Republicans Fearing the Once-Unthinkable: A Blue Texas

The Texas Tribune

AUSTIN, TX — 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 base seems to be begrudgingly voting for him, 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.”

More than 7.4 million Texans cast ballots over the 12-day early voting period that ended Friday. That exceeded the number of early votes cast in 2022, the last midterm election, by 36%, 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.”