A Perfect Texas Storm

GOP in-fighting, a president on the fence, and the loss of Latino support give an up-and-comer like James Talarico a fairly decent chance to win statewide

Three political winds are a-blowin’ in the Lone Star State. Any one of them alone might knock the election needle to the Democrats’ side. But all three together? It’s now quite a bit more likely that 2026 will be the year a Democrat finally wins state-wide in Texas.

Now, a caveat: We’ve gotten our hopes up before, only to be let down hard. I know from personal experience how deeply entrenched the GOP is in Texas. Team Takei once raised big bucks to try to flip the state blue in 2020, all to no avail.

And to our collective heartbreak and horror, the state has only trended redder, as Latinos drifted away from, and not toward, the Democratic Party.

So what is it about this year that gives me hope that this time around will be different? A series of self-owns by the GOP and Trump has created quite the potent brew and a unique opportunity for an economic populist like Talarico.

Today, let’s track these three political storms and how they might come together in November.

Please let it be THAT guy

With no Republican candidate for U.S. Senate receiving a majority in Texas’s March primary, the top two voter-getters, Cornyn and Paxton, are now in a fierce, damaging and costly runoff battle for the GOP nomination. To the dismay of Senate Republicans, incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is trailing enfant terrible, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, in the polls.

A runoff election is set for May 26, one day after Memorial Day weekend.

While the MAGA base cheers the fact that Paxton is now in the lead, since many consider Cornyn a RINO for bucking Trump on a few notable occasions, Paxton is simply too far to the right for many Texas voters. This from the state that gave us Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott.

Indeed, Paxton is so extreme that even his own party tried to impeach him and remove him from office. He boasts a list of scandals, investigations and criminal indictments that rivals Trump himself, which may explain his popularity among MAGA stalwarts. What could be more anti-establishment, after all, than a multiply-indicted, corrupt serial philanderer?

Cornyn and his GOP establishment supporters have spent tens of millions of dollars to defeat Paxton by running ads about how deplorable Paxton is. Here’s a taste:

This has given Democrat James Talarico room to consolidate his support, while the two Republicans tear each other apart.

Trump said he’d endorse but hasn’t

Donald Trump’s endorsement was supposed to settle the question early and in Cornyn’s favor, but it hasn’t come.

After the primary, where no Republican won an outright majority, Trump hinted that he’d soon back one candidate and demand the other drop out. That endorsement, which was pushed on Trump by GOP leaders, was supposed to go to Cornyn.

But the MAGA faithful pushed hard for Paxton, and then Paxton pulled an impressive political maneuver: He declared he would drop out of the race if the Senate would pass the SAVE Act, which is Trump’s highest political priority. This put Cornyn in a box and, in a sad “pick me” moment, he came out with a statement in support of eliminating the Senate filibuster to pass it.

Paxton had proven his MAGA bona fides once again to Trump. And by this point, Trump started to believe Talarico was so “liberal” that either candidate could beat him. So Trump declined to weigh in early on the Texas Senate runoff and ultimately failed to issue an endorsement before the deadline to drop out.

Early polling had shown Talarico would handily beat Paxton but trailed Cornyn. Now polling shows that Talarico would beat both candidates by roughly the same 1-2 point margin.

Independent voters will have an outsized say in this election, meaning their opinion of the candidates’ characters will play a big factor. On this front, Talarico maintains an advantage. As Max Burns noted recently in an OpEd for The Hill,

Talarico boasts a favorability of plus-6, compared to minus-24 for Paxton and minus-28 for Cornyn. Historically, voters are far less likely to turn out on Election Day for candidates they dislike. Call it the nasty guy tax.

With anti-Trump midterm winds at the Democrats’ back, the two GOP candidates attacking each other, Trump sitting out the race so far and a yawning gap in favorability numbers, Talarico is well-positioned for the general election in November.

Adios, GOP

Support for the GOP among Latinos is collapsing across the country. But it’s particularly visible in places like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas as the economy worsens, inflation spikes and brutal ICE enforcement actions continue against immigrant communities.

That erosion of support has been rapid. In fact, it has come on so suddenly and strongly that it has erased all the gains Republicans made since 2020 with Hispanic voters in Texas.

A special election held in January for Texas state House District 9, which encompasses Fort Worth, portended problems for the GOP with Latino voters. Trump had won that district by a whopping 17 points in 2024, thanks in large measure to Latino voters who swung his way. But in the January special election, his endorsed GOP candidate fell easily to the Democrat, Taylor Rehmet, who flipped the district by 14 points—a nearly 31-point swing toward the Democrats.

A closer analysis showed that Rehmet captured a stunning 79 percent of the Hispanic vote in District 9, a huge shift from Harris’s 53 percent in 2024. This overperformance shows up clearly in the district maps, per The Texas Tribune.

More recent election numbers in the state should also have Republicans sweating. In the March primary, most of the energy among Latino voters came from their participation in the Democratic rather than the Republican primary. As Multistate.us noted,

The March 2026 Texas primary saw record turnout exceeding 4.4 million voters, with Latino voter participation up 37% in majority-Latino regions and approximately three quarters voting in the Democratic primary.

If Latino voters are not only motivated but switching back to the Dems in large numbers, that represents the lift that could put Talarico over either of the two Republicans in the race.

Granted, there’s a political eternity between now and November. But many of the things currently driving key voting blocs away from the Republicans—the weakness in jobs, the rising costs of nearly everything, and the White House’s continued brutal mass deportation campaign—are only likely to worsen over the next seven months.

And that’s very bad news for the GOP and its electoral hopes, even in former red strongholds like Texas.