When the first poll was released showing James Talarico with a slim lead over Ken Paxton for our U.S. Senate seat, a burst of online wishful thinking flashed back to the Democrats’ favorite recent memory, the surprising narrow loss of Beto O’Rourke against Ted Cruz in 2018. Clinging to the dream that an even bigger surprise may lie ahead in November, enthused posts recalled that Beto never led Cruz in a poll.
Except he did. An Ipsos poll released in mid-September showed Beto up, 47-45. Interestingly, a Qunnipiac poll released the same week showed Cruz up by nine. The actual result saw a Cruz victory of two and a half percent, the closest Texas Senate race since 1978, when incumbent John Tower barely escaped Democrat Bob Krueger by half a point.
The lesson, then and now, is that polls are screwy. Polling is an infamously inexact science that may or may not reflect how a race might go if the election were held at the time of the poll. That said, most polling organizations would like for their surveys to draw closer to the final result as Election Day approaches. While some polls are tainted by biased questions and tilted sampling, no pollster wants to suffer the reputational damage of blowing a call down the home stretch.
As for polls that are nearly three months out, a divergent result can always be explained away as a race whose complexion changed from August to November. And this year, there are plenty of factors ripe for change as the weeks pass.
You may have noticed numerous Talarico ads that seem unmet at the moment by a similar Paxton TV buy. This is simple campaign finance math. Talarico is benefiting from the same bicoastal leftist donors that enabled Beto to more than double the Cruz funding total eight years ago. As he did in his primary runoff race against John Cornyn, Paxton will reserve sizeable spending for the final weeks, a strategy that enabled him to dominate the incumbent by nearly 30 points despite being massively outspent.
The ads he will run against Talarico will contain the most effective messaging ammo at his disposal: the Democrat’s own words and positions. Get ready for a September and October filled with Paxton commercials reminding Texans that the Democrat nominee has said that there are six genders, that God approves of abortion and that strong border policies are contrary to Christ’s teaching.
Talarico’s specific policy positions may fuel additional ads from Paxton and conservative groups. His “New American Dream” contains the multiple nightmares of forcing taxpayers to defray the cost of other people’s medical debts, a business-crushing minimum wage boost and even more punitive taxes for our most successful job creators. The politics of envy and waving the familiar Democrat lure of free stuff paid for by other people has been a proven loser in Texas for more than a generation. There is no reason to believe that will change this year.
But inventive narratives persist, from both Texas liberals and the bitter remnants of the Cornyn voting bloc that still can’t accept the resounding primary loss. Inspired by the Senator’s own failure to fully join the effort to defeat Talarico, some of his allies weave grudge-laden stories of a national GOP establishment that will now have to rush to Paxton’s aid with dollars that would not have been necessary if we had only shown the wisdom of choosing Cornyn.
The sharp divides of that campaign would have left a challenge in either case. If establishment-friendly GOP voters are still stung by the loss, plenty of grassroots conservatives would have been positively inconsolable if Cornyn had squeaked out a runoff victory on May 26. They may have been harder to prod onto the unity train than Cornyn’s wounded base will be.
As it is, a strong majority of Texas conservatives stands ready to lift Paxton to the Senate. They will be met on the electoral battlefield by energized Democrats clinging once again to a vision of turning Texas purple on the way to blue.
Nothing is impossible. If Talarico can improve on the Beto margin by three points, he will be elected. But this takes us to another barrier for the Democrats in November— Beto was a much better candidate.
His public record did not feature the same volume of viral, culturally polarizing sound bites that will be lobbed at Talarico every day for the next twelve weeks. He had much stronger name recognition and a regular-guy vibe with broader appeal than the forced attempts at Texas authenticity found in the Talarico ads.
It should be a basic instinct to avoid drawing broad conclusions about a November race in the middle of summer. But in today’s non-stop, 24-hour media feeding frenzy, even some conservative voices cannot restrain themselves from clumsy clickbait analysis. Witness the usually sharp Jesse Watters on Fox News last week, complaining about the Paxton effort, even as crowds streamed into several enthusiastic rallies across the state.
“Where is Paxton?” he began. “Get out of your hole and do something. I can’t win this race for you. Go raise some money and lay lumber into this guy.” It occurred to me in watching this peculiar tirade that a New York TV studio might not be the best vantage point for wise analysis of events down here. “If you lose this race for Republicans in Texas, you should seek asylum in Mexico. This cannot happen.”
It won’t. My first instinct was to suggest that Jesse should relax, but I don’t want him to relax. I just want him to stop mouthing off about races he doesn’t know a lot about. I want him and every conservative media voice to join the battle so that our confidence over a Paxton win can become reality.
The real power, of course, lies not with TV or online pundits, but with the voters of Texas. A brief perusal of very recent history shows the political fabric of our state. President Trump swamped Kamala Harris by 14 points just two years ago. A majority of Texas voters turning against his endorsement of Paxton seems quite the stretch. In that year’s Senate race, Cruz dispatched Colin Allred, a far more palatable mainstream candidate, by more than eight points.
In the 2022 statewide races that we see again this year, Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Paxton (in his Attorney General race) all won with margins of roughly ten points.
Nothing is to be taken for granted. The only thing certain in politics is the possibility of change. At a time when polling seems to be broken, it is wise to rest on trends of recent elections, and the history of the modern era of Texas politics. Neither of those suggest that a Talarico win is at hand.
If Paxton wins, it will not be because the landscape ordained it. It will be because the voters of our state showed the tendencies that have long been on display. It will mean that a sufficient number of the Cornyn brigades overcame personal grudges and realized the necessity of joining the fight. It will mean we are still a strong red state, 32 years after the last Democrats won statewide office.
I believe these things will happen. I also believe Democrats may one day reclaim a U.S. Senate seat in Texas. But not this year, and not with this candidate.
