Ken Paxton 2026 Texas Senate Campaign: Polls, Predictions and the Race vs James Talarico

The 2026 Texas Senate race is a statistical tie, and it has been one all summer. Thirteen public polls since 1 June put James Talarico ahead in seven of them, Ken Paxton in four, with two ties — and not one of those leads is large enough for the poll that found it to call a leader.

The general election is on 3 November 2026. Below is every poll with its field dates and margin of error, what the seven averages say, and the runoff arithmetic that explains how Paxton got here.

Who is running in the 2026 Texas Senate race?

Ken Paxton for the Republicans and James Talarico for the Democrats, in a seat with no incumbent on the ballot. John Cornyn, the sitting senator, lost his own primary.

Talarico won the Democratic nomination outright on 3 March 2026 with 52.4% against Jasmine Crockett’s 46.2%, clearing the 50% threshold by 2.4 points and avoiding a runoff. Paxton needed a second round: he finished second in March, then won the 26 May runoff.

What do the polls say in the Texas Senate race?

They say nobody is ahead. Every poll below is plotted on the dates it was in the field, with its own margin of error drawn as a bar.

Twelve of these publish a margin of error. In eleven of them, the gap between the candidates is smaller than that margin — which is the technical way of saying the poll did not find a leader. The single exception is Texas Public Opinion Research, a Democratic-sponsored poll with a five-point lead on a stated ±3.4.

Do the polling averages agree?

Remarkably closely, and all in the same direction. Seven different aggregators had Talarico ahead as of 13 August, and the whole spread between the highest and lowest is 0.8 of a point.

The agreement is worth less than it looks. These averages are drawn from the same small pool of public polls, so they are not seven independent measurements — they are seven ways of smoothing one set of numbers. What the consensus does establish is that no reasonable weighting of the available data puts Paxton ahead.

Has the race moved?

Toward Paxton, in the newest single poll, and not yet anywhere else. Emerson’s 9–10 August survey is the first since 21 June to give him a lead.

One poll is not a trend, and the previous Paxton lead came from a Republican-sponsored survey. But the direction is the thing to watch over the next few releases, because a one-point lead in a poll with a ±3.0 margin and a 1.6-point average against it are describing the same race: too close to call.

How did Paxton beat John Cornyn?

By losing fewer voters, not by winning more. This is the most misread part of the story, and the vote totals settle it.

Paxton added 9,632 votes between the two rounds. Cornyn lost 406,944. Total Republican turnout fell from 2,166,910 to 1,391,634 — a drop of 35.8% — and on that much smaller electorate Paxton’s share rose from 40.5% to 63.8%, making Cornyn the first sitting Texas senator beaten in a primary since 1970.

One more number that rarely appears next to it: the Democratic primary drew 2,319,187 votes to the Republican primary’s 2,166,910, a difference of 152,277, or 7%. That is a turnout comparison between two contests with different fields and different levels of drama, so it is not a prediction of November — but it is the kind of fact that explains why the raters moved this seat at all.

What do the race raters say?

All three still favour the Republican, and one has moved toward the Democrat. As of early August, Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and Inside Elections all had Texas at Lean Republican, with Inside Elections shifting it from Likely Republican on 6 August.

That is the gap worth understanding in this race: the polls have Talarico narrowly ahead, and the professional raters still favour Paxton. The raters are weighting things a poll does not measure — how the state has actually voted, the size of the Republican baseline, and how often a summer polling lead in Texas has survived to November. We set out the same tension across the four seats that decide the chamber in our 2026 Senate control guide .

What the polling cannot tell you

Who will win. A one-to-two-point lead in August, inside every margin of error, on a race with no incumbent, is not a prediction — and this article does not make one.

It cannot tell you what the electorate will look like in November: most of these polls screen for likely voters using models built before either candidate began advertising at scale. It cannot separate the effect of Paxton’s runoff victory from the effect of Cornyn’s collapse, because the same voters produced both. And it does not price the race, in the literal sense — no odds appear here, from us or from anyone else.