars from that period, particularly among Cornyn voters, remain. Paxton has had a much harder time consolidating Republicans than Talarico has had with Democrats, nonpartisan public polls have shown throughout the general election.

“The damage really comes from soft Rs [and] independents,” said Chad Wilbanks, a former executive director of the Texas GOP. “The perception of John Cornyn was that he was a good, honorable, decent human being that strove to do the right thing in Congress.”

Both nominees immediately made overtures to Cornyn’s supporters, with Paxton looking to consolidate Republicans and Talarico appealing to right-leaning voters put off by the attorney general’s hard-right politics and long list of legal and ethical controversies.

Talarico had spent the months since he secured his party’s nomination in March refilling his campaign coffers after an expensive, contentious primary against U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas Democrat with especially strong support among Black voters. He later announced a $25 million investment in Black voter outreach, responding to skepticism of him that lingered in Black communities after the primary.

Paxton’s fundraising, meanwhile, lagged for months. That gap, powered by Talarico’s prodigious hauls from small-dollar donors, allowed the Democrat to get on the air early and define himself to voters all summer. Before Republicans began spending, he ran ads highlighting his bipartisan accomplishments in the Legislature, his Christian faith and his diagnoses for the high costs of groceries and gas.

It was met with little response on the airwaves from the other side.

Operatives in both parties point to that lopsided summer disparity as a key juncture.

“There was an opportunity to define Talarico much earlier on, but there was also a fundraising issue at that point,” said John Wittman, a Republican operative in the state. “If you look back to June, right after the runoff, there was not a lot of money on the Republican side to do that. I think that certainly played a role.”

The most expensive Senate race on record

When Republican money did materialize, it came fast and furious. Talarico was inundated beginning in early September with $182 million in attack ads from an outside group affiliated with Senate GOP leadership.

The rescue mission, funded primarily by Musk, pushed Texas’ Senate race to become the most expensive in U.S. history by Oct. 23. Republicans aired positive ads on Paxton’s record as attorney general and his economic plan to provide new tax breaks for healthcare and housing-related expenses. And they relentlessly attacked Talarico, on two fronts.

First came the culture wars, featuring resurfaced clips of Talarico asserting his progressive interpretations of theology to defend trans rights and abortion. The Democrat’s now-infamous 2021 quips that “God is nonbinary” and that he is a “Christian who hates Christianity” — comments he said “missed the mark” and were “cringey” — were blasted online and eventually in TV ads.

The cycle’s highest-spending ad, from the Musk-funded super PAC, features a Texas mother of five at her kitchen table telling viewers that Talarico’s remarks — that “defending trans Texans is something we have to do every day” and that denying a child’s gender identity is “abusive for sure” — are dangerous for parents.

Then came the economy. Republican groups, including Paxton’s campaign, hit Talarico over his vote against a measure that would have made it harder to implement a state income tax, which Texas has never levied. Those ads described Talarico as having “voted for an income tax,” while others re-upped his past comments on fossil fuels to portray him as a proponent of high taxation who would threaten the oil and gas industry if elected.

“You needed to make sure that Texas voters knew about those [cultural] things,” said Gregg Keller, a spokesperson for pro-Paxton Lone Star Liberty PAC. “At the same time, you can’t make — and we didn’t need to make — the election all about those things exclusively.”

Most polls found that Talarico’s favorability softened, typically landing close to an even split, though he held onto a close polling lead as voters continued to find Paxton unfavorable. Democrats also contend that the Republican spending spree in Texas meant those dollars didn’t go to other battleground states, though Musk’s contributions meant the GOP had no shortage of funds to spread across the country.

“We’re holding our own here in a way that I don’t think many people even thought was possible,” said Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder. “We are human shields right now against big, billionaire, special-interest money.”

Talarico’s campaign, meanwhile, elevated Paxton’s scandals in its own ads, trying to paint the picture of a public official less concerned with public service than self-enrichment. And the spots sought to connect Paxton to Texas’ cost-of-living woes, with Talarico concluding in one ad that “Texans can’t afford Ken Paxton’s corruption.”

Across his campaign, Talarico highlighted Paxton’s impeachment by the Texas House over charges of bribery and corruption, on which he was acquitted by the GOP-run state Senate. Talarico also pointed to Paxton’s soaring net worth over more than two decades in public office; his travel to luxury destinations around the world, which ran taxpayers $3.3 million; and his indictment on felony securities fraud charges, which prosecutors dropped after Paxton agreed to pretrial diversion without admitting guilt.

“I have a legislative record; Ken Paxton has a criminal record,” Talarico said repeatedly on the stump. “This election is about whether you want a senator who puts money in your pocket or who puts money in their own.”

From his entry to the race, Talarico grounded his campaign in the argument that the economy is rigged in favor of the ultrawealthy over working people, and the root cause is the political influence of billionaires and corporations. He seized on Musk’s nine-figure spending to boost Paxton as the ultimate example of the broken system he’d decried for months, telling people at his rallies that Musk was “trying to buy Texas” and they would show him “Texas is not for sale.”

He also rolled out testimony from moderate or former Republicans, hoping to create a permission structure for right-leaning Paxton skeptics to vote for him or undervote the race.

“Scores of hardcore Republicans, scores of soft Republicans, many more independents, mostly women — there’s a real Paxton perception problem,” Wilbanks said. “And they’re struggling to make that vote for him.”

The final push

Republicans kicked off the post-Labor Day sprint with a two-day midterm convention in Dallas meant to drum up enthusiasm among Trump voters. There, the president urged his followers to pretend he was on the ballot and pledged to return to Texas so often, he joked, that “you’ll say, ‘Get this guy out of here.’”

As autumn took hold, Talarico issued a drumbeat of calls for Paxton to debate him. Though Paxton’s campaign at first said, “of course we’re going to debate” — and Trump declared Paxton “ready, willing and able” — the attorney general did not end up accepting any of the at least four invitations from news stations. It marked the first U.S. Senate race in Texas since 2000 to go without a debate.

October brought a series of leaked audio clips from a Washington fundraiser that captured Paxton candidly airing his campaign’s vulnerabilities. The headlines touched on his complaints that the Dallas GOP convention hurt his campaign, and that high gas prices caused by the war in Iran were “dragging” on his run — though he’s said he’s “supportive” of Trump’s actions in the Middle East. He also suggested cuts to federal benefits programs to manage the deficit and alleged Cornyn “wants me to lose.”

Then, flu-gate hit.

A case of influenza took Talarico, a Type I diabetic, off the campaign trail for nine days just a few weeks before early voting. An unfounded right-wing conspiracy theory began taking shape.

Paxton suggested that Talarico was actually suffering from a mental breakdown. Conservative influencers piled on, stoking a conspiracy that the Austin Democrat was not home sick with the flu but institutionalized at a mental health facility in Ohio. The story spread wildly online, prompting Talarico to deny he was receiving mental health treatment or had ever been to Ohio at all. The facility confirmed Talarico had never been a patient there, and Talarico’s campaign provided home security camera images to The New York Times to further prove his whereabouts.

As Election Day neared, the candidates crisscrossed the state to turn out their voters and nudge what appeared to be a virtual toss-up in their favor.

While Talarico’s tour was set to end with a concert in Austin, Paxton announced a final rally before Election Day at the Alamo.

“Have you all seen the bus out there?” Paxton asked the crowd packed into a barbeque joint in New Braunfels during early voting. “Did you see what it says? It has a message for the radical left, for James Talarico: It says, ‘Come and take it.’”

Whether his campaign would meet a different fate than those who defended the Alamo almost 200 years earlier would be decided Tuesday.

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