Tuesday 3 November 2026
The Associated Press calls the Texas Senate race for James Talarico, and Ken Paxton loses the seat Republicans have held since 1993
The Associated Press has called the Texas Senate race for Democrat James Talarico over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. The Associated Press count had Talarico at 4,155,536 votes and Paxton at 2,767,417 as of 9:30 p.m. Colorado time, with an estimated 67.5 percent of the vote counted. The El Paso Times reported that the Associated Press called the race shortly after 9 p.m. Colorado time. Talarico is the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas since 1994 and the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen won reelection in 1988. The seat was open because Senator John Cornyn lost the Republican primary to Paxton.
The margin is the story underneath the call. Final polls put Talarico ahead by about two and a half points, inside a close race. The count put him ahead by roughly 20 points with two thirds of the vote in. Trump carried Texas by more than 13 points in 2024. A state representative from the Austin area and a former middle school teacher, Talarico beat Representative Jasmine Crockett in the March Democratic primary and then ran on the cost of living, health care and housing against the sitting attorney general.
Paxton won the Republican nomination by beating Cornyn, a four term senator, in the primary runoff, and Trump endorsed him for the general election. He carried into the race the fraud allegations that have followed him through his years as attorney general, and the campaign his party ran behind him was the most expensive Senate campaign in the country. Advertising spending and reservations in the race passed 575 million dollars, according to the Washington Examiner, making it the most expensive non-presidential election in American history, and the two campaigns raised nearly 200 million dollars between them, according to figures reported by the Texas Tribune.
The seat itself has been Republican since 1993, when Kay Bailey Hutchison won it, and no Democrat has held it since 1961. More than 7.6 million Texans voted early. Texas gave Democrats their third Senate pickup of the night, after North Carolina and South Carolina, and it did so in the state Republicans treated as the foundation of their national map.
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