With election day less than a week away, early voting is running well ahead of 2022 midterm levels nationwide, and few races capture the stakes better than Texas, where Democrat James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton are locked in a race recent polling shows separated by only a point or two.
More than 21 million Americans had already cast ballots as of this week, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab, with early voting outpacing 2022 in a number of states. Georgia's early voting, which runs through Friday, has set records on multiple days; several North Texas counties have also reported record first-day turnout, with Dallas County logging more than 76,000 voters on its opening day and Tarrant County seeing a jump to over 50,000 from roughly 29,000 four years ago.
A Race Both Campaigns Are Treating as Existential
Talarico, a state representative seeking to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since 1988, and Paxton, the state's attorney general, have spent the campaign's final stretch crisscrossing the state — Paxton on a "Come and Take It" bus tour, Talarico on a "Clear Eyes, Full Hearts" tour — framing the contest in sweeping terms. "This isn't just red versus blue; it's the America our founders gave us versus something that they would never recognize," Paxton told supporters in Georgetown. "I am not exaggerating when I say we lose Texas, we lose America."
Talarico has leaned into his refusal to take corporate money as a contrast with Paxton's fundraising, which has drawn on deep-pocketed national donors. "You want to know why they are spending $200 million against me? Because I don't take their corporate PAC money, and I never will," he told a San Antonio crowd, pointing also to Paxton's 2023 impeachment by the Texas House — a vote that drew support from members of both parties, even though the Senate later acquitted him.
A Bellwether for Control of Congress
Texas has not elected a Democrat statewide since 1988, and Talarico's campaign has leaned on independents and moderate Republicans frustrated with both Washington gridlock and Paxton's long history of legal controversies to close what was initially a wider gap. Paxton, for his part, has highlighted his record challenging the Biden administration, Pfizer and Netflix in court, along with an economic plan that includes a $25,000 medical-expense tax deduction.
With polls this close in a state Republicans have not had to seriously defend in decades, the race has become a proxy for the broader midterm fight: whichever party wins narrow contests like this one is likely to determine which party controls the Senate for the back half of the Trump administration's term, and both parties' national committees have poured unusually large sums into a state usually left off the competitive map entirely.
