Battle for the Senate: Texas Race in Final Weekend
Meta description: Ken Paxton and James Talarico made their final-weekend pitches in Texas as President Trump campaigned by phone in a toss-up Senate race.
In the battle for the Senate, Texas was not supposed to be the centre of attention. It is a state that Republicans have carried in every presidential election for half a century, a state where Democrats have not won a Senate race since 1988, and a state that national strategists, until recently, filed under safe. On the final Saturday before the midterm elections, however, Texas looked like anything but safe. Republican nominee Ken Paxton addressed supporters in Fort Worth in the morning, warning them against handing control of Capitol Hill back to Democrats and telling them that the election would go down to the wire. His Democratic opponent, state lawmaker James Talarico, was due to rally supporters in Houston later the same day. And President Donald Trump, who has spent the closing weeks of October barnstorming the country in person, was campaigning on Saturday not from a stage but by telephone, calling into a series of virtual rallies after spending the morning and early afternoon at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The picture, taken together, is of a race that has become one of the defining contests of the midterm cycle, and a measure of how far voter frustration with the president and his party has travelled.
The Texas race matters because of what it would mean if it broke the pattern. The Senate currently sits in Republican hands by a margin of 53 seats to 47, and the House by 218 to 214, figures that leave almost no room for error on either side. A Democratic victory in Texas would not by itself decide control of the chamber, but it would signal a political earthquake, and it would force a reckoning inside the Republican Party about a candidate, a campaign, and a national environment that turned a supposedly safe seat into a toss-up. Paxton knows that, and his closing message was framed accordingly. He told his Fort Worth audience that the political left in America kept moving further in a radical direction, and he urged them to reject what he described as dangerous ideas being advanced by Democrats across the country. He closed, in the account carried by the Associated Press, by telling supporters that if Texas were lost, America itself would be lost, and by asking them to pray for the state and for him. It was the language of a candidate who understands that he is fighting not only an opponent, but a national mood.
Midterm Elections 2026: A Toss-Up in a Traditionally Republican State
The closeness of the race is the story that has surprised even seasoned observers. Polling in the final weeks put Talarico narrowly ahead in several surveys, a remarkable position for a Democrat in Texas. A CNN poll reported on October 29 put Talarico ahead by six points, at 49 percent to 43 percent. An earlier New York Times survey had given him a similar lead, at 51 percent to 45 percent, while a Fox News poll had the race closer, at 51 percent to 49 percent, within the margin of error. No single poll should be treated as a prediction, and the margins of error on these surveys, running above four points, mean that several of them are consistent with a race that is effectively tied. Taken together, however, they describe a contest that no one would have predicted at the start of the year, in a state that Trump carried by nearly 14 points in the 2024 presidential election. That contrast, between a comfortable presidential margin two years ago and a dead heat in a Senate race today, is the simplest summary of how the political ground has shifted.
The spending in the race tells a similar story. Republicans have poured an extraordinary sum into holding the seat, with one account putting their spending at around 210 million dollars, against roughly 39 million dollars spent by Democrats. That imbalance is itself revealing. Parties do not spend at that level to defend seats they consider safe. They spend at that level when they fear losing them. Much of the Republican money has gone to defining Talarico before he could define himself, and much of the Democratic money, far smaller in total, has gone to making the case that Paxton, a long-serving and deeply controversial figure, is the wrong choice for a state that deserves better. The result has been a campaign fought at high volume and, at times, at low depth, with attack advertisements, social media barrages, and personal charges crowding out sustained argument about policy. Voters in Texas have been asked to choose not only between two men, but between two very different accounts of what their state has become.
Trump Rally: The President Campaigns by Telephone
Trump’s own role in the final weekend is a study in adaptation. For most of October, he campaigned in person, night after night, in rally after rally, often speaking for ninety minutes or more, and his voice, by his own admission, has paid the price. On Friday, October 30, at a rally in Florida, he told the crowd that he had expected that event to be his last of the midterm blitz, and he joked that his voice was operating at less than half strength. The Republican National Committee had announced earlier in the week that his planned weekend rallies in Kansas and Iowa would be cancelled, before reversing course after pushback from Republicans in both states. On Saturday, rather than returning to the stage, Trump stepped back from in-person events altogether, at least for the day, and turned to the telephone. He was scheduled to call into six tele-rallies, a format that allows him to reach voters in multiple states without the travel, the crowds, and the physical toll of a live rally. The White House released few details about what to expect from the calls, but the format is familiar: the president speaks, often at length, to supporters gathered on the line, and the campaign counts the reach rather than the room.
The shift to tele-rallies is not a retreat from the Texas race, but a different way of fighting it. Trump has been central to the Paxton campaign from the start. He endorsed Paxton in the Republican primary contest against the incumbent senator, John Cornyn, a sitting senator who was widely regarded in Washington as the safer general-election candidate, and Paxton’s victory in that contest, with Trump’s help, set up the general election as it now stands. Trump has since campaigned for Paxton in person, including at a rally in San Antonio in early October, and he has attacked Talarico repeatedly, calling for a debate, mocking the Democrat’s absence from the trail during a bout of influenza, and giving him a derisive nickname that Talarico’s campaign has since printed on T-shirts. The telephone rallies continue that involvement in a quieter register. They allow Trump to be present in the race without the spectacle, and the risk, of another live event in the final days, when every appearance is scrutinised and every remark can dominate a news cycle.
2026 Midterms: How Paxton and Talarico Reached the Final Weekend
Paxton arrives at the final weekend as one of the most controversial figures in Texas politics. He has served as the state’s attorney general for years, building a national profile as a combative defender of conservative causes and a frequent litigant against the federal government when Democrats held the White House. He has also been beset by years of controversy, including legal and ethical questions that his opponents have made central to their case against him, and his primary victory over Cornyn was itself a shock to the Republican establishment, which had warned that nominating Paxton would put the seat at risk. That warning now looks prescient, at least in polling terms. Paxton’s campaign has responded by casting Talarico as the frontman for a far-left agenda, linking him to Democratic leaders in Washington, and arguing that a vote for Talarico is a vote for the national Democratic Party in its most liberal form. It is a familiar strategy in Texas, where the national party label has historically been a burden for Democrats, but in this cycle it has not yet produced the comfortable margin Paxton’s supporters expected.
Talarico, by contrast, is a state lawmaker who has built his campaign around a very different appeal. He is younger than Paxton, he speaks in the language of a new generation of Texas Democrats, and he has presented himself as a candidate focused on the practical concerns of voters rather than on the culture-war battles that have dominated the Republican campaign. His path to the nomination was not without its own complications. He spent more than a week off the campaign trail in the autumn, an absence that Paxton and Trump seized upon, questioning his explanation that he was suffering from influenza and suggesting, without evidence, that something else was going on. Talarico later said he had been ill, that he did not want to risk infecting others, and that he was back and feeling better. He has also faced personal attacks of a different kind, including advertisements that his supporters describe as generated with artificial intelligence and designed to mock him, and he has responded by turning the attacks back on his opponents, arguing that they reveal more about Paxton’s campaign than about him. The debate question has become a symbol of the race’s frustrations: Talarico has repeatedly challenged Paxton to debate, including on a national cable network, and Paxton has not agreed, leaving voters without the head-to-head encounter that might have clarified the choice.
Election Polls: What the Numbers Can and Cannot Tell Us
The polling in Texas deserves a careful reading, because it is easy to overstate what surveys can show three days before an election. The surveys that put Talarico ahead were conducted at different times, by different organisations, with different methods, and they disagree with each other about the size of the lead. Some show a clear advantage, others show a statistical tie. The most recent survey cited in the staged coverage of this cycle, from CNN, gave Talarico a six-point lead, but its margin of error means the true position could be closer. Other surveys have pointed in the same direction, but none of them votes. What the polls establish, with reasonable confidence, is that the race is competitive, that Talarico is not a distant underdog, and that Paxton cannot take the seat for granted. What they do not establish is a winner, and anyone who claims otherwise on the basis of a single survey is misleading the reader. Early voting, which was approaching its conclusion in several states as the final weekend began, adds another layer of uncertainty, because a large share of the electorate has already cast a ballot before the closing arguments are even delivered.
That uncertainty is part of why the final weekend matters so much, and why both campaigns have concentrated their efforts on the state’s largest population centres. Paxton spoke in Fort Worth on Saturday morning, in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, one of the great engines of Texas politics. Talarico was due in Houston later the same day, in Harris County, the state’s most populous county and a place where Democrats must run up large margins if they are to win statewide. Both candidates have spent the final days of early voting focused on Houston and its surroundings, a recognition that the election will be decided less by the state’s rural strongholds, where Republicans dominate, than by its suburbs and cities, where the electorate is more diverse, more contested, and more open to persuasion. The geography of the closing weekend is, in that sense, a map of the race itself: two candidates, two great cities, and a state whose political identity is being renegotiated in real time.
Swing States: Texas in the National Senate Map
Texas does not stand alone in the national picture. Across the country, the battle for the Senate is being fought in a handful of states where Democrats are competitive in places Republicans once counted as safe, and where the president’s standing has become a headwind for his party’s candidates. In Kansas, the race between the Republican incumbent and his Democratic challenger has become one of the surprises of the cycle. In Michigan, in Maine, in North Carolina, and in Ohio, similar patterns are visible: close polls, heavy spending, and Republican candidates deciding, race by race, how closely to stand beside the president. Texas fits that pattern, but it also exceeds it, because of its size, its symbolism, and its history. A Democratic victory in Texas would be read, fairly or not, as a verdict on the Trump presidency itself, and as evidence that the coalition that carried Trump to the White House twice is fraying at its edges. A Republican victory, even a narrow one, would be read as proof that Texas remains Texas, and that the polls, once again, overstated the Democratic challenge.
The national stakes also explain why Trump has invested so much personal capital in the race, and why his party has spent so much money defending it. The Senate majority of 53 to 47 is not large, and the loss of even one seat in a state like Texas would narrow the margin for the final two years of Trump’s presidency, complicating confirmations, legislation, and the president’s ability to set the agenda. The House, at 218 to 214, is even tighter, and the two chambers together will determine whether the second half of Trump’s term is a period of governing or a period of gridlock. Voters in Texas are therefore being asked to decide something larger than a single Senate seat, even if they experience the choice as a local one. That is the paradox of midterm elections: they are fought state by state, candidate by candidate, but they are judged nationally, as a referendum on the president and his party.
What Happens Next: The Final Days Before November 3
What happens next is, in the short term, a matter of days. The election itself falls on Tuesday, November 3, and early voting was already well advanced as the final weekend began. Both campaigns will spend the remaining days trying to turn out their supporters, to persuade the shrinking pool of undecided voters, and to ensure that the ballots already cast are not the last word. Trump is expected to continue his tele-rallies and, if the pattern of the week holds, to return to in-person events in Kansas and Iowa on Sunday, after the reversal of the cancellations announced earlier in the week. In Texas, Paxton and Talarico will make their final pitches, likely in the same great cities where they spent Saturday, and the airwaves will fill with closing advertisements that are, if anything, more intense than what has come before. The debate question will probably remain unresolved, a source of frustration for voters who wanted to see the candidates face each other directly.
Beyond Tuesday, the race will be judged by its result, and by the margin. A narrow Paxton victory will be claimed by Republicans as vindication and by Democrats as evidence of how far they have come in a state they were not expected to contest. A Talarico victory will be claimed by Democrats as a breakthrough and by Republicans as a warning about candidate selection and national mood. Either way, the race has already changed the conversation about Texas, about the Senate map, and about the limits of partisan identity in a state that is changing faster than its politics. For now, the facts are these. On Saturday, October 31, 2026, Ken Paxton campaigned in Fort Worth and James Talarico was due in Houston, in the final weekend of a Senate race that polling shows as competitive in a state Democrats have not won at Senate level since 1988. President Donald Trump campaigned by telephone, calling into six tele-rallies after spending the day at his golf club in Florida, rather than appearing in person. The election is on Tuesday, November 3, and the outcome, like the polls, remains genuinely uncertain.
Source: Associated Press