Democrat James Talarico now leads Republican Ken Paxton by five points in a new Texas Senate poll, but with neither candidate cracking 50 percent and 14 percent of voters still undecided, the race remains far from settled.
A Texas Public Opinion Research survey conducted July 15, 17 found Talarico, an Austin state representative, pulling 45 percent support among likely voters to Paxton's 40 percent. The nonpartisan polling center surveyed 1,048 likely voters, with a margin of error of roughly 3.4 percentage points. The Hill reported that the Texas Tribune shared the results Tuesday, and the five-point gap represents Talarico's largest advantage in any public general-election poll to date.
That lead has grown. A previous TPOR survey taken after Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the May Republican runoff showed Talarico ahead by just three points, 47 to 44. A New York Times/Siena poll in June found the two candidates deadlocked at 47 percent apiece. The trend line favors the Democrat, but the numbers also show a volatile electorate that has not committed to either man.
The most damaging data point for Paxton may not be the five-point deficit itself. Breitbart reported that nearly one in five Republican respondents said they were either undecided or planned to support Talarico. In a state where the GOP nominee should be able to count on partisan consolidation, that figure signals a loyalty problem Paxton has not yet solved.
Talarico also holds a commanding lead among independent voters, with less than one-quarter of independents backing Paxton. And in a reversal that should alarm Republican strategists, Talarico leads among voters without a college degree, a group Paxton carried by 21 points in the earlier TPOR survey taken in May.
The TPOR sample itself leaned right. Fifty-three percent of respondents said they voted for President Trump in the 2024 presidential election, while 42 percent said they voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris. That composition makes Talarico's lead harder for Republicans to dismiss as an artifact of a skewed sample.
Paxton won the Republican nomination with President Trump's endorsement, defeating Cornyn in a bruising runoff that left parts of the Texas GOP fractured. The question now is whether the scars from that intra-party fight are healing fast enough.
Republicans say they still expect to consolidate support behind Paxton as the primary fades from memory, Newsmax reported. But that optimism rests on a bet that time alone will fix what the polling currently shows, a base that has not come home.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report already shifted its rating for the Texas Senate contest from "Likely Republican" to "Lean Republican" after the GOP runoff. That downgrade reflected a judgment that Paxton, despite his statewide name recognition as attorney general, carried enough political baggage to make a historically safe Republican seat genuinely competitive.
A Democrat has not represented Texas in the U.S. Senate since 1993, when former Sen. Bob Krueger held the seat. Democratic strategists expressed optimism about Talarico's chances after Cornyn's defeat, viewing Paxton as a weaker general-election candidate than the three-term incumbent he replaced on the ballot.
Not every poll agrees that Talarico is ahead. A University of Texas/Texas Politics Project survey showed Paxton leading Talarico by one point, reversing earlier results that had the Democrat up by roughly three. The conflicting data underscores a race where the margin is narrow enough to swing either way, and where the final result may depend on which campaign can move the 14 percent of voters who remain undecided.
The fundraising gap between the two candidates is enormous. Talarico's campaign reported raising $28 million in the second quarter. Paxton's campaign reported $1.6 million over the same period. That seventeen-to-one ratio gives Talarico the resources to flood Texas airwaves and fund a ground operation in a state where statewide campaigns are expensive by default.
Money alone does not win Senate races, but it buys the capacity to define an opponent before he defines himself. Paxton already faces attacks tied to personal controversies that Democrats have seized on during the campaign. One of Paxton's former defense attorneys endorsed Talarico, arguing that Paxton's conduct made him unfit for higher office.
Meanwhile, Talarico has not been immune to intra-party headaches of his own. Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett refused to back her fellow Democrat in the Senate race, exposing a fracture within the Texas Democratic coalition that Paxton could exploit if he finds the message and the money to do it.
After the runoff, Senate Republicans rushed to line up behind Paxton, recognizing that losing a Texas seat would be a catastrophic blow to the party's majority. Whether that institutional support translates into the kind of fundraising and voter-contact operation Paxton needs remains an open question three months before Election Day.
For all the attention on Talarico's lead, one number should keep both campaigns honest: neither candidate has broken 50 percent in any public poll since winning their respective primaries. In a state Trump carried comfortably in 2024, a Republican nominee polling at 40 percent is underperforming. But a Democratic nominee stuck at 45 percent in a favorable polling environment has not closed the deal either.
The race is shaping up to be one of the most expensive and closely watched contests of the 2026 cycle. Republicans hold the structural advantage in Texas, but structural advantages matter only if the nominee can unify the base and compete for the middle. Right now, the polling says Paxton is struggling on both fronts.
Texas Republicans have held this Senate seat for more than three decades. If they lose it, it will not be because the state turned blue overnight, it will be because they nominated a candidate who gave voters a reason to look the other way.
