The Democratic Party has a serious chance to win a Senate seat in Texas for the first time in a generation, as James Talarico, a Democratic state legislator, begins the summer locked in a tied race with Ken Paxton, the Republican state attorney general weighed down by past scandals, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.
Frustrations over President Trump’s handling of the economy and concerns about Mr. Paxton’s character have put the Senate seat in play in one of the nation’s Republican strongholds.
Mr. Paxton, 63, swept past indictment, impeachment and allegations of infidelity to thump an incumbent Republican senator who vastly outspent him in a primary this year. Now, as he faces Mr. Talarico, a 37-year-old who is training to be a minister, Mr. Paxton finds himself in a tight race that is marked by striking demographic divides.
Overall, Mr. Talarico and Mr. Paxton each garnered 47 percent of the vote in the poll.
[Nate Cohn on how the Texas Senate race become a tossup.]
There were several signs of weakness for Mr. Paxton in the poll.
A majority of likely Texas voters see Mr. Talarico as having good character and the right moral values, but not Mr. Paxton. Mr. Paxton, a MAGA firebrand who spearheaded the legal efforts to reject the 2020 presidential election results and celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 by declaring the date an annual holiday for his office, was also more likely to be viewed as “too extreme” than Mr. Talarico.
Mr. Paxton has failed to attract some voters who otherwise said they would like to see a Republican-controlled Senate. On the question of which party they preferred to be in power in the Senate, 50 percent of likely voters in Texas favored Republicans, while 44 percent favored Democrats.
Mr. Talarico is winning 61 percent of Hispanic voters — less than two years after Mr. Trump carried that community in Texas in the 2024 election.
Still, the poll shows the extent of the challenge ahead of Mr. Talarico.
His enormous lead among independent voters — 27 percentage points — was only good enough to force the race into a virtual tie in heavily Republican Texas. While Mr. Talarico is ahead in Texas’s big urban centers, Mr. Paxton is crushing him two-to-one everywhere else.
Melissa Daniels, 34, identifies as politically independent and is supporting Mr. Talarico.
“I think he’s focusing on the common issues that the people have,” she said. “We want to feel safe. We want to be able to afford groceries, and, you know, those issues that we care about.”
Ms. Daniels, an attorney living in Arlington, drew a contrast with Mr. Paxton’s priorities. “Paxton’s focused on, you know, I.V.F. and who’s using what bathroom,” she said. “Just stuff that isn’t really affecting day to day lives of Americans.”
The sheer closeness of the race is an ominous sign for Republicans, who have not lost a statewide contest in Texas since the 1990s.
To win a Senate majority this year, Democrats need to flip four Republican-held seats while defending all their vulnerable races. Texas had widely been seen in the second tier of Democratic opportunities but the state rose after Mr. Paxton won his party’s nomination.
With Mr. Trump’s support, Mr. Paxton ousted Senator John Cornyn in a costly Republican primary despite repeated warnings from Senate leaders and national party strategists that his checkered history could endanger the seat for Republicans.
Since his last election, Mr. Paxton was impeached as state attorney general by the Republican-controlled state Legislature and is now in the middle of a messy divorce, which his wife has said she is ending “on biblical grounds.”
Pedro Aybar, a 69-year-old Army veteran and a Christian, said he does not judge Mr. Paxton for his past.
“I mean, nobody’s perfect,” said Mr. Aybar, a Republican living in El Paso who plans to vote for Mr. Paxton. “Who hasn’t done anything in this lifetime?”
[See all public polls of the Texas Senate race.]
The contest is marked by striking divides along gender, generational and geographic lines.
A massive gender gap is shaping the contest, with women backing Mr. Talarico by 18 percentage points and men backing Mr. Paxton by a roughly the same margin — a chasm even bigger than in the 2024 presidential race.
And Mr. Paxton begins the general election with voters viewing him far more dimly than Mr. Talarico.
Only 38 percent of likely Texas voters said Mr. Paxton had “good character,” compared to 56 percent who said the same of Mr. Talarico. But among voters who did not graduate from college, who make up the majority of the electorate in Texas, the gap on moral values and character was notably smaller.
The poll suggests that the Texas race is genuinely close as it enters the final four months, which could force national Republicans to divert tens of millions of dollars from other battlegrounds to a state that is typically solidly red. Mr. Talarico has already captured the imaginations of small Democratic donors who give online, emerging as the party’s strongest fund-raiser and pulling in at least $40 million this year through May, federal records show.
The poll shows Mr. Talarico still has room to grow among independent voters: 23 percent of those who are not already supporting him said they were open to doing so, compared with 7 percent who said the same about Mr. Paxton.
Republicans have aggressively circulated clips of Mr. Talarico’s more left-wing commentary, including his provocative suggestions that “God is nonbinary” or that there are six biological sexes, and tagged him “TalaFreako.” But the surveys show the extremist frame has yet to take root with most voters. Still, more voters saw Mr. Paxton as “too extreme” (50 percent) than Mr. Talarico (43 percent).
And significantly more voters said the Democratic Party is too far left (53 percent) than Mr. Talarico (39 percent).
At the same time, Mr. Paxton is likely to benefit from running in a state that plainly still prefers Republicans to Democrats. More voters see the Democratic Party as too far to the left than see the Republican Party as too far to the right.
“James Talarico’s version of the Bible and interpretation of the Bible is just not even close to in keeping with who God is,” said Timothy Hanley, a 54-year-old Republican who works in construction and lives in San Marcos.
Mr. Hanley, who plans to vote for Mr. Paxton, said Mr. Talarico’s religious views were “heretical” and said he worries Mr. Talarico’s policies are too liberal on “pretty much any position on any issue you can cite.”
The closest that Democrats have come to winning a Texas Senate seat was in 2018 — the first midterm of Mr. Trump’s first term — when Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic challenger, finished 2.6 percentage points behind Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican.
Despite the divisive Republican primary, Republican voters have largely united behind Mr. Paxton. He is garnering the support of 91 percent of Republicans.
But Mr. Paxton appears to have virtually no crossover appeal. Mr. Talarico is winning the support of 9 percent of 2024 Trump voters; Mr. Paxton is winning only 1 percent of people who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.
Economic issues — jobs, the stock market, inflation and the cost of living — are, by far, the most pressing issue for Texas voters. A total of 28 percent said economic issues would decide their vote — nearly triple any other issue.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Talarico recently released a new television ad that begins with him declaring, “Too many Texans feel like they’re drowning” as he walks out of a grocery store with a brown bag decrying the price of food and fuel.
A full 60 percent of voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of cost-of-living issues.
At the same time, one potential challenge for Democrats is that Texas voters were unusually pleased with the state of their state’s economy, with 48 percent rating it good or excellent.
Immigration policy offered another rare bright spot for the president, with management of that issue receiving 50 percent support.
For now, Mr. Talarico is winning with voters for whom the economy and inflation are the main issue driving their vote, while Mr. Paxton does best with voters who point to either control of Congress or immigration as central to their decision.
The entire Republican ticket appears to be dragged down by disappointment with Mr. Trump, especially over economic matters. A majority of Texas voters disapproved of the president’s handling of the economy overall, gas prices, the war in Iran and tariffs.
Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican incumbent, leads his Democratic challenger, Gina Hinojosa, a state legislator, by six points; Mr. Abbott last won re-election in 2022 against Mr. O’Rourke by 11 points.
Mr. Paxton is faring worse than Mr. Abbott. Some 80 percent of voters have heard at least a little about scandals surrounding Mr. Paxton, including his legal problems and accusations of an affair.
But only 38 percent of Texas voters said that they had heard “a lot” about Mr. Paxton’s controversies. In Maine, by contrast, twice as many likely voters said they had heard “a lot” about controversies surrounding Graham Platner, that state’s Democratic candidate for Senate.
The swirl of allegations appear to have had an impact in Texas: 24 percent of Republicans said they either couldn’t support Mr. Paxton or that they were questioning their support. Still, many of these voters are planning to vote for him in the fall.
Mr. Talarico, who is white, also emerged through an intensive primary against Representative Jasmine Crockett, who is Black and won an overwhelming share of Black voters. She has endorsed Mr. Talarico but not campaigned for him and did not appear at the party’s recent state convention.
Mr. Talarico was winning 80 percent of Black voters in the poll but one warning sign was that 12 percent of Black voters still had a very unfavorable view of him.
Photo production by Amanda Cordero. Christine Zhang contributed.
