A Record 7.4 Million Texans Voted Early. One Poll Has Paxton Ahead, Most Have Talarico.
A record 7.4 million Texans voted early, and the polls still can’t separate Ken Paxton and James Talarico with two days to go in the Texas Senate race.
By Lynn Matthews - November 1, 2026
Early voting ended Friday in Texas with a record 7.4 million ballots cast, and the last poll from Quantus Insights says the Senate race is too close to call. The survey of 1,221 likely voters, taken October 26 to 28, has Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton at 48.7 percent and Democratic state Rep. James Talarico at 47.6 percent. Libertarian Ted Brown has 1.4 percent and 2.2 percent are undecided. More than half of those surveyed had already voted.
A one-point lead means little here. The poll’s margin of error is 3.2 points, and Quantus says the margin on the gap between the two candidates is closer to 6.4. Counting voters who lean toward a candidate moves the numbers to 49.4 and 48.4, the same one-point spread.
Texans cast 7,410,631 early ballots, in person and by mail, a record for a midterm. That is 38.9 percent of the state’s 19 million registered voters. About 5.5 million voted early in 2022 and just under 4.9 million in 2018, when Beto O’Rourke ran against Ted Cruz. Texas does not register voters by party, so early totals do not show who is ahead. In the Quantus survey, 54.3 percent of likely voters said they had already voted, including 59 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans, and Quantus says the vote still to come leans more Republican than the vote already in. One Republican consultant expects as many as 10 million Texans to vote, and at that size one percentage point is roughly 100,000 votes.
Musk’s closing argument
On Friday morning Elon Musk, the Texas-based billionaire, posted on X that a Democratic sweep of the House, Senate and presidency in 2028 would let the party make D.C. and Puerto Rico states, legalize people living in the country illegally, and add seats to the Supreme Court. He called that outcome a “permanent one-party state” and wrote that 51 Republican senators in 2029 would prevent it, which is why he said voters should back Republican senators now.
Some Democrats have floated versions of the first and third items. James Carville, a longtime party strategist who holds no office, has said Democrats should add both states and expand the court to 13 seats if they win everything.
The candidates’ records
Paxton’s record is the center of Talarico’s campaign. The Texas House impeached him in 2023 on accusations that he abused his office to help a donor, Austin real estate investor Nate Paul, and the state Senate acquitted him on all 16 articles it considered. Eight aides who reported him to the FBI in 2020 were fired or quit, and four of them sued under the state whistleblower law. A separate felony securities fraud case from 2015 ended when Paxton completed a pretrial diversion agreement that required restitution, community service and ethics training. It was dismissed in 2025, and his lawyer said the deal was not an admission of guilt.
Talarico has faced his own questions. A ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation found that he voted in five elections using his parents’ address after buying a home nearby in June 2022, and he did not update his registration until September 2024. The reporting said the practice may have violated state voting law. His campaign provided records showing he registered at his parents’ address in November 2021, and it turned the question back on Paxton, whom Talarico had accused weeks earlier of voting from the wrong address in six elections. Paxton’s campaign says he is a lawful registered voter.
What happens next
Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Paxton’s campaign has maintained that Texas will stay Republican, and Talarico’s has promised to end 30 years of one-party rule. The result will help decide whether Republicans keep their 53-seat Senate majority, and no poll has settled it.
