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A Texas-sized showdown is brewing deep in the heart of the largest red state in the US. As early voting begins on Tuesday for the Lone Star state’s 3 March primaries, Republicans and Democrats alike face a high-stakes choice that could set the stage for one of the fiercest Senate races of the 2026 midterm cycle.
At the center of the fractious Republican contest is a clash between the party’s old guard and a Maga culture warrior, with four-term incumbent John Cornyn, a conservative fixture of Senate leadership locked in the fight of his political career against the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton.
Democrats, meanwhile, are waging their own internal battle – a race between two rising liberal stars: Austin-based state senator, James Talarico, who grounds his Bernie Sanders-style populism in biblical teachings and Representative Jasmine Crockett, a civil rights attorney and liberal media darling known for her sharp-tongued clapbacks to Republicans.
It has been three decades since Democrats last won a statewide election in Texas. In 2024, Donald Trump dominated the state, widening his margin of victory with the support of Hispanic voters.
But now, as Trump contends with sagging approval ratings amid economic unease and a backlash to his deportation agenda, Texas Democrats sense an opening.
“We start off these races always with the assumption that the Republican is going to win,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston. “But this year, there’s an added wrinkle to that prognosis.”
Texas voters unnerved Republicans earlier this month, when Democrat Taylor Rehmet captured a state senate seat in a Fort Worth-area district that Trump had carried by more than 17 percentage points in 2024. Months earlier, Texas senator Ted Cruz had reportedly warned the president that unless the economy improved, Republicans could “face a bloodbath” in November.
“Republicans are flying into pretty significant national headwinds, even before they choose a candidate,” Jones said, suggesting the political climate more closely resembles the mood in 2018, when former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke came within three percentage points of unseating Cruz, fueled in part by a backlash to Trump.
On the Republican side, Paxton has framed the race against Cornyn as a battle between Trump’s Maga movement and the Republican establishment that Trump shattered.
“I am the only electable Republican in this primary, a proven conservative with real experience and results who votes with President Trump more than 99% of the time,” Cornyn, who was once seen as a possible successor to former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, wrote in a recent social media post.
Paxton, who was impeached by the Republican-led Texas House in 2023 on charges including bribery and abuse of office before being acquitted by the state senate, has countered that Cornyn embodies a Washington status quo out of step with grassroots conservatives. “Nothing moves the base like being endorsed by the Houston Chronicle”, Paxton wrote recently, mocking the senator’s institutional support.
As attorney general, Paxton has waged high-profile legal fights over immigration, abortion and Joe Biden-era federal policies, and an unsuccessful attempt to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss – a record that has earned him a devoted rightwing following. This month, he was endorsed by Turning Point USA, the political action group founded by the late far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
Meanwhile, wealthy Republican donors have swooped in to help Cornyn fend off Paxton’s challenge, warning that Paxton would force the party to pour resources into the race that would otherwise remain safely in their column.
James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at University of Texas at Austin, said nominating Paxton would complicate Republican’s path to victory, but it wouldn’t fundamentally “change the game”, particularly with candidates such as Texas governor Greg Abbott on the ballot, whose coattails and war chest could help pull an embattled nominee over the line.
“Victory becomes more costly for Republicans, but it’s certainly not out of the question,” he said.
A third candidate, the Houston-area US representative Wesley Hunt, has also aligned himself closely with Trump, but has emerged as an alternative for voters who dislike both Cornyn and Paxton.
A University of Houston survey released last week found Paxton ahead with 38% support among likely voters, followed by Cornyn with 31% and Hunt with 17%. Because Texas requires a majority to secure the nomination, the campaigns are preparing for an all-but-certain May runoff – a scenario that some observers believe could favor Paxton, whose dedicated base is more likely to turn out in a lower-participation contest. In a hypothetical runoff, the same poll found Paxton leading Cronyn by an even wider margin.
“The big question right now is what is Trump going to do in this Republican primary?” Henson said. Trump has so far stayed on the sidelines, even as the candidates vie for his endorsement.
Backing from Trump could “disrupt or amplify” the current dynamics, Henson said, adding: “If Trump doesn’t endorse and he freezes the field, then that probably preserves Paxton’s natural advantage.”
Across the aisle, Democrats are confronting a different kind of choice – one less centered on on policy and ideology and more about style and competing theories of how to win statewide in a reliably red state.
Crockett, the 44-year-old congresswoman, has emerged in Trump’s second term as one of her party’s most forceful messengers, an partisan combatant whose sharp exchanges with Republicans in congressional hearings routinely ricochet across social media. She has argued that Democrats need a fighter capable of galvanizing disaffected voters and younger people. “It’s not about who sounds as clean as possible,” she said during a January debate. “It is about tapping into the rawness of this moment.”
Talarico, a former public school teacher and seminarian, gained national attention last year when he and other Texas Democrats decamped from the state in an effort to block a Trump-sought redistricting plan designed to secure as many as five additional GOP House seats. The gambit ultimately failed in Texas, but it prompted Democratic-led states such as California to move forward with countermeasures of their own.
On the campaign trail, Talarico has cast himself as a bridge-builder with appeal beyond the party’s base. “The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom,” he said in the January debate. “We will not win this race in November with the same old politics of division.”
Despite her late entry into the race, Crockett appears to be approaching the final stretch with momentum. A recent University of Houston survey found her leading Talarico, 47% to 39%. The poll also showed both candidates broadly popular with Democratic primary voters, a measure of enthusiasm reflected in their grassroots fundraising and online reach.
“When Jasmine got into the race, I predicted that this was going to be the most online US senatorial race in the country,” said Monique Alcala, a former executive director for the Texas Democratic party. “That has proven to be on the nose.”
The contest’s intensely online nature, driven by influencers and content creators, has served to amplify longstanding tensions within the party over identity, race and the fraught question of “electability”.
Those tensions erupted recently when a Texas-based influencer alleged that Talarico had privately described his former rival, Colin Allred, as a “mediocre Black man”, prompting Allred to endorse Crockett and sharply criticize Talarico. Talarico has said the exchange was a “mischaracterization of a private conversation” in which he had described Allred’s campaign as “mediocre” but “not his life and service”.
Democrats will soon choose their nominee – weighing Crockett’s unapologetic fire or Talarico’s olive branch appeal.
Notably, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer did not include Texas when outlining his party’s clearest path back to a Senate majority. But if Republicans nominate a scandal-plagued insurgent, national Democrats could face renewed pressure to rethink the map – and finally invest in a state they have long hoped to flip.
“There’s cautious optimism,” Alcala said. “There’s always optimism, because people are tired of losing.”
