Texas turns blue: James Talarico beats Ken Paxton in Senate race as Democrats end 32-year statewide drought
Democrat James Talarico has defeated Trump-backed Ken Paxton to win the US Senate race in Texas, the first statewide Democratic victory there since 1994, on a night when his party also took back the House of Representatives.
Texas has elected a Democrat to the United States Senate for the first time since 1988. James Talarico, a 37-year-old state representative and former schoolteacher, defeated Republican Ken Paxton, the state's attorney general and a close ally of President Donald Trump, in the most closely watched Senate race of the 2026 midterm elections, according to projections by NBC News, CBS News and Decision Desk HQ reported by Reuters and USA Today.
The result ends a 32-year statewide losing streak for Texas Democrats. No Democrat had won any statewide office in Texas since 1994, and the party had spent decades predicting that the state's changing population would eventually make it competitive. On Tuesday it finally happened, in the largest Republican state in the country — one that Trump carried by 14 percentage points only two years ago.
Talarico's path to the nomination ran through his own party first. He defeated US Representative Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nomination, then built his general-election campaign around fighting political corruption and lowering everyday costs for families, a message his team believed could reach beyond the party's usual voters in the state's big cities.
Paxton's candidacy carried heavy baggage into the autumn. He had won the Republican nomination by ousting four-term Senator John Cornyn in a primary runoff after receiving Trump's endorsement, but he remained at the centre of controversies that included a 2023 impeachment by his own party in the state legislature — he was acquitted in the Senate trial — and a long-running securities fraud case. Democrats, backed by the Senate Majority PAC aligned with Senator Chuck Schumer, spent heavily from September on advertising that put those issues in front of voters.
The money on both sides was extraordinary. Reuters reported that Republicans spent more than $316 million trying to retain the seat, and estimates of total advertising spending in the race ran above $570 million, making it the most expensive non-presidential contest in American history. Turnout matched the stakes: more than 7.7 million Texans cast ballots before election day, a record for a midterm election in the state.
The Texas flip matters most for what it does to the Senate map. Republicans went into the night holding a 53–47 majority, and Democrats needed a net gain of four seats to take control. Texas gives them one of the hardest of those gains, alongside Roy Cooper's pickup in North Carolina and a stunning upset in South Carolina, where paediatrician Annie Andrews became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in that state since 1998 by defeating Trump's hand-picked candidate, Darline Graham.
With Texas called, Democrats moved within one more flip of erasing the Republican Senate majority altogether, with counting still under way in battleground races including Alaska, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Kansas. Millions of votes remained uncounted in those states, and the final shape of the Senate may not be known for days.
The House of Representatives, by contrast, was settled sooner. Broadcasters including NBC News projected that Democrats had taken back control of the chamber, and the party was on course for a majority that some projections suggested could be larger than expected. Democrats even held on to three Florida House districts that Republican lawmakers had redrawn earlier this year in an attempt to make them safer.
Trump, who watched the results from the White House, responded to the gathering rout with a short defence: he had not been on the ballot. The line is unlikely to settle the argument inside his party, where the choice of candidates such as Paxton — elevated over an incumbent senator in a primary — is already being questioned after a night in which states Republicans expected to hold slipped away.
What happens next depends on the remaining counts. If Democrats complete the Senate takeover, the final two years of Trump's presidency would face a Congress entirely in opposition hands, with consequences for his legislative agenda, judicial nominations and oversight. If Republicans cling to the Senate by a seat, Washington gets divided government of a narrower kind. Either way, Texas — for a generation the foundation of Republican power — has shown it can no longer be taken for granted.
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