From Texas Public Opinion Research:
Hey y’all, welcome back! In today’s TPOR installment, we’re diving into the findings from our latest poll on the 2026 Senate race—tracking voter preferences in a hypothetical Democratic primary, and examining the state of play in the Republican primary between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton. We’re also breaking down some fascinating data on general election preferences amongst voters in Texas.
Key Findings
- Democratic Senate Primary: Former US Rep. Beto O’Rourke (27%) and US Rep. Jasmine Crockett (26%) lead a hypothetical Democratic primary, followed by former US Rep. Colin Allred (13%), State Representative James Talarico (7%), and US Rep. Joaquin Castro (4%). Eighteen percent of Democrats are undecided.
- Republican Senate Primary: In a head-to-head matchup, US Sen. John Cornyn receives 32% support among Republicans, compared to 26% for State Attorney General Ken Paxton. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans are undecided, while 9% of GOP voters say that they would not vote in that race.
- General Election Preferences: In a generic US Senate ballot, Republicans lead Democrats 48% to 43%; Republicans also hold similar, slight leads on generic ballots for Governor (49%–43%) and Attorney General (47%–44%).
The rest of the post expands on these three points, so I’ll leave it to you to read more as you see fit. I’m not a big fan of including undeclared candidates in a poll except in limited situations, like “potential challenger versus incumbent”. Most of the time these kind of polls largely recapitulate name ID. This poll does the interesting thing of comparing each Dem’s name ID number to their support in the hypothetical multi-way candidacy, which is a dimension I haven’t seen used before. Jasmine Crockett has made good use of her more-visible profile so far, at least among Dems. For that insight alone, I appreciate this poll. I also think James Talarico will become a lot better known, at least among Dem primary voters, pretty quickly.
There have been enough polls showing Cornyn improving his position against Paxton to make me think there’s been some movement in that race. Cornyn has been on the air – well, a national Republican PAC on behalf of Cornyn – mostly on football games where it’s hard for people like me to escape the ads, and I’m sure that has helped. Paxton, who probably doesn’t have the same amount of resources on his side yet, has not been able to counter yet. On the assumption that he will be advertising in the near-ish future, we’ll see what effect that may have.
Generic R-versus-D polls are also of questionable value, since actual races have actual candidates who bring pluses and minuses to those races, but they do tell us something. What this one says, not too surprisingly, is that the environment at this time is better for Dems than 2024 was. It would be nice to have a direct comparison to 2018, but we’re not going to get that. Next best will be other polls doing the same thing, so we can at least compare across them. By the time we get to the point of knowing who the candidates are, this won’t much matter anymore.