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Democrat James Talarico leads Republican Ken Paxton 51% to 45% in Texas’ U.S. Senate race, according to a New York Times/Siena poll. He is trying to become the state’s first Democratic senator since 1988.
The telephone survey of 615 likely voters was conducted in English and Spanish Sept. 21-30 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Another 4% were undecided. Election Day is Nov. 3.
Talarico, 37, is a state representative from Austin, a former middle school teacher and a Presbyterian seminarian who has put his Christian faith at the center of his campaign.
Paxton, the state’s attorney general and his rival, won the Republican nomination with President Donald Trump’s endorsement after defeating four-term Sen. John Cornyn in a May runoff. No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since 1994.
Who is James Talarico, the Democrat running for Senate in Texas?
Talarico taught language arts in a low-income, largely Latino area of San Antonio through Teach for America, a program that places recent graduates in under-resourced schools. He later earned a master’s degree in education policy from Harvard.
In 2018, he won a seat in the Texas House representing District 52, a suburban area north of Austin that includes his hometown of Round Rock.
Trump had narrowly carried the district in 2016, and Talarico flipped it from Republican to Democratic, becoming the state’s youngest legislator.
During that campaign, he walked the full 25-mile length of his district and ended up in the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. He then learned his insulin would cost $684 a month.
As a lawmaker, he passed a bill capping insulin copays at $25 a month, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law.
How does faith shape James Talarico’s politics?
Talarico is on leave from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and has said he plans to become a minister. He regularly cites the Bible to make the case for progressive policies, an unusual approach for a Democrat.
He drew national attention in 2023 when he told a Republican colleague that her bill requiring the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom was “deeply un-Christian.”
On “The Ezra Klein Show” in January, he said the Bible mentions economic justice about 3,000 times, yet the theme is absent from Christian nationalism and the religious right.
His core message is about wealth. He often says the country’s biggest divide is between the top and the bottom, not left and right. In the Senate, he says he would push to:
- Limit the money that political action committees, groups that raise and spend money to influence elections, can pour into campaigns.
- Ban members of Congress from trading stocks.
- Outlaw gerrymandering, the practice of drawing district lines to favor one party.
Former President Barack Obama has called him a “really talented young man,” and podcaster Joe Rogan told him during an interview that he should run for president.
What controversies has James Talarico faced?
Some of his positions are a hard sell in Texas. He opposes the death penalty in a state that has carried out more executions than any other since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed them to resume in 1976, and he rejects religious exemptions from vaccine requirements.
He has also faced criticism for past remarks, which he later renounced, in which he said that “God is nonbinary” and that there are six biological sexes.
Paxton has made those remarks a centerpiece of his campaign. His first general election ad called Talarico “radical” and “too low-T for Texas,” and he has mocked him with nicknames such as “Six-Gender Jimmy.”
Outside groups have amplified that message. As of mid-September, Texas PAC, a group linked to Senate Republican leadership, had spent $62.4 million on ads in the race, the most of any spender, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
During the primary, Morgan Thompson, a political content creator on TikTok, said Talarico had privately called former Rep. Colin Allred a “mediocre Black man.”
Talarico denied it, saying he had called Allred’s campaign mediocre, not Allred himself, and that he would never attack him on the basis of race.
Can James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas?
Talarico defeated U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the March 3 Democratic primary, winning more than half the vote and avoiding a runoff. Weeks earlier, his campaign reported raising $2.5 million in 24 hours after Stephen Colbert said CBS had blocked his interview with Talarico from airing on TV. CBS disputed that account.
Black voters favored Crockett in primary polling, and Talarico told The New Yorker there is no way to flip the seat without Black Texans. In the new poll, he leads among Black likely voters 91% to 7%, though that group’s smaller sample means a wider margin of error.
Several of the poll’s questions about the candidates were asked of 465 respondents, so their results also carry a wider margin of error. In those questions, 47% view Talarico favorably and 38% unfavorably, while 39% view Paxton favorably and 51% unfavorably.
Asked about ideology, 40% said Talarico is too far to the left, and 47% said Paxton is too far to the right.
Paxton’s own controversies weigh on his campaign. The Texas House impeached him in 2023 over allegations that included bribery, and the state Senate acquitted him. His wife has also accused him of adultery.
Most likely voters have heard about those controversies: 73% said they had heard a lot or some about them. Asked how the controversies affect their vote, 32% of all likely voters said they cannot support him, while 38% said the controversies haven’t changed their support.
Trump’s standing could also matter. In the poll, 40% of Texas likely voters approve of his job performance and 57% disapprove.