Could Texas really turn blue in 2026?
While it’s tempting to be skeptical, a blue Texas is increasingly easy to imagine. It’s even easier to imagine after Ken Paxton’s victory over John Cornyn, the incumbent senator, in the Republican primary runoff on Tuesday night.
That’s partly because Mr. Paxton, the state attorney general, has distinct political liabilities. He’s faced investigation, indictment, impeachment and a messy public divorce.
But there’s another reason Democrats might pull off a statewide win for the first time in three decades: demographics. Texas is one of the most diverse states in the country, and national polls show Democrats surging back in support among young and nonwhite voters — and especially Hispanic voters.
On paper, these national demographic trends ought to send Texas racing toward the left and into contention. Add in Mr. Paxton’s nomination and you can start to see how Democrats could flip Texas this fall.
After a decade of big talk from Democrats about Texas, it’s understandable that people could harbor some doubt about flipping the nation’s largest red state. Judging by presidential election results, Democrats barely made any progress at all: President Trump won Texas by almost 14 percentage points in 2024.
But beneath the state’s stable Republican voting record, extraordinary demographic shifts have put Texas Republicans in a much more vulnerable position. To an extent few would have imagined a decade ago, Texas’ status as a reliably Republican state now depends on elevated levels of support among Hispanic voters.
In the latest national polls, Mr. Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters have vanished — and the Republican grip on Texas is in danger as a result. The latest New York Times/Siena poll is representative: It shows Democrats ahead by 30 points, 54 percent to 24 percent, among Hispanic registered voters nationwide. That’s better than Joe Biden’s margin in 2020 and getting close to Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016.
The signs of Democratic strength aren’t limited to the polls. Since 2024, Democrats have run well ahead of Kamala Harris’s showing in heavily Hispanic areas in special elections — including in Texas — and in the regularly scheduled elections in Virginia and New Jersey.
Alone, major Democratic gains among Hispanic voters would be enough to make Texas a plausible battleground in November. Now consider the party’s expected gains among other demographic groups — including white voters — in this national political environment, and suddenly the conditions would seem to be in place for a Democratic breakthrough.
To illustrate, consider this hypothetical: What would have happened in 2024 if Ms. Harris had fared as well as Mrs. Clinton did among Hispanic voters in 2016?
If she had, Texas would have been about tied. That’s right, tied. There are more sophisticated ways to reach this conclusion, but you can see for yourself just by plugging the results by race from the 2016 exit poll into the 2024 exit poll. You get a contest within one point.
How could this be? It’s been easy to overlook, but Democrats have made significant gains among Texas’ white voters during the Trump era. For comparison, the gains are basically equivalent to those Democrats made among white voters in Georgia, which drove that state toward the left over the same period.
The Democratic gains among white Texas voters would have been enough to make Texas competitive in 2024, if everything else had stayed constant. Of course, everything else did not stay constant: Mr. Trump made even larger gains among nonwhite voters, especially Hispanic ones, canceling out Democratic gains — and more. Now, those gains have been reversed.
Or consider another example: Imagine we adjusted the results of the last presidential election by shifting each racial demographic group’s support to match the latest Times/Siena poll results. Based on the poll’s findings, Texas would be expected to tilt Democratic in this national political environment. Interestingly, the other red states Democrats are targeting in their pursuit of Senate control — like Ohio and Alaska — would still remain red in this exercise, even though each voted more Democratic in 2024 than Texas. That’s because Democratic gains among nonwhite voters help Democrats more in Texas, since it is a much more diverse state.
Of course, Democrats might win in Ohio or Alaska even though national trends alone wouldn’t seem enough to do it. The party has recruited strong nominees (Sherrod Brown and Mary Peltola) with a track record of outperforming the national party. The same can’t necessarily be said for Texas Democrats: The party’s nominee, James Talarico, is a first-time candidate for statewide office with a mix of political assets (he grounds his campaign in his Christian faith) and liabilities (he has been attacked for saying that God is nonbinary and that there are six biological sexes).
But unlike the Democratic candidates in Ohio and Alaska, Mr. Talarico will not be facing an incumbent senator. He’ll be facing Mr. Paxton, who enters the general election campaign already damaged by tens of millions of dollars spent by Mr. Cornyn and his allies on negative advertisements. In recent months, polls have shown that more Texans have an unfavorable view of Mr. Paxton than a favorable one.
While Texas Republicans have occasionally had a few close calls, this year’s contest is already different, at least by the measure of the polls. Back in 2018, Beto O’Rourke never led a poll collected by RealClearPolitics against Ted Cruz.
This time, Mr. Paxton hasn’t led a general election poll against Mr. Talarico since January.
