James Talarico defeats Ken Paxton, giving Democrats their first U.S. Senate win in Texas since 1988
By Gabby Birenbaum and Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune
November 3, 2026
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, a political earthquake unseen in Texas this century, 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.
“We were the underdogs in this race,” Talarico said Tuesday night. “We went up against nearly 40 years of doubt and disillusionment. We went up against more than $300 million — more than any Senate campaign in American history. We went up against all the negative ads, fear campaigns, foreign bots and AI deep fakes that money can buy. Those attacks were the final howls of a dying establishment.”
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. He reiterated that message in his victory speech Tuesday, vowing to serve and fight for all Texans and to work to “heal the deep spiritual corruption at the root” of the country’s troubles, from “corrupt forever wars” to a lack of access to healthcare. And he cast his win as Texans’ endorsement of a new, more inclusive kind of politics.
“This is a win the size of Texas; now we have a mandate the size of Texas,” he said. “That old politics is dying, and a new politics is being born through each of us. Through every underdog, through every David against every Goliath, through every Texan who believed in our state and believed in this movement. Now the real work begins.”
Shortly before 10:30 p.m., Paxton took the stage at his watch party and delivered a brief concession speech, thanking supporters while acknowledging Republicans had a tough night across the country.
“Let me start off by congratulating James Talarico,” Paxton said. “I will commit that I will be praying for him that he will do good for Texas and this nation.”
At his party, the room was filled with disbelief as the election results came into focus, each update punctuated by cries of “No!” and attendees shaking their heads. When Fox News called the race for Talarico, the projector screen was turned off.
Cornyn, whose seat Talarico will take over come January, also congratulated the Democrat and said he looked forward to meeting with him and offering his assistance during the transition.
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.
Two primaries yield two different springs
Texas has long been a white whale for Democrats, especially after 2018, when Beto O’Rourke came within 3 percentage points of unseating Sen. Ted Cruz and lifted a new class of down-ballot Democrats — including Talarico, who flipped a red House seat in Round Rock that year.
But successive elections dashed those hopes, culminating in Trump’s 2024 rout. He carried Texas by 14 points, the largest margin of his three runs, behind historic gains with Latino voters that Republicans hailed as the start of a new multiracial working-class coalition.
Enter Talarico, and the many unexpected factors that would converge to enable his path to victory.
By early 2025, the Austin Democrat, a Presbyterian seminarian, had garnered a major online following for viral clips of him invoking theology as he debated Republican House colleagues over legislation, such as a proposal to require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. He joined Joe Rogan’s popular podcast for a three-hour conversation in which the host, who backed Trump in 2024, told Talarico he should run for president. All the while, Talarico was in talks with O’Rourke, 2024 nominee Colin Allred and U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro about forming a statewide slate. The prospect of running against Paxton, who’d launched his primary challenge to Cornyn a few months earlier, was tantalizing.
Despite being encouraged to run for governor, Talarico threw his hat in the ring for Senate in September 2025, after Allred had already mounted a bid. He launched with a video discussing the sanctity of the commandments to love God and neighbor and telling Texans that it was “time to start flipping tables,” as Jesus had done.
The path grew more complicated when firebrand U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett entered the race on the last day of the filing period in December, prompting Allred to drop out.
On the Republican side, a civil war was brewing. Cornyn, a senator since 2002 who has long run ahead of his party, and his allies spent tens of millions of dollars touting his allegiance to Trump, courting both the MAGA base that dominates Texas’ low-turnout primaries and the loyalty-obsessed president’s endorsement. And he built his case against Paxton, a man he argued was ethically unfit for the office and potentially too repellant to general-election voters to win. Paxton, meanwhile, used Cornyn’s experience against him, arguing he was a creature of the Washington swamp who had gone soft over the years and lost the base.
When U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston entered the race, pitching himself as a bridge between the two camps — MAGA bona fides without the baggage — he all but guaranteed a runoff.
No Republican candidate cleared 50% in March. Cornyn’s surprise first-place finish left many in his camp hoping a Trump endorsement would quickly settle the runoff against Paxton.
Instead, the president demurred, and the fight dragged into late May, turning uglier and even more expensive.
From Washington, the Republican establishment marshalled resources to hammer Paxton on the airwaves, particularly over a case in which the attorney general’s office had offered a Waco sex offender a plea deal that would have allowed a one-day jail sentence. Talarico would frequently return to the same line of attack in the general election. Other ads from Cornyn’s camp hit at Paxton’s divorce — one showed an AI-generated Paxton driving off with two women to the B-52s’ “Love Shack” — and his accumulation of wealth on a government salary.
While Cornyn and Paxton spent millions bruising each other, Talarico spent the spring raising money. He defeated Crockett in the March 3 primary by 6 percentage points, and by the end of the month had raised $27 million for the year, a first-quarter record for a Senate candidate in an election year.
Talarico also had to mend fences with part of his own base after the primary. Some Black voters, who supported Crockett by massive margins, said he needed to do more to earn their votes. In September, Talarico pledged $25 million toward Black voter turnout, and election returns in key majority-Black areas thus far do not indicate any collapse.
Musk’s money vs. Talarico’s head start
Trump finally endorsed Paxton a week before the runoff, helping propel him to a 28-point victory. But the attorney general emerged with his campaign funds depleted and facing deep GOP rifts exposed by the primary.
Democrats made no secret they preferred Paxton, whose favorability rating in Texas has remained lower than Trump’s throughout the cycle — unlike the GOP’s Senate nominees in most other swing states.
With the airwaves to himself, Talarico used positive ads to boost his own favorability and later followed Cornyn’s playbook, blasting Paxton over the Waco sex offender case, his rising net worth and his past allegations of corruption. Cornyn, for his part, pledged to support the Republican ticket but stood by his criticism of Paxton’s electability from the primary.
“He’s lazy and doesn’t raise money,” the senior senator, who fundraised for other GOP candidates but not Paxton, told The Texas Tribune in August. “And he basically is not offering a very compelling case for his election.”
Talarico needed three things to pull off the upset: a surge in Democratic enthusiasm, which became evident in early voting; enough independents and swing voters, especially the Latinos who helped power Trump’s 2024 performance; and enough Republicans — from demoralized base voters to frustrated Cornyn supporters — to either stay home, leave the Senate race blank or vote third-party.
Talarico’s summer ad blitz, aimed at the middle group of swing voters, left him leading by upwards of 20 percentage points with independents heading into September. But the race was flipped on its head early that month, when the GOP — led by Musk — began pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into protecting Texas.
Senate Leadership Fund, the main GOP outside group aligned with Majority Leader John Thune, led the $188 million rescue mission, booking TV ad time at a blistering pace with money that almost entirely came from Musk. The trillionaire Texas resident and world’s richest man also seeded the main pro-Paxton super PAC with $10 million and poured at least an additional $47 million into the race through his own group, America PAC. The super PAC affiliated with Trump, MAGA Inc., spent an additional $43.3 million for Paxton.
For two months, Texans were flooded with ads touting Paxton’s record as attorney general and casting him as a proponent of transgender athletes in girls’ sports — a position Talarico says he opposes. Angela Paxton, the attorney general’s estranged wife, even cut an ad for Senate Leadership Fund, saying she would support the Republican ticket without mentioning her husband.
Republicans nearly doubled Democrats on ad spending in the general election. But Talarico’s superior fundraising to Paxton allowed the Democrat to buy more airtime at the cheaper rates offered to candidates — narrowing the real gap.
In all, the race racked up nearly $590 million worth of TV, radio and digital ad spending across the primary and general, making it the most expensive nonpresidential contest on record, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact.
Both candidates crisscrossed the state in the final weeks, rallying supporters to vote and deploying their closing arguments.
Paxton cast the stakes of the race as existential, telling voters that if Republicans lost Texas, they would lose the nation. Talarico framed the election as a chance for change and for working Texans to claim power, likening it to the biblical story of David and Goliath: Republican money was the Philistine warrior, and the people of Texas were his slingshot.
On Tuesday, the Democrat emerged victorious.
Cornyn will continue to hold the seat through the end of year, until Talarico is sworn in come January.
On the Republican side, Paxton’s loss forces a reckoning. The party has long been split between two contentious schools of thought: one that argues the state’s elected officials need to be as hardline and confrontational as the base, a wing represented by Paxton, and another that warned such a posture would eventually cost the GOP its hard-won dominance.
For Democrats, Talarico’s victory opens new possibilities as soon as the 2028 presidential election. Republicans have long feared that just one Democratic statewide victory would unleash a tsunami of party money into Texas, given the size of its electoral prize. Without the Lone Star State’s 40 Electoral College votes, a figure expected to grow after the 2030 Census, Republicans have little to no path to a presidential win.
Paxton themed his closing tour around the Texas Revolution, daring Talarico, like the Texian settlers to the Mexican army at the Battle of Gonzales, to “come and take it.”
As it turns out, Talarico did. Armed with the knowledge that Texas can be won, Democrats are likely to come back for more.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune. 