New Quantus Poll Puts Paxton at 48.7 Percent and Talarico at 47.6 in the Texas Senate Race - Inside the Margin of Error
The final-week survey reported by FOX 7 Austin is a statistical tie with four days left, and the early-vote tea leaves both campaigns are reading come with the same warning label: Texas does not register voters by party.
The Texas Senate race goes into its final weekend as a statistical tie. A Quantus Insights poll reported by FOX 7 Austin on Friday gave Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton 48.7 percent support and Democrat James Talarico 47.6 percent - a 1.1-point gap inside the survey's 3.2-percentage-point margin of error, according to the poll's reporting as compiled by USJournal.
Both campaigns are also reading the early vote, and the honest version of those numbers carries caveats. An October 22 analysis by election analyst E DataGuy classified more than 1.2 million returned ballots as Republican and approximately 961,000 as Democratic - but those are modeled estimates, not official party totals, because Texas does not register voters by political party and an early ballot cannot show which candidates a voter supported. The published categories also fall 15,322 short of the reported statewide total. The Texas Observer, looking at primary history instead, reported that voters with a history of participating in Democratic primaries were outpacing their Republican counterparts.
The money around the race is national in scale. Federal disclosures reported by the Washington Post showed that MAGA Inc., President Donald Trump's political operation, had deployed nearly $277 million through direct spending and transfers to affiliated groups while retaining more than $164 million as of October 14 - spending that supports Republican candidates in multiple races nationwide, not Texas alone. Trump has endorsed Paxton.
What none of it can do is call the race. A 1.1-point poll gap inside a 3.2-point margin of error, modeled early-vote estimates and national spending totals all describe a contest that will be decided by who actually votes on Tuesday, November 3 - the only count in this race that is not an estimate.
