Talarico Defeats Paxton, Ending Democrats' U.S. Senate Drought in Texas

The Texas Tribune

AUSTIN, TX — Democratic state Rep. James Talarico defeated Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas’ U.S. Senate race Tuesday, overcoming a deluge of outside money to break the GOP’s three-decade grip on the state.

Talarico’s victory delivers his party its first statewide win here since 1994, ending the longest active streak of one-party dominance in any state. The U.S. Senate drought for Texas Democrats extended back to 1988 — when Rick Perry was still a Democratic state lawmaker, the Cowboys were coached by Tom Landry and Talarico was not yet born.

The Associated Press called the race for Talarico shortly after 10 p.m., as he led Paxton by margins that, if they held, would easily exceed his narrow polling lead heading into Election Day. His coattails appeared to extend far down the ballot, leaving Democrats poised to gain major ground in the Texas House and local offices around the state.

The result slingshots Talarico, a 37-year-old four-term state legislator from Austin, into the national Democratic stratosphere, a remarkable ascent for a former middle school teacher new to federal politics.

It also leaves egg on the face of President Donald Trump, who staked political capital to elevate Paxton despite other Republican leaders’ warnings that the scandal-damaged attorney general would put the seat at risk and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to defend.

Their advice proved prescient. Trump endorsed Paxton anyway, and Republicans poured over $280 million into advertising, including over $200 million from Elon Musk, making the race the most expensive U.S. Senate contest on record. But Paxton remained stuck under the weight of his legal and ethical baggage, a sluggish economy marked by high gas and grocery prices and, in Talarico, an opponent who put those two vulnerabilities at the heart of his campaign message: diagnosing voters’ economic malaise as a function of billionaires and corrupt politicians.

The result carries symbolic as well as practical weight, given Texas’ status as the longtime bastion of the 21st-century Republican Party. It also means another seat for Democrats in an upper chamber that began the night under GOP control, yet was tilting toward the Democrats  as they led in several other swing states.

Paxton’s defeat is a watershed moment for the Texas GOP, whose dominance took root in the Bush era, under a party defined by a business-friendly conservatism, and endured through the party’s takeover by its hardline MAGA wing. A leader in that movement, Paxton used his three terms as attorney general to wage legal battles against the left, frequently bragging on the campaign trail about his court wins against former President Joe Biden on the border and culture-war issues.

Paxton’s synergy with the GOP base powered his May primary win over Sen. John Cornyn, a product of the Bush era who warned that Paxton’s trail of scandal would put the seat at risk. It was that same bond that carried Paxton through his legal and ethical troubles, including a felony securities fraud indictment and corruption charges that prompted both a federal probe and Paxton’s impeachment by the GOP-controlled Texas House. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, accused him of adultery in filing for divorce months into his Senate run.

The Texas Senate acquitted Paxton in his impeachment trial, and prosecutors dropped the fraud charges after he agreed to a pretrial diversion deal, victories that burnished his brand as a fighter persecuted by the political establishment. But voters on Tuesday were less convinced: his favorability remained deeply underwater, below that of Trump and other statewide Republicans, and even many of his supporters told pollsters they were voting more against Talarico than for Paxton.

Talarico gave right-leaning Paxton skeptics somewhere to go. Flush with record fundraising, he got a monthslong head start on TV advertising, defining himself over the summer with an eye toward independents and swing voters. As the attorney general and his allies stayed dark on the airwaves, Talarico aired spots about his record of bipartisan legislating in the Texas House and the religious principles of loving God and neighbor that he said form the foundation of his political philosophy. And he made overtures to Cornyn’s supporters, distancing himself from the provocative comments he had made as a state legislator while rolling out endorsements from a handful of more moderate Republicans. 

All throughout, Talarico stayed locked on the thesis of his campaign: that the divisions between the top and bottom in Texas were deeper and more powerful than those between the left and right. 

The outcome was in some ways expected. Talarico led the polling average for the entire general election, in a cycle in which Trump’s plummeting popularity and high everyday costs put Republicans on their heels across the country. In other ways, it is a stunning result in a state as synonymous with Republican rule as brisket and cowboy hats.

At Talarico’s headquarters Tuesday night, the mood was electric as early returns filtered in. With a live band as their backdrop and a big screen tuned to NBC News and MSNow all night, thousands of the party faithful gathered on the Long Center terrace and erupted in cheers at every Democratic margin splashed across the screen.

For long-suffering Texas Democrats Laura and Greg Hitt, who said they’d been waiting for statewide wins since Ann Richards, the moment was almost impossible to fathom. They were at the Travis County Democratic Party’s election night event in 2024 — and said it was over in a flash after polls closed.

Laura Hitt, a retired teacher, said she’d had a pit in her stomach all day after feeling “traumatized” from close election cycles past. She’d had a hard time making herself volunteer for Democratic candidates this year because she was afraid of getting “emotionally invested” in the campaigns of Talarico and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa.

But as the returns rolled in, she finally let herself believe. Welling up, she said Tuesday night’s results, where Democrats were overperforming up and down the ballot, “gives you faith in humanity.”

“It tells me there are people who want to hold this administration accountable,” Greg Hitt added.

Throughout the race, Paxton cast Talarico as a radical whose candidacy threatened the Texas way of life. His campaign mined the Democrat’s record for culture-war fodder, highlighting past comments in which Talarico said God is nonbinary, that there are six genders, and that good Christians could not “destroy God’s creation with greenhouse gases.” Republican groups spent hundreds of millions of dollars on attack ads amplifying the remarks, swamping the airwaves with negative spots.

Echoing the national GOP messaging, Paxton closed his campaign by referring to Talarico as Republican voters’ worst nightmare — a trans-obsessed, tax-loving Marxist.

Similar themes had powered past GOP campaigns, including against Democrats with fewer “cringey” comments, as Talarico put it, on tape. But throughout the midterms, voters ranked the economy and cost of living as their top issue and showed less interest in the cultural wedge issues, such as trans rights and immigration, that have reliably foiled Democratic bids in Texas. 

Paired with the emergence of corruption as a campaign theme nationally, Talarico rode what emerged as the friendliest political environment for Democrats in years, while giving Paxton the distinction of being the first Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Texas to lose in 38 years.