On Tuesday night, two major standoffs will take place in Texas that carry broad implications for the midterm elections in November.
On the surface, a Texas race for the U.S. Senate should be easy pickings for Republicans. President Donald Trump won the state three times. Democrats have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1988.
But Trump’s approval is falling across the country, and that has even spread to the reliably crimson Lone Star state, where a poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas found that 49 percent of Texans disapprove of Trump. A growing number of Hispanics, who make up 40 percent of the state, also disapprove of his mass deportation regime. And a right-wing candidate saddled with numerous scandals has thrown what should be a safe seat into jeopardy.
So, today’s contentious Republican Primary — which pits incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a vestige of the conservative establishment, against the state’s ultra-MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton — has left Democrats feeling like they have a real chance to capitalize on the chaos, flip the seat and ultimately win back a Senate majority, which currently stands 53-47 in favor of Republicans.
And that glimmer of hope has triggered its own contentious race on the other side of the aisle between two very different types of Democrats, pitching two very different messages to win over voters.
It has turned the Texas Senate primary race into one of the most expensive primaries in U.S. history, with more than $128 million spent. Cornyn and his allies alone have spent $71 million and Democratic state representative James Talarico spending $24.3 million and living up to that old adage that things are always bigger in the Lone Star State.
Polling places in most of the state close at 8 p.m. ET, but the western edge of Texas, including El Paso, is in a different time zone, so polls there don’t close until 9 pm ET. Calls in the Republican or Democratic primaries will not be made until after 9 p.m. ET – although polling data should come in quickly at that point.
It’s not the only state that has primaries this evening. Staunchly Republican Arkansas is holding its primaries, with polls expected to close at 7:30 pm local time. And North Carolina, which has a contentious congressional Democratic primary in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region and a primary to determine which Republican will run against former Democratic governor Roy Cooper for Senate, has its contest with polls closing at 7:30 pm.
Here’s a breakdown of the dynamics at play Tuesday, brisket and tortillas not included.
The last stand of a genteel Republican
Cornyn looks like a Texas country lawyer, replete with his square jaw, his silver slicked back hair, his wry humor and cowboy boots that he wears with his business suits. He normally should be guaranteed re-election to the Senate seat that he first won in 2002.
He’s voted with Trump 99 percent of the time on everything from the 2017 tax cuts to the One Big, Beautiful Bill that extended them while slashing Medicaid, to confirming his most controversial nominees like Tulsi Gabbard to be director of National Intelligence. A hawk on immigration, he’s supported Trump’s efforts to continue building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. And he voted for all three of Trump’s Supreme Court picks.
But that 1 percent opposition — Cornyn voted to certify Joe Biden’s election victory, for example — has made Cornyn radioactive in the MAGA stronghold and led to accusations that he is a “RINO” (Republican in name only.)
In 2022, following the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and 2 teachers died, Cornyn negotiated a gun control bill with Democrats, angering many conservatives. In 2023, as Trump launched his run for president, Cornyn further enraged the preisdent’s supporters by saying that Trump’s time “has passed him by” and said Trump was interested in turning out his base.
But he remains in the fight, with current polling showing Cornyn consistently polling behind Paxton.
Cornyn has warned that Paxton is “toxic” and an “albatross” to the rest of the Republican ticket. “We haven’t lost a statewide election in Texas since 1994 but we could this year if the wrong person is at the top of the ticket,” Cornyn warned last month.
Paxton, by contrast, is a product of Texas’ hard-right turn in the past decade and a half. He’s served as attorney general since 2015. In that capacity, he attempted to help Trump throw out the 2020 presidential election results by suing battleground states over their results, which the Supreme Court threw out. In 2023, he attempted to block a woman named Kate Cox from receiving a medically necessary abortion.
But he has also been mired in scandal almost as long as he has been attorney general. He had been under federal indictment for years, though the Justice Department declined to prosecute him. In 2023, he was impeached by Texas House of Representatives — at the time controlled by his own party – for corruption, specifically, using his office to benefit a campaign donor named Nate Paul, who at the time was under federal investigation.
The impeachment trial spilled a host of unsavory details including about Paxton’s alleged affair, such as him using an Uber account under the name of “Dave P” for alleged trysts with his mistress. He was eventually acquitted by the state senate after Trump criticized the impeachment efforts. The acquittal emboldened Paxton and turned him into a heroic figure in right-wing circles.
But there was personal fallout. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, announced she would divorce him “on biblical grounds” over the alleged infidelity.
To add to the drama, Republican Rep. Wesley Hunt, a two-term congressman from Houston, jumped into the race late, causing a three-way split. A YouGov poll shows that Hunt is taking about 17 percent of the vote.
This has created a nightmare scenario: if no Republican wins a majority Tuesday, the race will go into a runoff six weeks from now with the top two candidates, giving the Democratic pick a major head start.
To make matters worse, Trump has stayed neutral in the race, likely aware that many of his supporters like Paxton and disdain Cornyn.
But Senate leaders have appealed to Trump to back Cornyn, fearing how Paxton will fare against a Democratic challenger. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Tim Scott warned that a Paxton win could cost them the seat or be incredibly expensive to save.
“It is a strong possibility we cannot hold Texas if John Cornyn is not our nominee,” Scott told Fox News on Wednesday.
Stephen Colbert and derogatory disses haunt Democrats
If Republicans fear that Paxton will cost them a Senate seat and down-ballot races, Democrats have their own challenges with candidates.
The two-way race pits Texas State Rep. James Talarico, a white Presbyterian seminarian from Austin, against U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Black, two-term congresswoman from Dallas who has become a favorite in liberal media circles for her viral attacks on Trump and her Republican colleagues, often made in her tomato barbecue sauce-thick Texas drawl.
Polling has been all over the place, with some showing Crockett leading and others showing Talarico with a majority of the votes. The latest YouGov poll shows Talarico beating Crockett by 13 points with 53 percent of the vote, which would be enough to avoid a runoff.
Talarico’s supporters argue that he can win over Christian conservatives put off by Paxton’s rhetoric, and Hispanic voters in Texas who voted for Trump in large numbers in the presidential election but might find Paxton unsavory or who disapprove of Trump’s policies on deportation. The fact Talarico is open about his Christian faith has some Democrats thinking he might not be as much of a threat.
Talarico has campaigned heavily in the Rio Grande Valley – a majority-Hispanic region along the U.S.-Mexico border that had voted for Democrats for the better part of a century until Trump flipped it in 2024, taking out a key column of support for Democrats in the state.
He appeared on Joe Rogan’s hugely popular podcast where he earned praise from him due to him talking about how being disillusioned is understandable but life did not to be that way forever. Rogan said “We need someone who is actually a good person.”
Talarico got a further boost to his national profile, and fundraising, when he appeared on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show after Colbert said that CBS’ lawyers prohibited Talarico from appearing on the show citing the Federal Communications Commission’s Equal Time rule. He actually didn’t make it to the show itself but on its YouTube channel. The move led to Talarico raising $2.5 million after Colbert posted the video on YouTube.
But his campaign was hit with controversy after a TikTok account accused Talarico of saying he had signed up to run against a “mediocre” Black man like Colin Allred (a previous candidate who dropped out of the Democratic primary in December) and not an accomplished Black woman like Crockett.
Allred, who is now running for his former congressional seat, slammed Talarico while endorsing Crockett, saying “don’t come for me unless I send for you.” It has not seemed to move the needle, with one Democratic-aligned operative telling The Independent last month that “There’s eight people, most of whom don’t live in Texas, who are fighting on the internet and that is driving [the conversation].”
Talarico called the claim a mischaracterization of the conversation.
“In my praise of Congresswoman Crockett, I described Congressman Allred’s method of campaigning as mediocre–but his life and service are not,” he said. “I would never attack him on the basis of race.”
On the other side, Crockett is a much more pugnacious Democrat who is unafraid to take an aggressive stance towards MAGA Republicans, Memorably when she hit back at remarks that former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene made about her “fake eyelashes,” which prompted her to ask the committee chairman if calling someone a “bleach blonde bad-built butch body.” would be considered a personal attack.
But many Democrats fear her approach is too caustic to reach Texas voters who have backed Trump in the past. And she previously came under fire for calling the Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels,” since he uses a wheelchair.
Whoever wins, will still have an uphill battle. Crockett will need to win over younger college-educated voters and white urban dwellers, and Talarico will need to convince Black voters come November.
What’s at stakes Tuesday night
In the most basic terms, the race is about the Senate majority — North Carolina’s open Senate seat and flipping Republican Sen. Susan Collins seat in Maine. Democrats are the easiest parts of their math. They are betting on a miracle in either Alaska or Ohio to get them to 50. But if they want a majority, they would need to flip Texas to get to 51.
But claiming a Senate seat in ruby-red Texas also strikes at something deeper. To Democrats, Texas is a point of frustration: a fool’s gold that seems to have all the elements that should make it a blue state: a large number of well-educated white voters, major cities like Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort-Worth, and large Black and Latino populations.
For Republicans, Texas is the crown jewel in its coalition with its history of cowboys, love of guns, the fossil fuel industry, wide open spaces, no state income tax, and Christian conservatism.
So it’s about saving the GOP brand. Ever since George W. Bush won a landslide re-election as governor in 1998, Republicans have won every statewide race in Texas. Cornyn, who became the first Republican attorney general in a century that same year, is the last of that era and he, and many other Republican leaders at least view him as keeping the lid on what Democrats need to be competitive – a dubious moral character such as Paxton.
And while Trump has been successful in his own right, his acolytes have cost Republicans winnable seats in formerly GOP strongholds like Georgia and Arizona, which opened the door for Democrats to win there.
If Democrats were to pierce through their armor in Texas, their grip on the Senate and the country becomes more precarious.
