Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and state Rep. James Talarico (AP)
Senate Majority PAC (SMP), the main super PAC backing Senate Democrats, has privately told top donors that Texas is the party’s best chance to flip a Senate seat in a traditionally Republican state Tuesday, Axios reported Thursday.
Ohio, where the race remains close, ranks next on the group’s list, and Iowa and Alaska are within reach, though those outcomes could take longer to settle. JB Poersch, the PAC’s president, expressed confidence that Democrats will take control of the Senate at a private donor briefing this week as he reviewed the electoral map state by state.
To retake the chamber, Democrats need to win Democrats need to win two of Texas, Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska, each of which President Donald Trump carried by double digits in 2024, while flipping North Carolina and Maine and avoiding an upset in Michigan, Axios reported.
Poersch also told donors that Kansas, which Trump won by roughly 16 points, is in play.
SMP spokesperson Lauren French told Axios that Texas remains a toss-up, “as do Iowa, Ohio, and Alaska,” and cautioned that every battleground seat has voted for Trump by double digits.
Texas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. The party’s closest recent contest came in 2018, when then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke lost to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, by about 2.6 percentage points.
Four years later, O’Rourke lost the governor’s race by nearly 11 points, Axios noted.
This year, Democrats are running state Rep. James Talarico against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, in a May 26 GOP runoff and took about 64% of the vote.
A Marist Poll survey conducted Oct. 8-11 found Talarico at 47% and Paxton at 45% among likely voters, a difference within the poll’s margin of error.
The Marist University poll surveyed 1,196 registered Texas voters by live telephone interviews, text, and online methods.
Results were weighted using voter-file data on age, gender, income, and race, along with census estimates for education. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.3 percentage points for registered voters and 4.9 points for likely voters.
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