9 min read
Major Takeaways
- A final major poll released Sunday puts James Talarico ahead of Ken Paxton 50 to 43 in the Texas Senate race.
- Black voters back Talarico 85 to 10 in that poll, and Texas holds more Black eligible voters than any other state.
- Texas leads the nation with 7.7 million early ballots cast, and big metro counties broke turnout records.
- A Democrat last won statewide in Texas in 1994, and this race is now rated among the Senate seats most likely to flip.
The Texas Senate race goes down to the wire on Tuesday with Black voters at the center of it.
A major national poll released Sunday, November 1 gave Democrat James Talarico his biggest lead of the campaign.
Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton 50 to 43 with less than a day left before Election Day.
The survey questioned 1,215 voters between October 27 and November 1.
It is the widest margin for Talarico from a national polling source since he launched his campaign in September 2025.
For Black Texans, the numbers inside the poll tell the real story.
Black voters back Talarico over Paxton 85 to 10.
Latino voters back him 65 to 27, and women back him 56 to 38.
Voters age 18 to 29 back him 72 to 23, a huge margin with young Texans.
Paxton leads among men, among voters age 45 and older, and among white voters 59 to 35.
The map inside Texas splits the same way the whole race does.
Talarico leads in every major metro area in the poll.
He leads 55 to 37 in Houston and 53 to 43 in the Dallas and Fort Worth area.
He leads 62 to 30 in Austin and 55 to 33 in the San Antonio area.
Paxton leads across the rest of the state 59 to 36, where his rural base lives.
That means Tuesday comes down to a simple contest of turnout.
If the big cities show up in force, Texas flips for the first time in a generation.
If they stay home, the old Texas holds one more time.
Texas Senate Race Turns on Black Turnout in Houston and Dallas
Texas holds more Black eligible voters than any other state in the country.
Black voters make up roughly 13 percent of the Texas electorate.
They can make up a far larger share of the Democratic vote on any given night.
That math is why both the opportunity and the risk in this race run through Black Texas.
Survey work from the Barbara Jordan Center at Texas Southern University points the same way as the final poll.
That research found Black voters backing Talarico over Paxton nearly eight to one.
It also found Black turnout tracking at a normal rate for a midterm election.
Yet more than three in four Black voters in that work said the Texas Democratic Party takes Black voters for granted.
That tension has hung over this campaign from the start.
Support was never really the question for Talarico with Black voters.
Trust was the question, and trust has to be earned precinct by precinct.
The final weekend showed a campaign still doing that work in person.
Talarico rallied Sunday at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in the Third Ward of Houston.
“That work of representing Black Texans does not start the day after Election Day, it starts now,” he told the crowd.
His weekend schedule also included a school supply giveaway at Emancipation Park with Houston DJ OG Ron C.
The campaign says it has committed more than 25 million dollars to its Black voter effort.
It built an expanded Black engagement team with veteran operatives and Black owned consulting firms.
A Primary Wound That Had to Heal First
None of that outreach started from a clean slate.
Talarico won the Democratic nomination by beating Representative Jasmine Crockett in a hard primary fight.
Crockett held deep support among Black voters, above all in Houston and Dallas.
Many of her voters walked out of that primary unsure about the man who beat her.
Winning them back became the central task of his general election campaign.
At the Houston rally on Sunday, several Black voters who backed Crockett said they now plan to vote for Talarico.
One voter, Bresean Cockrell, described sitting through hard talks with Talarico earlier this summer.
“It was uncomfortable at some points, but there were critical conversations that needed to take place,” Cockrell said.
“I think he took it very well, and I genuinely think he wants to work to make things better.”
That slow repair work is now the whole ballgame.
The Black early voting surge across the South showed what Black turnout can do this cycle.
Texas will show on Tuesday whether that same energy reaches the biggest prize of the night.
Two Campaigns, Two Very Different Pitches to Black Texas
The contrast between the two campaigns could not be much sharper.
In October, Talarico rolled out two ads aimed straight at Black voters.
The ads ran statewide on digital platforms and on Black radio stations.
The first ad, called Care, centers on his work in the Texas House to cap insulin costs at 25 dollars a month.
“Too many Texans are forced to choose between medicine and groceries,” he says in the ad.
The second ad, called Something That Lasts, talks about housing, health care and property taxes.
“I will work to open real access to capital for Black owned businesses to help families build up so they have something to pass down,” he says.
“That is not Ken Paxton,” he adds. “His office went to court to pull up the ladder on Black business owners while the wealth gap just gets bigger.”
Paxton, the state attorney general, took a different road.
His team had launched no ad campaign aimed at Black voters as of the October reporting on the race.
His effort focused instead on driving rural and conservative turnout as high as it can go.
Paxton also carries baggage that even many Republicans talk about out loud.
He went through an impeachment trial in 2023, and corruption allegations have followed his time in office.
Senator John Cornyn, whom Paxton beat in the Republican primary, warned that his nomination could bring a massacre down the Texas ballot.
Republican money arrived anyway, and it arrived in staggering amounts.
Republican groups have spent more than 278 million dollars on ads in this race since the primary.
Elon Musk alone accounted for 168 million dollars of that Republican spending, more than in any other contest in the country.
Early Voting Already Broke Records Across Texas
Whatever happens Tuesday, Texans have already voted like this race matters.
Texas leads every state in the nation with 7.7 million early ballots cast, based on state data.
Turnout ran high in Democratic counties, and Latino voters made up a bigger share of the early vote than last time.
The first day of early voting shattered midterm records in the biggest counties.
Harris County, home to Houston, counted more than 104,000 voters in person on day one.
That crushed the old midterm record of about 63,000 first day votes, set in 2018.
Dallas County also broke its own first day midterm record.
Senator Ted Cruz looked at those numbers on Friday and sounded an alarm for his own party.
“We could lose every single statewide race,” Cruz said on his podcast.
The wider climate explains a lot of that energy.
President Donald Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024.
An October survey from the University of Houston Hobby School found him eight points underwater with Texas likely voters.
In that survey, 46 percent viewed him favorably and 54 percent viewed him unfavorably.
Nearly six in ten said the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Federal monitors will also be watching Texas polls on Tuesday, part of a record federal deployment to polling places in all 50 states.
What a Texas Flip Would Mean on Election Night
The stakes reach far past Texas.
Republicans hold the Senate 53 to 47 going into Tuesday.
Democrats need a net gain of four seats, and they must hold every seat they now defend.
Texas sits third on the list of Senate seats most likely to flip, behind only North Carolina and Ohio.
It sits there alongside the Michigan Senate race, where control could turn on Detroit.
A national average of polls still shows no clear leader in Texas, even with Talarico ahead in the final surveys.
That gap is the whole story of modern Texas politics in one line.
A Democrat last won a statewide race here in 1994.
Since then the party has lost more than 100 straight statewide contests.
Talarico is the only Democrat favored in many polls among the 18 statewide races on the Texas ballot this fall.
For Black Texans, a win built on Houston and Dallas turnout would carry a message that travels.
It would prove that showing up early, organizing through churches and refusing to be taken for granted can move even Texas.
A loss by a small margin, with Black turnout held down, would teach the opposite lesson for another cycle.
Either way, the answer starts at the polls on Tuesday morning.
Follow the returns as they land on the live UCP Election Tracker on election night.
