The night before Texas Democrats won their first U.S. Senate race in 38 years, the state party’s chairman was standing outside a truck stop in the small town of West, about 20 miles north of Waco, feeling, he said, “very anxious.”
Kendall Scudder had reason to be. For decades, Texas Democrats had entered every major election asking the same question: Is this finally the year? The answer had always been no. No Democrat had won a Senate race in Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, or the governor’s mansion since Ann Richards in 1990.
On Tuesday, the answer was yes.
State Rep. James Talarico, a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, won Texas’ open U.S. Senate seat, defeating Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton by about 12 points — more than 1 million votes — with more than 88% of the expected vote counted early Wednesday. State Rep. Gina Hinojosa of Austin, a self-described “daughter of the Rio Grande Valley,” unseated Gov. Greg Abbott, who was seeking a fourth term, and will be the state’s first Latina governor.
They are the first Democrats to win statewide in Texas in more than three decades, two years after President Donald Trump carried the state by more than 13 points. Talarico’s victory also helped hand Democrats the Senate: The party needed a net gain of four seats and is projected to reach the 51 it needs for a majority.
“This is a win the size of Texas. And now, we have a mandate the size of Texas,” Talarico told cheering supporters after the race was called.
The night before, Scudder sounded defiant. “Texas Democrats are the Weebles of American politics: We get knocked over and we pop right back up and just keep fighting,” he told MS NOW. But he wouldn’t make predictions. All the party could do, he said, was “shovel every person out to vote that we possibly can and leave everything on the field.”
They did. More than 7.7 million Texans voted early, shattering the state’s midterm record, and more than 9 million cast ballots in all.
Talarico and Hinojosa won in an unusually favorable year for their party. Trump’s approval rating had sunk to 35% in FiftyPlusOne’s polling average. The war with Iran sent gas prices soaring and deepened a cost-of-living crisis. And Republicans nominated a Senate candidate so scarred by scandal that prominent members of his own party, including members of the Bush family, crossed over to oppose him.
But favorable conditions have come and gone for Texas Democrats before. This time, they had a candidate who could speak to voters in a language the party had largely ceded to Republicans: faith.
Both parties will spend the next two years arguing about what Tuesday meant: a lasting shift or a one-time convergence of a singular candidate, a deeply damaged opponent and a punishing year for the president’s party. Republicans started that argument before the night was over. Some blamed the candidate.
“Tonight is a thermonuclear event for Texas Republicans. As it turns out, Ken Paxton is the weakest top-of-the-ticket nominee in at least 38 years in Texas, and he ran the worst U.S. Senate campaign in the country this cycle,” said Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based Republican strategist who worked for Sen. John Cornyn. “Texas will never be the same.”
Others blamed the party. A Texas Republican lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment of a politically fraught moment, pointed to the ongoing “Republican civil war” between MAGA and moderates.
“It has a destabilizing effect for the power structure in Texas because it’s been a one-party state for so long,” he said. “It feels like [the Texas GOP] is decapitated,” he added. “There’s a power vacuum.”
Democrats, meanwhile, had Talarico.
Reclaiming faith
Talarico, who grew up in Round Rock, built his campaign on Scripture, framing his positions on immigration and reproductive healthcare through his faith. In doing so, he held up a mirror to a Republican Party that has long claimed Christian values as its own.
“You know what insults Jesus? Kicking the sick off their healthcare while cutting taxes for billionaires. You know what insults Jesus? Deporting the stranger and separating babies from their mothers,” he told a congregation at a Black church in Houston in March.
The message found an audience among Texans, some of whom had never voted for a Democrat.
For some voters, the message and the opponent were hard to separate.
Allyson Koether, a longtime Republican from Houston, voted for Talarico on Tuesday. On Wednesday, she will lead a Bible study group at which no one discusses politics.
“I feel kind of like a heretic or something,” Koether said. By her estimate, 95% of her friends voted for Paxton, whom she describes as “a lying cheater.”
“I was looking over Talarico’s platform, and there’s nothing on there that I would disagree with,” she said. “Maybe I might not be quite as liberal on the abortion side of things, but oh my gosh, that’s like 1% of what’s going on right now.”
The Paxton factor
Paxton, a fervent Trump loyalist, has been Texas’ attorney general since 2015. He used the office to champion what he called “election integrity,” promoting baseless claims that voter fraud was rampant in Texas. His own integrity has been under scrutiny for nearly as long.
He was indicted on securities fraud charges in his first year in office, a case that dragged on until 2024, when he agreed to pay roughly $270,000 in restitution in exchange for the charges being dropped. In 2020 several of his top aides reported him to the FBI, alleging that he had abused his office to benefit a wealthy donor. Paxton fired them, and his bid to settle their lawsuit with $3.3 million in taxpayer money led the Republican-controlled Texas House to impeach him in 2023. The state Senate acquitted him. Last year his wife of 38 years, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce “on biblical grounds,” alleging adultery.
None of it had ever cost him an election. He won re-election in 2018, while under indictment, and again in 2022. It didn’t cost him with Republican primary voters this year, either, or with Trump, who endorsed him a week before the May runoff. Paxton routed Cornyn by more than 20 points, making the four-term incumbent the first Republican senator from Texas to lose his party’s nomination. Cornyn had warned that Paxton being the nominee “would be a dead weight at the top of the ticket.”
The nomination split Texas Republicans. Dan Cogdell, a Houston lawyer who defended Paxton at his impeachment trial, endorsed Talarico. So did David Maxwell, a former Texas Ranger who served as Paxton’s director of law enforcement and was one of the aides Paxton fired after they went to the FBI.
Paxton went on the attack. The night he won the runoff, he called Talarico “the most extreme radical the Democrats have ever nominated” and “a vegan who thinks God is nonbinary and that there’s actually six biological sexes.” He took to calling him “Tofu Talarico,” and his campaign’s first ad closed with the line “Radical Talarico: Too low-T for Texas.” Republicans, Trump among them, also mocked him as “Talafreako.”
Talarico, whose campaign said the vegan claim was false, shot back: “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.” He started selling “I’m a Talafreako” T-shirts.
When Talarico briefly left the campaign trail last month, Paxton’s campaign pushed an unfounded conspiracy theory about his mental state. Talarico, who said he had the flu, challenged Paxton to a debate. “He asked for proof of life from me. I’m asking for proof of spine from him,” he said.
Paxton never accepted.
On Tuesday night, Paxton spoke for about 90 seconds in a ballroom at the Westin Galleria in Dallas. “I will commit that I will be praying for him, that he will do good for Texas and this nation,” he said of Talarico. “We’ve had a difficult night tonight across the country, but it’s not over.”
How Talarico won
In March, Talarico beat Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas outright, despite her late endorsement from former Vice President Kamala Harris. Their primary was, at bottom, an argument about how to win Texas. Crockett’s theory was mobilization: bring out the Black voters and other Democrats who had been skipping general elections. Talarico’s was persuasion: win over independents, Republicans repelled by Trump and Latinos who had drifted toward him.
The early returns suggest it took both. Turnout broke records, but Talarico also ran well ahead of Hinojosa: His margin was roughly double hers, a sign that he won over some voters who stuck with Abbott.
Detailed data on who voted, and how, will take days to arrive.
Talarico also outran the polls. In the final week, he led Paxton by 3 percentage points in an MS NOW/FiftyPlusOne polling average. He won by roughly four times that.
Texas has more Black eligible voters than any other state, about 2.7 million, according to the Pew Research Center, and Talarico’s standing with them was an open question. In February former Rep. Colin Allred, who had dropped out of the Senate race, publicly accused Talarico of having called him “a mediocre Black man” and endorsed Crockett. After losing, Crockett initially refused to concede. She eventually backed Talarico, if halfheartedly. “I’ve endorsed him 100 times,” she told the Houston Chronicle last month.
Talarico course-corrected, telling MS NOW last month that he had begun “treating Black voters as swing voters.” By October a Texas Politics Project poll at the University of Texas found 79% of the state’s Black voters backing him.
The hardest test was along the border. In 2024, Trump made major gains in the Rio Grande Valley, the heavily Latino region that had long been a Democratic stronghold. On Tuesday, Bobby Pulido, a Democrat and Tejano singer, flipped Texas’ 15th Congressional District.
Janet Murguía, CEO of UnidosUS, said both parties had long fallen short on outreach in the region, and she credited Pulido and Talarico with engaging directly with Latino voters. Anger toward what she called “aggressive and violent ICE enforcement actions” was “palpable” in the valley, she said, where the families of Border Patrol agents and mixed-status families live side by side.
Whether the coalition lasts, she said, depends on the candidates. “I think people are going to find that our voters are pretty discerning,” Murguía said. “You can’t fake it till you make it.”
The other upset
Hinojosa’s climb had looked steeper. Abbott’s job approval rating was 44%, and he led her by about 3 points in the final week, according to the MS NOW/FiftyPlusOne average. She was vastly outspent, and national Democrats, including the Democratic Governors Association, initially held back from investing in her campaign.
She won anyway, with more than 52% of the vote to Abbott’s roughly 46%. Abbott called to concede before she took the stage in Austin.
“Everything is bigger in Texas, including the shock of this win,” Hinojosa told supporters. “It never bothered me that they doubted me,” she said. “It bothered me that they doubted us.”
Her win carried a particular resonance. Her father, Gilberto Hinojosa, chaired the Texas Democratic Party for 12 years and resigned after its losses in 2024. Scudder succeeded him. Two years later, his daughter is the governor-elect.
Texas, it turned out, was in play after all — all the way down the ballot.
The long game
Tuesday’s victories were built, in part, on the defeats that came before them.
In 2014, Wendy Davis, a state senator who had become a national star with a marathon filibuster against sweeping abortion restrictions, lost the governor’s race to Abbott by more than 20 points. Her campaign energized a new generation of activists.
Maliha Mazhar was one of them. As a University of Texas student, she joined University Democrats and Students for Wendy Davis, and she remembers being “heartbroken” when Davis lost. Talarico had been president of the same campus group, University Democrats, in 2009.
“Hopefully, this election can bear the fruit of some of that labor in 2014 and 2016,” Mazhar, now 32, said before the race was called.
Four years after Davis’ loss, Beto O’Rourke came within 3 points of unseating Sen. Ted Cruz, the closest any Texas Democrat had come to winning statewide in decades. He lost the 2022 governor’s race to Abbott by almost 11 points. In 2024, Allred lost to Cruz by about 8.5 points.
Two years later, Talarico won by about 12.
When the races were called, Scudder was “ecstatic.” The party’s internal numbers had looked promising, he said, but “we didn’t know whether or not to believe them.”
“The people of Texas have stood up. They have made very clear that they want a government that is run by regular, working-class people who finally get to have their voice heard,” Scudder told MS NOW from the Hyatt Regency in Austin.
On the campaign trail, Talarico insisted he was “not interested in turning Texas blue.” He said he believes “the best color for Texas is purple.”
As of Tuesday night, it is.
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