Why This Texas Senate Race Is Different

In 2018 a captivating congressman from El Paso nearly turned Texas blue. In a race against Sen. Ted Cruz that captivated Democrats nationwide, BetoO’Rourke lost by a modest 2.6 points, the closest a Democrat has come to winning a Senate or governor’s race in Texas in modern memory.

Although this performance was still a loss that earned Democrats exactly zero Senate seats, it augured a bright future for Democrats in the state. “Blue Texas,” foretold since the Obama era, seemed on track. That perception grew in 2020, when Joe Biden lost the state to Donald Trump by only 6 points in a presidential year, improving 3 points on Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. The state’s color was turning.

And then, in 2024, Texas Democrats, as O’Rourke told me, “got what they deserved.”

Kamala Harris lost the state by a whopping 14 points. While the country shifted rightward as a whole, the turn against Democrats among Latino voters turbocharged the collapse in Texas. Cruz easily won another term in the Senate. “Blue Texas” had never seemed further away.

Which makes it all the stranger that only two years later, we’re doing this again. Because Democrat James Talarico really could win a Texas Senate race.

The political-media industrial complex has been down this road before. No one—no reporter, operative, commentator, analyst, or person on the street—wants to look like an idiot by overhyping it again. I certainly don’t. But after weeks of speaking with politicians and experienced campaign hands in Texas, there’s no denying it: There’s more to this race than the usual hopium.

“You’d have to work pretty hard to not recognize that this is different,” University of Texas professor James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, told me. “That this Senate race is different than any Senate race we’ve seen for a couple of generations, let alone any statewide race.” He noted that in the run-up to the 2018 Texas Senate race, O’Rourke never led in any polls. Meanwhile, Talarico has led or tied in all but one recent poll.

“I think Talarico is just one of, if not the, best candidates we’ve ever seen,” O’Rourke himself told me.

Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. Especially given their setback in 2024, it was clear going into 2026 that Democrats would need a perfect storm to win. They just might get it.

The national environment is at Democrats’ backs. Talarico is a compelling and well-funded candidate—albeit one not without baggage—running against a scandal-plagued and poorly funded opponent in Attorney General Ken Paxton. The strong gains Trump made among Latinos in South Texas over the issues of cost of living and immigration are reversing over the issues of … cost of living and immigration. There’s a populist revolt over data centers and Flock cameras. Gas is expensive. Everyone is mad.

But it’s not just the conditions. There’s something more fundamentally different this time in Democrats’ approach. What struck me as I was talking to Democrats about this cycle is that, unlike in previous runs that had their hopes up, they’re not relying on vibes to do their work for them. The past failures and overhyping has chastened them and offered much to learn from, and they may well be learning it: They’re not promising a new era of Democratic Party rule in Texas. They’re just focused on winning this race, this time, and not squandering the opportunity that has fallen into their laps.

Democrats’ future—not just in terms of winning control of the Senate in 2026, but in terms of staying competitive with Republicans in the long run—depends on their learning to win in red states. Have they finally cracked the code?

Why does the idea of Texas turning blue hold such fascination in Democrats’ hearts? Why don’t charismatic Democratic candidates from Mississippi or Tennessee make the cover of Vanity Fair, rake in record amounts of money, and capture Democrats’ national attention?

It’s not just because Texas is the crown jewel of red America, the second-largest state in the country with the second-biggest allotment of electoral votes. It’s because, unlike many other comfortably red states, there was a period when its demographics were shifting in a way that aligned with those of the Democratic Party. During the Obama years, the state was becoming younger, more concentrated around metropolitan areas, more diverse, and more white-collar. This was the coalition that Democrats were betting on for transformative change across the country, the party’s then recipe for an enduring majority.

The idea, then, was not that Texas Republicans were going to convert en masse to voting for Democrats. It was that their majority would be diluted away as Democrats registered more and more Latino voters, assured to be on their side. College-educated transplants would flood to the orbits of Austin, Houston, and Dallas. Suburban voters would veer away from the GOP.

The appropriate way to interpret this information was, and is, that Democrats had the ability to make Texas a competitive state. The inappropriate way to handle it was, and is, to think that assumed demographic change guaranteed that Texas would inevitably turn blue and it was only a question of when. This latter stance can breed an idleness that, as we’ve now seen, ensures it may not happen at all.

One of the first tests of this era of demographic promise was the 2014 governor’s race, when Greg Abbott ran for election against Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis.

Davis had gone viral in 2013 for a 13-hour filibuster against a state legislative bill restricting abortion. She had a compelling biography, as someone raised by a single mother who rose to graduate from Harvard Law School. Helping her along in the field was Battleground Texas, an organizing group founded in 2013 by former Obama aides with the goal of registering Democratic-leaning voters in the state. While Battleground tried to explain that it was playing a long game, its linkup with Davis, who was attracting extraordinary national attention, applied pressure on both to show immediate results. But it was an awful election year for Democrats nationally, and Abbott defeated Davis by 21 points.

“That was partly our fault,” Davis told me in an interview of the way expectations got out of hand. “Because when you’re running a campaign, you do need to build belief that it’s going to be different this time.”

She didn’t have as forgiving a stance for the group that helped her along: “The unfortunate thing is there were a lot of big promises and hopes made by Battleground in that cycle,” she added, “that, when they didn’t come to fruition, some of the folks leading that effort just moved on.”

Perhaps given that hangover, the O’Rourke campaign started off with low expectations in the 2018 cycle.

“The O’Rourke campaign was not at first built to win,” Jeff Rotkoff, a Texas Democratic strategist who directed campaigns for the Texas AFL-CIO in 2018, told me. “In fact, they were dismissive of efforts of others to help them win.” Indeed, they were dismissive of Rotkoff’s own efforts to help them: He described to me how O’Rourke initially missed out on the AFL-CIO’s endorsement because his campaign hadn’t asked for it. The whole operation had a general “too cool for school” attitude early in the campaign, Rotkoff said, in which it rejected opportunities to work with the rest of the party infrastructure.

But then it grew into a proper movement—not just among liberals nationally, but in Texas as well. And yet, to some degree, O’Rourke’s campaign was still winging it. Texas Democrats I’ve spoken to over the years have a way of framing O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run as not only a highly impressive achievement … but also something they’re comfortable Monday-morning quarterbacking. There’s a pervasive sense that maybe he could have won if he’d just done a few things differently—though what those things are is up for debate.

Part of the problem, everyone seems to agree, is that the party infrastructure itself wasn’t prepared for a competitive statewide race. The gubernatorial candidate, Lupe Valdez, “was sort of a sacrificial lamb” in the governor’s race against Abbott, as Henson put it. And the primary focus of the national Democratic Party was on flipping several suburban House seats, not on driving O’Rourke across the finish line.

Rotkoff wanted to be clear that these weren’t attacks on O’Rourke personally, and that “they learned a lot of lessons” in real time. The point of comparison, though, is with the Talarico campaign, where “the strategic political analysis was there from the start.”

“It’s not just a vibes deal,” he said.

This time, as former Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Manny Garcia told me, Talarico “doesn’t bear the burden of having to do it by himself.”

Democrats have recruited a candidate for every state and federal race on the ballot, no matter how doomed the contest, to ensure that persuadable voters everywhere are hearing the message. (Republicans have derided this move as a gimmick.) The state party is cooperating with the Texas Majority PAC—in other words, with George Soros’ dollars—to provide resources. And Democrats have landed a strong gubernatorial recruit in state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, who sits next to Talarico in the state Capitol, to both challenge Abbott in a difficult year—making him work unusually hard for his fourth term—and reinforce the message of corruption the two candidates are using against their opponents.

Talarico is “bringing so much interest to Texas, lots of money to Texas, and it helps me and my appeal to certain constituents. So we are complementing each other in a way that is very helpful for the statewide ticket,” Hinojosa told me in an interview. “There is this synergy happening up and down the ballot that we have never had before in Texas, and I do think that is a difference-maker.”

So Democrats have the candidate. They have the environment. They have the opponent. They have the ticket. They have the money. They even have the strategy.

Do they have the voters?

One is hard-pressed to find a more dramatic shift in voter behavior between 2016 and 2024 than that of Latino voters in Texas.

Hillary Clinton, per exit polls, won this cohort 61 percent to 34 percent in 2016. Eight years later—and with Donald Trump remaining precisely the same person he was, saying the same things he’s always said, every day, over the course of that stretch—Trump won 55 percent of Latinos in the state. Results on county-by-county levels are jaw-dropping. As the Washington Post reported after the 2024 election, 13 of the top 15 counties in the country with the largest rightward swings between 2016 and 2024 were in Texas. They’re all majority Hispanic.

What happened? Everything.

Inflation and economic hardship, which led to fond remembrances of the Trump economy from 2017 to 2019. Chaos at the border. Working-class Latinos joining the broader working-class turn away from the Democratic Party. Voters being another generation removed from their newness to the country and attaining a more conservative socioeconomic status. Social conservatives responding to leftward shifts among Democrats on cultural issues. Name something, and the answer is probably yes.

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This helps explain Democrats’ losses, from Davis to O’Rourke to Harris: The party may have gotten the demographic shifts it was expecting, but it never translated into the political coalition it predicted. As James Henson put it to me, “The growth of the Latino population relative to the Anglo white population was going to be a lot more complicated than the demographical-destiny trope really took into account.”

And just about every Democrat and Republican I spoke to for this story said that Democrats took these voters, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley, for granted—“based on the color of their skin or their country of origin,” as Beto O’Rourke put it.

A better way to put it, though, is that Democrats never had these voters secured in their coalition the way they thought they did.

“Latinos felt for a long time like Democrats were the lesser of two evils,” Sergio García-Rios, an assistant professor at UT and director of polling for Univision, told me, “but that Democrats never deliver.” Democrats “thought, for a long time, that the only thing that mattered was immigration, to Latinos, and immigration reform.” But immigration reform never materialized, anyway. And then, after the parade of inflationary and border-security maladies under Biden, it was time to give something else a shot.

“There’s a lot of people who are working class in these areas who voted Democrat for a long time, and their life hasn’t gotten any better,” Chuck Rocha, a veteran Democratic strategist—who is advising both Talarico and Hinojosa this year—told me.

“And then along comes Donald Trump, who sounds a lot like, if you close your eyes, Bernie Sanders,” Rocha added. “He’s talking about a rigged system. He’s talking about remanufacturing jobs in America. That’s kind of how Donald Trump controlled that space while Democrats don’t spend any money juxtaposing that position, because there’s no real party infrastructure in McAllen or in Brownsville.

“And that’s the perfect storm,” he concluded, “that put us in a position where not all of those people automatically came on board like their mothers and grandmothers.”

In the long run, Democrats’ ability to win back Latino working-class voters will hinge on their ability to win back working-class voters more broadly. But as far as 2026 goes, the upside for Democrats with Latino voters’ swingy voting preferences is that they can swing right back from Republicans’ 2024 highs. And they can even do so largely on the same issues with which Trump won those voters: the cost of living, and immigration.

Manny Garcia, formerly of the Texas Democratic Party, told me that “people wanted something in economic terms that was being promised” by Trump. He added: “And right now, what people are seeing is, ‘Well, my prices aren’t going down like you promised, I’m not having a better economic outlook like you promised, and I am getting consistently disrespected. My family’s getting consistently disrespected. My community’s getting consistently disrespected.’ ”

On immigration, Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist and former campaign manager for John Cornyn, noted that Latinos in South Texas “want a secure border, don’t want the cartels to run rampant, we don’t like human trafficking, we don’t want to see immigrants dying in the desert of thirst.” At the same time, though, the current Trump administration has gone well beyond what they find acceptable. Now they also realize they “don’t want these excesses, don’t want the federal government to come in and round up everyone, especially people that don’t have a criminal past.”

As Steinhauser put it: “There’s not a lot of support among Hispanic Texans in South Texas for doing mass deportation of people who are not violent criminals.”

The polling shows clear signs of a reversion, with polls of Latinos in Texas backing down hard from Trump’s 2024 margins while Talarico enjoys strong support among them in his race against Paxton. A recent survey from Univision and YouGov showed Talarico leading among Latinos 56 percent to 37 percent.

This flip is worth understanding specifically. Because it’s not that all of the voters Trump picked up in 2024 suddenly, in the words of Rocha, are “going to run up and become democratic socialists or start dyeing their hair blue or get a nose ring.” It just means that some of those who felt that promises made to them were broken could sit this election out.

“Not all of those guys are coming back, and they still think that Democrats are queers or weak,” he added. “But they’re really pissed at Republicans.”

As much as this is Texas Democrats’ best opportunity in modern memory to win a prestigious statewide race, it is, ultimately, only that: an opportunity. And James Talarico is a long way from winning this race.

Talarico has been ahead in polls over the summer, with strong support from independents, but he’s rarely polling above 50 percent. The great question is whether Texas Republicans will come home for their candidate, warts and all.

Their candidate has behaved confusingly. Ken Paxton has been running an anti-campaign at times so baffling that it’s worth considering whether his ability to get others to do his work for him is actually genius.

To quote his felled primary opponent, Sen. John Cornyn, “Paxton’s a poor campaigner” who’s “lazy and doesn’t raise money. And he basically is not offering a very compelling case for his election.” As of the latest filing deadline, which covers the first two quarters of the year, Paxton had only $16.7 million (with joint fundraising committee hauls factored in), while Talarico had raised $72 million. Paxton was literally on vacation in London, famously the home of the British monarchy, with his girlfriend on America’s 250^th anniversary. When he does bother to campaign, he makes peculiar choices, such as at a late August event for which he wore a Four Seasons Orlando–branded golf shirt and what appeared to be a $40,000 watch.

All this, of course, is layered atop his history of having been impeached by the state House, having faced an untold number of corruption allegations, and having been divorced by his wife on “biblical grounds.” That he’s made it this far is because he’d remained in Trump’s favor after trying to overturn the 2020 election through a lawsuit hastily dismissed by the Supreme Court.

What Paxton must have known, though, is that once he became the nominee, he’d be golden. National Republicans can’t afford to lose his race—outside money would have to swarm to prop him up. And, sure enough, the cavalry has finally arrived. After a lengthy finger-pointing match between Trump, Senate Republicans, and Texas donors about who was responsible for rescuing Paxton, they’re all chipping in. Between the recent commitments from Trump’s super PAC, Senate Republican leaders’ super PAC, and others—including Elon Musk—Paxton managed to close the spending gap with Talarico in a week.

That money will allow Republicans to amplify Talarico’s most prominent weakness: his history of getting carried away during what is now called “Woke 1.0.” In 2020 and 2021, Talarico said that “God is non-binary,” that there are six biological sexes, and that “white skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus” of racism. More recently, CNN uncovered an appearance by Talarico in a 2020 Sierra Club forum in which he said that he was “thankful that young activists have really drawn the link between climate change and White supremacy and capitalism in our country,” describing them as “oppressive systems” in need of “dismantling.”

Talarico has tried to dismiss old comments like these as “cringey.” But with the right ad budget behind them, they could be just cringey enough to send Republican-inclined voters, noses held firmly, to pull the lever for Paxton.

Then again, it’s quite something to see nearly $100 million in super PAC money dumped into Texas, in September of an election year, to save a Republican Senate candidate.

The GOP’s late attempted rescue of Ken Paxton coincided with the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in early September, and Paxton’s role in this showcase was largely to serve as the butt of a joke. He himself gave lackadaisical remarks on the convention’s first night—alongside everything else, Paxton is also an unenthusiastic public speaker—to an indifferent crowd. For the rest of the convention, he was subjected to Trump’s regular insults about how he dresses poorly and looks bad. Paxton, waiting for his super PAC money to arrive, just stood there and took it.

If Texas Democrats can’t beat this guy, in this environment, could they ever have a chance in Texas?

It’s a question for Democrats in states across the country this year.

Each red state in which Democrats are competitive in 2026 is a little different. Ohio and Iowa are less diverse but have more recent Democratic DNA in them, having voted for Barack Obama twice. Right now they’re being hit hard by Trump’s trade (and real) wars. Alaska is uniquely reliant on the federal government and has a large independent streak. What Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio all have in common is the national wind at their backs, strong candidates, and decisions by Trump that went out of their way to make life in their states more difficult. They also all prompt a lot of heartburn about races over the past decade that fell short despite initial signs of promise and alluring polling numbers the September before the election.

Should Democrats get swept in all these races, under these dreamlike conditions, Democrats nationally may, once again, forswear ever getting emotionally or financially invested in these states. (Or at least for another two years, when they find themselves inevitably tempted again.)

The issue is that soon, converting red states where Democrats have lost their foothold—not just fantasizing about converting them—will become a necessity for the party.

Republicans already have a structural advantage in the Senate with their strength in small, rural states, giving Democrats limited options and narrow paths toward a Senate majority. And after the 2030 census, Democrats are going to need some fresh electoral votes. States like California and New York are projected to lose multiple congressional districts, while various other blue states will likely lose individual seats. This gives Democrats fewer Electoral College options and will officially retire the old “Blue Wall” pathway to victory of winning Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (not that this pathway has been the most reliable recently). That means Democrats will need more options to win a presidential race. And there’s no better place to make it up—and beyond—in one fell swoop than Texas, to where many of those blue-state congressional districts will be transferred after the census.

“We damn sure better be investing in Texas now than in 2032,” Wendy Davis told me.

In other words, the long-term dream of “blue Texas” from the Obama years, seen as a way to lock in an inevitable, prolonged Democratic era, could soon become the medium-term need for “blue Texas” just for Democrats to keep up.

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The first order of business, though? Well, you’ve just got to win a race.