Texas is the Democrat Party’s white whale. Every election cycle, the party convinces itself this is finally the year the state turns blue, and every election cycle, Texas tells it to pound sand. It got fooled again in 2024, when polling suggested that the state was within reach. It wasn’t. Donald Trump won Texas by 14 points, and no amount of wishful thinking from Democrat strategists changes the fact that a state like Texas isn’t about to send a Trump-endorsed candidate’s creepy opponent to the Senate.
You’d think Democrats would have learned by now. They haven’t.
Some polls have indeed shown Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico (D-Texas) ahead in Texas, and the party has poured enormous sums of money into his campaign, believing it finally has a shot. It doesn’t. A new poll shows Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-Texas), the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, leading Talarico by two points, 49% to 47%, making the race his to lose.
The survey, conducted on June 21, 2026, surveyed 800 likely Texas voters for the Red Eagle Politics/SoCal Strategies poll. While Paxton holds the edge, the numbers reveal something Democrats will love, and Republicans should watch closely: Talarico is winning independents by 10 points. SoCal Strategies notes that Texas “still appears to be a red state in party identification,” which is likely what’s keeping Paxton afloat despite his independent-voter problem.
Here’s the part that sounds like it should worry Republicans more than anything else in this poll. The poll claims that Talarico is winning 25% of voters who backed John Cornyn in the Republican primary. How is that possible? How could Talarico get 25% of Cornyn voters and still be behind in the poll? It makes sense when you find that nearly the same share of those Cornyn-to-Talarico voters also supported Kamala Harris in 2024.
Additional context:
Recalled 2024 vote among Cornyn primary voters
Trump: 79%
Harris: 20%
Governor Vote
Abbott: 79%
Hinojosa: 20% https://t.co/GxG6e76fP4— SoCal Strategies (@SocalStrategies) June 23, 2026
In other words, these aren’t persuadable swing voters. They’re Democrats who crossed over into the open primary specifically to help Cornyn, and they’re now coming home to vote for Talarico in November. They weren’t even going to vote for Cornyn in the general election if he’d won.
There’s more good news buried in here for Paxton, too. Republicans are more undecided than Democrats, 4% to 1%, which suggests room to grow as the race tightens. And voters say they care more about Talarico’s policy positions than Paxton’s scandals, by a 39-point margin. That’s notable given how hard Talarico has been working to rebrand himself from a left-wing gender theory creeper to someone Texans would actually want to vote for.
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And Talarico knows his radical views are a problem. He has spent recent months publicly reversing several of his longtime far-left positions as the midterms approach. He’s recently flip-flopped on issues like border security, gender transitions for minors, meat consumption, oil and gas, and gun rights. It’s always Democrats trying to redefine themselves as more conservative than the other way around, isn’t it?
Democrats can keep pouring cash into Talarico’s campaign if they want. Every dollar spent chasing a Texas mirage is a dollar that isn’t going somewhere they might actually have a chance. Let them burn it.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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