Today we’re zooming in on the midterm races in Texas. We started our 2026 tour of the states in Georgia. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, go check it out!
If Georgia has become a secondary concern for the parties this cycle, it’s because redder states have upstaged it and Texas is the star of the whole show.
In the race for Senate, Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton aren’t just making Texas look like a highly competitive state. They’re making it look like Democrats are favored. Talarico currently leads in the polling averages by three points, and Paxton hasn’t led in the average since the conclusion of the primary in May.
In the race for governor, Republican Greg Abbott is favored and leads Democrat Gina Hinojosa by three points on average, though it’s certainly a closer race than Republicans would have imagined two years ago, when Trump won the state by 14 points and Abbott was sitting at a net approval rating of plus 20 percentage points.
In the House, Texas steals the show again. It was ground zero for the redistricting wars, with Republicans redrawing the map to give themselves five pickup opportunities. That now looks overly optimistic.
Even downballot races are attracting national attention. The Republican nominee for railroad commissioner, Bo French, prompted Karl Rove to endorse his Democratic opponent after his racist posts on Twitter, bemoaning the presence of South Asian students celebrating at a UT Austin Longhorns game.
With me to talk about it all are Gabby Birenbaum, Washington correspondent for The Texas Tribune, and James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin, where he directs the project’s polling.
