James Talarico’s Texas Hype Train Has a 2024 Problem - Newsweek

The James Talarico hype train is thundering through Texas, powered by poll after poll showing the Democrat leads Republican rival Ken Paxton in a gripping Senate race that could flip a red state blue for the first time in, well, a long time.

Talarico is young, charismatic, and devoutly Christian. He’s also liberal on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, once describing God as nonbinary, the kind of stance that has earned him the nickname "Tala-freak-o" among his Republican opponents.

Paxton, on the other hand, is a classic, red-blooded Texas Republican, but one whose political career is checkered by scandal and controversy, including allegations of corruption. MAGA loves him; Texas isn’t so sure.

It’s all looking like Talarico’s to lose right now. We’ve seen this story before. Remember Beto O’Rourke’s near-miss in 2018? But there’s a closer precedent that should slow the wheels of the Talarico train. And there’s a clear echo.

One point. That’s Talarico’s lead over Paxton in Emerson College’s latest Texas poll, 47 percent to 46. It was also Ted Cruz’s lead over Colin Allred in Emerson’s final Texas poll of 2024, 48 to 47.

Thirteen days later, Cruz won by 8.5 points.

The polling echo isn’t a forecast. The candidates, the electorate, and the year are all different. But it is a warning about the story now being told in which Talarico’s leads are read as evidence that Texas is finally turning blue again.

His edge in the major polling averages is three to four points. That’s smaller than the more than four-point miss Texas polls produced two years ago. And much of the likely-voter polling rests on assumptions about which 2024 voters will participate in a midterm.

Which is this: the coalition that handed Donald Trump a nearly 14-point Texas win in 2024 will not fully turn out again.

In 2024, the final polling averages had Cruz ahead by roughly four points, about half his eventual margin.

Four years earlier, 2020, the incumbent Senator John Cornyn—defeated by Trump-endorsed Paxton in the GOP primary—went into Election Day about seven points up in the RealClearPolitics average and won by nearly 10.

Both years, Trump was on the ballot.

The midterms tell another story. In 2018, the final averages had Cruz ahead of O’Rourke by six to seven points. He won by 2.6, and Emerson’s own final poll, Cruz by three, was nearly exact.

In 2022, the final University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll had Greg Abbott up over O’Rourke by 11 in the gubernatorial race. He won by 10.9.

The recent record does not flow in one direction. Texas polls understated the Democrat in 2018, came remarkably close in 2022, and understated the Republican Senate margin in both 2020 and 2024.

They underestimated Republicans when Trump was on the ballot, and underestimated the Democrat in the last midterm fought under a President Trump.

None of this makes the Talarico train a mirage.

Every nonpartisan survey in the Texas Politics Project’s tracker since late August has him ahead, by one to six points.

His campaign had raised $68.6 million through June 30, against $9.2 million for Paxton’s committees—more at that stage than any Texas general-election candidate in a decade, with 51 percent from donors who have given less than $200.

Paxton has the worst net favorability of any statewide candidate in Texas Southern University’s latest poll, 43 percent favorable to 55 unfavorable.

And Republicans are acting as if the threat is urgent: conservative super PACs had spent $98.5 million on advertising by mid-September.

Pollsters rarely announce their changes, but their methodology notes, read side by side, show some were made.

Emerson’s final 2024 Texas poll reached voters through automated landline calls, text messages, and a commercial online panel.

This September’s poll contacted a probability-based voter panel by text, added interviews from a second panel, and matched panel responses to the voter file.

Rice University’s Mark Jones co-led the University of Houston’s 2024 surveys, which relied on a YouGov online panel. The Texas Southern polls he now co-writes instead text a random sample of registered voters.

The bet lives in the likely-voter screen. Texas Southern’s likely voters who cast 2024 ballots say they backed Trump 54 percent to 44—a 10-point margin, against his actual 13.7.

Jones explained that, in a midterm, many of Trump’s 2024 supporters are "simply going to stay home this November" in Texas.

The enthusiasm numbers support him in that assessment. In the Texas Politics Project’s August poll, 39 percent of Republicans said they were extremely enthusiastic about voting, down from 52 percent at the same point in 2022.

It is also a bet on Hispanic voters, the group at the center of 2024’s surprise.

Emerson’s September 2024 poll had them backing Kamala Harris 54 percent to 41, and Jones’s own Houston survey had them evenly split.

Texas exit-poll estimates later suggested Trump won roughly 55 percent of Latino voters.

But Emerson’s latest has them backing Talarico 54 to 39, a symptom, perhaps, of Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown.

The bet is reasonable—2018 is the precedent—but it’s going to be put to the test very soon.

Paxton wins just 84 percent of Republicans in Texas Southern’s poll. Abbott, on the same ballot, wins 88.

All else equal, merely closing the four-point gap between Paxton's and Abbott's support among Republicans would be arithmetically enough to erase Talarico's one-point lead.

There are certainly hints they might. When Big Data Poll pushed undecided likely voters to choose, they broke toward Paxton, shrinking a three-point lead to two.

When early voting opens October 19, watch out for whether turnout sags faster in Trump’s 2024 strongholds than in the Democratic cities.

If it does, Talarico’s lead looks more plausible. Otherwise, the Emerson echo will stop sounding like a coincidence.

Texas Democrats have waited three decades for this train, and Talarico has plainly got it moving.

But a lead built on a turnout assumption is a timetable, not a destination—and Texas showed in 2024 what happens when the riders nobody counted suddenly turn up at the station looking for a different train.