Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Roberto Franco Vazquez - Texas Is Closer Than It Looks — and That Should Worry Republicans

Texas Is Closer Than It Looks — and That Should Worry Republicans


by Roberto Franco Vazquez

August 26, 2026

For a generation, Texas politics has been governed by a simple assumption: Republicans win statewide, Democrats complain about it, and every election eventually confirms the pattern.

The 2026 campaign is beginning to look different.

Not necessarily because Texas has turned blue. It has not. And anyone who reads a handful of favorable polls as proof of a Democratic takeover is making the classic mistake of confusing a snapshot with a trend.

But the polls are telling us something more consequential: the Republican lock on Texas is no longer something Democrats can simply be expected to accept.

That is the real story behind the remarkably competitive races involving Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate contest, and Democrat Gina Hinojosa and Gov. Greg Abbott in the race for governor.

Start with Talarico.

A Texas Public Opinion Research poll in late July put Talarico ahead of Paxton, 45% to 40%. A Fox News poll had Talarico ahead 51% to 48%. An Emerson College/Nexstar survey released last week had Paxton at 47% and Talarico at 46%. The University of Texas/Texas Politics Project's June survey, by contrast, had Paxton ahead 43% to 42%.

In other words, the polls do not tell us that Talarico is winning.

They tell us that he can win.

That distinction is crucial.

For years, that proposition would have sounded almost absurd. Texas has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988. Donald Trump carried the state by nearly 14 percentage points in 2024. Republican statewide candidates have enjoyed enormous structural advantages.

Yet Talarico is running essentially even with Paxton — and, in several surveys, ahead.

More revealing is who is putting him there.

The Fox poll found Talarico winning independents by a huge margin and attracting roughly a quarter of non-MAGA Republicans. Other polling has shown him performing unusually well with voters who do not fit neatly into the modern Democratic coalition.

That is not a small detail. It is the entire election.

Texas Democrats do not need to persuade every Republican to become a Democrat. They need to persuade enough Texans who have voted Republican — or who are willing to split their tickets — that the Democratic candidate is an acceptable alternative.

Talarico appears to understand that.

His campaign has been remarkably disciplined about presenting him not as the standard-bearer of a national Democratic Party, but as a Texas Democrat willing to challenge some orthodoxies of his own party. That approach is beginning to produce something Democrats have struggled to achieve in Texas: permission for moderate and independent voters to cross the partisan divide.

And that brings us to Hinojosa.

Her race against Abbott may be even more revealing.

In June, the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project found Abbott leading Hinojosa 47% to 40%. But more recent surveys have shown the margin shrinking sharply. A Texas A&M/ReconMR poll put Abbott only one point ahead. An Emerson/Nexstar poll had Abbott at 49% and Hinojosa at 45%. A Texas Public Opinion Research survey put the governor ahead 45% to 42%.

Again, Hinojosa is not leading the race.

But a Democratic challenger being within striking distance of a sitting Texas governor seeking a fourth term is itself news.

Especially when you consider the money.

Abbott has an enormous financial advantage, with roughly $67 million in his campaign account compared with about $3 million for Hinojosa. He has already launched a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign.

That should make the closeness of the polling more, not less, significant.

It suggests Hinojosa is not merely benefiting from a temporary burst of attention. She is tapping into an electorate that is increasingly willing to question whether every Republican incumbent deserves another term simply because he is a Republican.

And there is an important Texas-specific issue lurking beneath these numbers: the changing political geography of the state.

Texas is still conservative. But it is also younger, more urban, more diverse and more economically complicated than the Texas of two decades ago.

The state's political argument is no longer simply about Democrats versus Republicans. It is about who benefits from Texas' extraordinary growth — and who pays its costs.

Property taxes. Housing. Electricity. Water. Data centers. Public schools. Immigration. The electric grid. The astonishing pace of development around the state's major metropolitan areas.

These are not abstract ideological questions. They are the issues Texans encounter every day.

And some of them are creating unusual political coalitions.

The backlash over data centers, for example, has given Hinojosa an opening among voters who ordinarily would not be inclined to support a Democrat. Recent reporting has found conservative Texans openly considering a Democratic vote because of anger over the state's handling of data-center development.

That is the sort of political development that polls can capture but cannot fully explain.

The deeper question is whether these voters are temporarily unhappy with Republicans or whether they are beginning to reconsider their political allegiance.

That answer will determine whether 2026 is an anomaly or a turning point.

Republicans, meanwhile, appear to understand the danger.

The clearest evidence may be in the Senate race. A super PAC affiliated with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has just launched a $1.7 million advertising campaign aimed at helping Paxton defeat Talarico. The intervention is a reminder that Republican leaders are no longer treating the Senate race as a routine Texas Republican victory.

That is what a competitive race does: It changes behavior before it changes results.

But Democrats should be careful, too.

There is a tendency in politics — particularly among partisans hungry for good news — to interpret every favorable poll as evidence of a wave. That would be premature.

Polls can be wrong. Turnout can change. Campaigns can collapse. National events can overwhelm local issues. And Texas remains, by any reasonable historical measure, a Republican state.

The Senate race is close. The governor's race is competitive. Neither is decided.

But something important has already happened.

The psychological barrier has been broken.

For decades, Texas Republicans benefited from the assumption that Democrats could not win statewide. That assumption affected donors, candidates, voters and even the news media. A Republican candidate did not always have to prove he could win Texas; the Democrat had to prove he could lose narrowly.

That is changing.

Talarico has forced Republicans to spend money defending a Senate seat that, not long ago, would have been considered safely theirs. Hinojosa has transformed the governor's race from a coronation into a contest that requires Abbott to campaign aggressively.

The polls are not predicting a blue Texas.

They are doing something more interesting.

They are telling Republicans that Texas is no longer a state they can take for granted.

And they are telling Democrats that the door they have spent years trying to open is, finally, beginning to move.

The election will determine whether it opens.

But for the first time in a long time, Texas politics is no longer asking whether Democrats can compete.

It is asking whether Republicans can hold the line.

That is a very different question — and one worth watching all the way to November.

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