In the go-big-or-go-home collective consciousness of Texas, no ambition is deemed too reckless, no daydream too wild. Save perhaps one.
It is the idea, fantastical to many as it is irresistible to others, that the Democrats will win a statewide race in Texas for the first time in 32 years.
According to the latest New York Times/Siena University poll of the race for U.S. Senate, James Talarico, a 37-year-old state legislator seen by national Democrats as one of the breakout stars of this cycle, is ahead of his Republican rival, Ken Paxton, the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general, by six points. The poll was conducted from Sept. 21 to Sept. 30. A survey from mid-September, the ReconMR/Siena Research Institute poll, also showed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Gina Hinojosa, four points ahead of the three-term G.O.P. incumbent, Greg Abbott, the most dominant political figure in Texas.
Cue the fluttering heartbeats. Cue, as well, the eye-rolls.
Given how thoroughly Republicans have dominated the state, and how the hopes of Democrats have repeatedly crashed, some Texas pollsters remain skeptical.
“At some point, you do get conditioned by all that’s happened in the past,” said James Henson, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project. “I mean, you look at the trends and you have to admit that something’s going on. But you still don’t want to believe your lying eyes, because you’ve been burned for so long.”
Mr. Henson was referring to the perennial spectacle of much-ballyhooed Texas Democratic aspirants face-planting against the Lone Star State’s red wall.
First came Tony Sanchez Jr., the swaggering and self-funding Laredo oilman whom Gov. Rick Perry dispatched in 2002 by an 18-point margin. Next was the state senator Wendy Davis, who attracted worldwide attention for her filibuster in the Texas Legislature against an anti-abortion measure but whom Mr. Abbott demolished by 20 points in 2014.
Finally, the El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke came up 2.6 points short of defeating Senator Ted Cruz in 2018 but then suffered a 10-point loss to Mr. Abbott four years later.
Even with the awareness of such humiliations, Democrats find themselves maintaining that 2026 could, at long last, be the year. President Trump’s deep unpopularity and the prospect of a blue wave could, they insist, extend into the state he won by nearly 14 points in 2024. According to a September survey conducted by Texas Southern University, Mr. Trump is seven points underwater in Texas.
Mr. Talarico has run an energetic and well-financed campaign, while Mr. Paxton has staged far fewer public events and has had to rely on outside groups to fund an attack-ad blitzkrieg against his Democratic opponent. Mr. Abbott, meanwhile, has outspent Ms. Hinojosa by a 10-to-one ratio, yet has been unable to build an insurmountable lead.
“People have vastly underestimated Gina,” said Ms. Davis, now a political consultant and a senior adviser to Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, an advocacy organization. “Dollar for dollar, she’s running the best statewide campaign we’ve ever seen.”
Such optimism stands in defiance of the political axiom that Texas is where idealistic Democrats go to be mugged by reality. The party’s demise there is not a product of ill fortune, Mr. Henson said. “Governor Abbott has built an impressive election machine that has benefited state-level Republicans again and again for a decade and a half,” he said. “And the Democratic machinery here is almost nonexistent.”
A ‘Hollowing-Out’
I have written about the politics of my native state at regular intervals for more than three decades. After watching the Democrats’ century-long rule in Texas come to a decisive end with Gov. Ann Richards’s loss to George W. Bush in 1994, I saw the party descend into atrophy in which failure begot more failure.
“The 30-year drought has done a lot of things,” said Luke Warford, the chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party and the founder of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund. “It’s kept donors on the sidelines, which makes a lot of potentially good candidates not run because there’s no belief they can win. And it also makes a lot of really talented staff leave to find better-paying work in true battleground states.”
The Democratic Party has no counterpart to Mr. Abbott, and hasn’t since 1993, when Senator Lloyd Bentsen moved to Washington to join President Bill Clinton’s cabinet. Its weaknesses are even more glaring farther down the hierarchy.
In recent elections, as many as one-third of state races have gone uncontested by Democrats. One-fifth of the party’s county chairs and two-thirds of its precinct chairs have been left unfilled. Until last year, the state party had a negative operating budget. As the veteran Democratic consultant Matt Angle observed, “There’s been a hollowing-out of the party.”
Still, those of us who recall the satisfied sense of invincibility among Texas Democrats after roughly a century of one-party rule have detected similar signs of overconfidence among the state’s ruling party. The party’s rightward tilt, increasingly forceful with each legislative session, reached its apotheosis in March, with Mr. Paxton’s primary victory over the more moderate Republican four-term incumbent, Senator John Cornyn.
Mr. Paxton, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, was impeached by the Republican-controlled State House (and later acquitted by the State Senate) in 2023 over allegations that included bribery. He was also accused by his wife of adultery. Mr. Trump endorsed him anyway, all but guaranteeing his landslide primary triumph over Mr. Cornyn but in the process testing the allegiance of center-right Texans.
In similar fashion, the Texas G.O.P. is in danger of losing many Latino voters who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 after years of siding with Democrats. “We adopted a lazy way of campaigning that bit us on the ass, and we’ve learned from that,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “Now it’s the Republicans who’ve gotten really lazy and complacent and comfortable.”
Signs of Republican Overreach
Simply spending one week driving through the vastness of Texas, as I did in September, is all it takes to appreciate an underdog party’s uphill battle.
The state’s 32 million residents are spread across 20 media markets, many of them distinct ecosystems, from the urban colossi of Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to the oil patch of the Texas Panhandle to the Latino-dominated borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley.
“When national donors are deciding where to invest, they look at a place like Iowa, where $5 million can fully fund a race,” said Katherine Fischer, the director of the Texas Majority PAC, which was established by the liberal philanthropist Soros family. “That’s why Texas is always at the bottom of their list. It’s just so damned big.”
Reaching so many markets presents a daunting challenge for an upstart candidate like Ms. Hinojosa, a state representative from the border city of Brownsville. “There’s still 20 percent of the electorate that doesn’t know who I am,” she said in an interview in mid-September. To date, Ms. Hinojosa’s campaign has said that it has raised about $20 million.
For his part, Mr. Talarico spent about $30 million earlier this year to introduce himself statewide as a man of Christian faith and a member of the Texas House with a record of supporting bipartisan legislation.
Since that time, however, Mr. Paxton and his associates have invested more than $100 million in an effort to redefine his opponent as “radical” and “weird,” with ads that quote from remarks Mr. Talarico made several years ago (and later renounced) suggesting that “God is nonbinary” and that there are six biological sexes. Mr. Paxton and his allies have at times questioned Mr. Talarico’s manhood and even his Christianity, an effort to jolt the sensibilities of a state prone to mythologizing godly and masculine archetypes.
“How they’re negatively defining Talarico is kind of a bank-shot way of saying that he’s not a true Texas conservative,” Mr. Henson said.
Whether money can overwhelm conditions on the ground is the riddle looming over the Texas races. In the border city of Laredo, which Mr. Trump won in 2024 — the first time a Republican had done so in over a century — signs of buyer’s remorse are evident. Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Laredo were higher in July than in any other American city. Mr. Trump’s erratic trade policies have further created instability at the city’s port of entry.
While acknowledging the economic concerns that many border residents share, Adrian Zapata, a business executive in the health industry who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, said in an interview that the negative ads against Mr. Talarico were resonating with some of his family members. “They see Talarico as an ultraliberal,” he said. “They’re done with the ‘they/them.’ They’re going to vote for Paxton just because of that.”
As for Mr. Zapata, “I’m not ready to vote for Talarico,” he said. “But I don’t like Paxton. He’s never done anything for South Texas, and his personal and business dealings have hurt him a lot with folks down here.”
There is a similarly muddled electoral picture in the cattle country of deep West Texas adjacent to Big Bend National Park. Mr. Trump and Mr. Abbott have aggressively championed a border wall and artificial intelligence data centers, both of which threaten to disrupt the region’s pastoral ethos.
A coalition of more than 200 landowners has sued the federal government over the border wall, while other residents have circulated a petition to protest the construction of a new data center near Fort Stockton. George Johnson, a cattle feed operator in Alpine, waved off such concerns, saying: “Folks worrying about data centers were also worried when the internet got started. It’s Talarico who scares me to death, him and all that socialist talk.”
Others in this largely conservative region harbor the view that Republicans have failed to make good on their promises. Thaddeus Cleveland, the Republican sheriff of Terrell County, said that both he and his county had voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, but added, “Everything he campaigned on, we’re seeing the opposite of, like going to war.” Sheriff Cleveland predicted that the negative campaign ads by the Republicans would not factor as significantly into the votes of his neighbors as “the price of groceries and gas, which are compounded here because we’re so far from everywhere else.”
But it is in purple Tarrant County, dominated by Fort Worth, where the party could pay the price for having potentially overestimated its mandate from the voters. Conservative leaders have cut funds for nonprofits that aid at-risk children, subjected school library books to right-wing litmus tests and eliminated free bus rides to polling stations in poor neighborhoods.
“The far-right leaders here have implemented Project 2025 on a county level,” said Alisa Simmons, a Democrat and county commissioner who is running to unseat the conservative county judge, Tim O’Hare.
In an early sign this year that area Republicans may be out of step with Tarrant County’s constituents, a Democratic aviation machinist and union leader, Taylor Rehmet, defeated Leigh Wambsganss, a well-funded Republican Christian activist who led the conservative takeover of several metroplex school boards. He won by 14 points in a January special election for a State Senate seat covering a region that Mr. Trump won by 17 points in 2024.
A ‘Gradualist’ Theory
Which party prevails in Texas is a complicated riddle. Historically a low-turnout state — it ranked second to last in the 2024 election, ahead of only Arkansas — Texas held a primary in March that saw nearly one in four voters showing up to the polls, a modern record for midterm participation, with Democrats slightly outpacing Republicans.
A few factors could conspire to thwart a blue wave in Texas. As of 2020, straight-ticket voting is no longer possible in the state, which could impact the mostly Democratic urban counties where that practice has frequently been used by voters in past elections. Texas is one of only eight states that lack universal online registration, while voting by mail is also highly restricted.
In January, Mr. Abbott turned over the state’s list of approximately 18.7 million registered voters to the Trump administration, and 1.2 million of them have subsequently been put on the “suspense list” because their addresses have not been verified. The recent shuttering of nearly one-third of Tarrant County’s polling sites by its Republican-controlled county commission is particularly worrisome for Democrats.
“The reason we’ve lost these statewide races in the past is because we’ve never gotten enough out of Tarrant County to overcome the margins in rural Texas,” Ms. Davis said of the turnout. “If we don’t get it to 53 or 54 percent this November, it’s game over. James and Gina can’t win.”
But the state’s Republicans have reasons of their own to be fretful. Partly because of the recruitment efforts of the Texas Majority PAC and Blueprint Texas, a down-ballot candidate support organization co-founded by Ms. Davis earlier this year, the Democrats are fielding a full slate in all 150 state races for the first time in a half-century. Though many of these aspirants face long odds, their presence on the ballot could energize the Democrats in predominantly conservative regions who have not bothered to turn out in the past.
“If we win on Nov. 3, most of those names running down-ballot in really tough areas like East Texas and the Hill Country and the Panhandle will be responsible,” Mr. O’Rourke said.
Mr. Henson added that while he remained skeptical about Democratic enthusiasm being sufficient to carry the day for Mr. Talarico, he also doubted that a last-minute avalanche of negative ads would prove decisive for Mr. Paxton. “At a certain point, there’s diminishing impact once you get past an absurd level of spending,” he said.
Rather than project a winner in November, Mr. Henson said he felt more comfortable embracing a “gradualist” theory, one in which Texas does not become blue overnight, but instead competitive.
“Even if Talarico loses by a Beto-like margin,” he said, “the next cycle is a presidential election, where Trump likely won’t be popular and Democratic turnout will be higher. So there are reasons for Texas Democrats to be optimistic.”
