A closer look at how Talarico and Paxton could fare in crucial North Texas counties in U.S. Senate race
VoteHub, an independent firm that forecasts political races across the country, says current polling numbers show Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has an edge over Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton in three of the big four counties in North Texas.
Zachary Donnini, Head of Data Science at VoteHub, spoke with CBS News Texas about the current state of the Senate race. Vote Hub is working with the Data Desk at CBS News in the all-important midterm election in November.
Donnini said Donnini said as of right now, the state is a toss-up. "The entire race is basically a dead heat, about 50-50." But he said Vote Hub predicts Talarico will win Tarrant County, the largest Republican county in the state and nation.
"We have Talarico winning Tarrant County by seven points," said Donnini. Even in Collin County, which has voted solidly Republican and was Paxton's home county for many years, Donnini said Talarico is leading.
"We have James Talarico winning Collin County by one point right now. We have Collin County as kind of the key swing county in the race this November," said Donnini. "We're seeing a couple of things. First, again, Donald Trump won the popular vote in the U.S. by about one to two points in 2024. If the election was held today, we think Democrats would win what we call the generic vote by seven to eight. That's an eight to ten-point shift. That's a big shift."
In 2024, President Trump won Collin County by 11 percentage points, 54% to 43%. "If you just apply that eight to ten point shift onto the county, you get a light pink county, maybe a county that you would think a Republican would win by three," said Donnini. "But Ken Paxton does have some issues. Right now, he's getting out-fundraised by about eight to one by Talarico. And there were a ton of attack ads against him from the primary that hurt his favorables. It hurt his image. That was actually spent by Republicans. That's now working against the Republican nominee."
Donnini said Talarico needs to carry Tarrant County if he wants to win the state. "If he's not carrying it, he's not getting the voters in the northeastern portion of the county, near North Richland Hills to shift well enough in his direction, those upper-middle-class white voters. And if he's not doing well enough in the southern portion of the county with Hispanic voters, it's also an issue for him. He just doesn't have a real path without Tarrant County," said Donnini. "Not only do we think he needs to win it for him to feel comfortable, he'd have to win it by seven or more points."
When asked if he thought that was possible, Donnini said, "We do think it's possible. These polls we're seeing right now, when you see a poll that has James Talarico up three points in Texas, that's a 17-point shift from how Donald Trump did in Texas just two years ago. A lot of Hispanic districts, we're potentially going to see 20 or 25-point shifts this November. Those are high numbers for Talarico to hit. So far in polling, he's hitting them. Polling has been wrong before, so we'll see this November."
In Denton County, another solidly Republican county, Donnini said Paxton is leading by one percentage point. In Dallas, a reliably Democratic county, Donnini said he expects Talarico to win by more than 30 percentage points. "It's not just about flipping red areas to blue. It's about really running up the score in Democratic strongholds," said Donnini.
In 2018, President Trump's first midterm election, then Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke came close to unseating Republican incumbent Senator Ted Cruz. But Cruz went on to win by 2.6 percentage points. When asked how this year's Texas Senate race compares to 2018, Donnini said, "I think that in Texas, it's bluer than 2018."
On Friday, President Trump said his super PAC, MAGA, Inc., will spend at least $400 million on the midterm elections, including in Paxton's race. Donnini said that could help Paxton.
"So right now, in our current polling average, we have James Talarico polling ahead of Ken Paxton by 2.4%. But our model, how it works, it doesn't just look at polls. It thinks about other factors. So, the model knows there are about nine to ten percent of voters who say they're undecided in the polls, have some attributes that are favorable for Paxton. They, almost all of them, voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Many of them voted for Ted Cruz in 2018 too. These are Republican voters. So, these are Republican voters who are unhappy enough with the administration or skeptical enough of Ken Paxton as a nominee, that they aren't saying they're going to vote for Paxton in opinion polling right now," said Donnini. "But can those $100 million plus dollars of outside spending that we're expecting help bring some of them home to Paxton? We think so. That's why our forecast, as I said, is a toss-up right now even though Talarico is winning the polls."
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