Democrats pulled off a historic double in Texas on Tuesday, capturing both a U.S. Senate seat and the governor’s mansion in one of the country’s largest and most reliably Republican states.
James Talarico, a 37-year-old Democratic state legislator, won the Senate race over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Associated Press projected, while Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated Republican Governor Greg Abbott in the race for governor, according to The New York Times’ election results.
Together, the two victories turned Texas blue at the top of the ticket for the first time in roughly three decades — a result reported by The New York Times in an account by Shane Goldmacher that ranks among the most striking of the night. The wins came in a state President Trump carried comfortably just two years ago, and they unfolded as Democrats were favored to take control of both chambers of Congress, having won or led in nearly every Senate battleground, including Michigan and Ohio, according to the Times’ live forecast.
The twin defeats were a rebuke to two of the most prominent Republicans in the state. Abbott, a long-serving governor, and Paxton, the state’s attorney general and a close ally of the president, both fell on the same night, handing Democrats the governorship and a Senate seat at once. Details of the governor’s race were still emerging as counting continued, with the Times’ results showing Hinojosa the winner.
Talarico, an eighth-generation Texan and a Presbyterian seminarian, built his campaign around an argument that the central divide in American politics is “not left versus right but top versus bottom,” the Times reported.
He called for term limits and a ban on congressional stock trading, ran hard against corruption, and leaned on his personal story, including that of his mother leaving his abusive father when he was young.
He first won a seat in the Texas House in 2018, later moving to a safer district that includes Austin after Republicans redrew his original one. His national profile rose sharply in the summer of 2025 after an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast — Rogan told him he should “run for president” — and again when Texas legislative Democrats left the state to try to block a Republican redistricting push, which made Talarico a regular presence on cable news. In the primary, the Times reported, he outlasted the party’s 2024 Senate nominee, Colin Allred, who dropped out, and defeated Representative Jasmine Crockett of Dallas.
His campaign drew heavily on small online donors, putting him on track to raise well over $150 million — more than any other Democrat in the 2026 midterms, according to the Times.
Paxton, 63, had reached the general election by defeating the state’s sitting Republican senator, John Cornyn, in a bruising primary fight this spring, mobilizing the party’s MAGA base after years of courting Mr. Trump — including by amplifying the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, the Times reported.
Republican officials, Cornyn among them, had warned that nominating Paxton could put the seat at risk because of his record. As the Times noted, Paxton was once indicted on felony securities-fraud charges, his wife has accused him of infidelity, and he was impeached three years ago — with the backing of numerous Texas Republican lawmakers — on accusations of bribery and abuse of office, before being acquitted by the State Senate. Mr. Trump backed him over Cornyn anyway. Talarico, for his part, called Paxton “the most corrupt politician in America.”
A $200 million barrage
The general election was expensive and bitter. Talarico survived an advertising onslaught financed largely by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who the Times reported poured about $200 million into efforts to keep the seat in Republican hands. By the end of the race, a political action committee funded by Musk had paid for all six of the most expensive political ads in the country this cycle, according to the advertising-tracking firm AdImpact cited by the Times.
Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance campaigned repeatedly for Paxton, and the president tried out the nickname “Talafreako” in an effort to cast Talarico as outside the mainstream. Talarico was also attacked over his past support for transgender rights, which he sought to blunt; in one of his own ads, he said, “I don’t support sex change surgeries for kids.” None of it was enough to save Paxton.
Talarico’s victory, paired with Hinojosa’s win over Abbott, gave Democrats a sweep at the top of the Texas ballot and added to a night in which the party was also projected to retake the U.S. House. Taken together — a flipped Senate seat, a governor’s office, and a projected House majority — the results, if they hold as counting continues, would reshape the balance of power both in Austin and in Washington for the second half of Mr. Trump’s term.
https://ctninfo.com/talarico-and-hin…-flip-texas-blue/
Source: The New York Times
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