{"id":398011,"date":"2026-08-05T04:06:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T04:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/398011\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T04:06:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T04:06:08","slug":"new-polls-show-talarico-leads-paxton-in-texas-senate-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/398011\/","title":{"rendered":"New polls show Talarico leads Paxton in Texas Senate race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 Three public polls released in the past month show Democrat James Talarico narrowly leading Republican Ken Paxton in the Texas U.S. Senate race, with the latest survey from Texas Southern University released this morning putting Talarico ahead by two points.<\/p>\n<p>Josh Blank, Research Director for the Texas Politics Project, said the polling underscores how tight the contest appears to be. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cAll the polling that we&#8217;re seeing here in Texas is reflecting the competitiveness of the race,\u201d Blank said.<\/p>\n<p>Recent surveys from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/fox-news-poll-gop-divisions-shape-texas-senate-race\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Fox News<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.texastribune.org\/2026\/07\/28\/texas-senate-poll-james-talarico-ken-paxton-july-2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Texas Public Opinion Research <\/a>and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.texastribune.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/TSUStatewideAugust2026.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Texas Southern University<\/a> each show Talarico leading Paxton by five points or fewer. The polling suggests Talarico is performing better at this stage than Beto O\u2019Rourke did in 2018, Blank said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGiven that Beto only lost by two and a half percentage points, we should expect this to be a really competitive race,\u201d Blank said.<\/p>\n<p>Talarico, who is seeking to become the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas in more than 30 years, pointed to what he described as momentum in the state. <\/p>\n<p>Across the three surveys, Talarico topped the 50% mark only once. Paxton did not reach 50% in any of them.<\/p>\n<p>Blank said Talarico supporters have reason to be encouraged by the consistency of the results. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs we see that consistently it makes it more likely that that is actually a true reflection of the state of the race at this point in time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Blank cautioned that the margin of error in each poll means the race remains too close to call.<\/p>\n<p>Paxton\u2019s campaign was contacted for comment on the latest polls, but no response had been received.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AUSTIN, Texas \u2014 Three public polls released in the past month show Democrat James Talarico narrowly leading Republican&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":398012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-398011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}