First, the headline stories, which don’t interest me much.
Ken Paxton and John Cornyn are effectively tied in the Republican primary race for U.S. Senate, with 34% of voters backing Paxton and 33% supporting Cornyn. 22% support Wesley Hunt.
Jasmine Crockett leads an expanded field of potential and declared candidates in the Democratic Senate primary, with 31% of the vote. Beto O’Rourke and James Talarico have 25% each, followed by Colin Allred at 13%. Crockett and O’Rourke have not formally entered the race.
Allred holds a slight lead over Talerico in a head-to-head matchup between the leading announced Democratic candidates, 46% to 42%.
I will continue to side-eye the inclusions of Beto and Rep. Crockett in these polls, at least until such time as there’s at least a rumor that they’re thinking about getting in. I think the Allred-Talarico situation is fluid, as Talarico’s name ID is still not where it needs to be. That said, don’t underestimate Allred.
What I’m more interested in, part 1.
Survey respondents who voted in the 2024 presidential election had over the course of the year been asked who they voted for in the 2024 presidential election. In this September survey the respondents were asked if they could vote again today in the 2024 presidential election, who would they vote for, with the options being Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Kamala Harris, Libertarian Chase Oliver and the Green Party’s Jill Stein, with additional options of saying they were unsure or would not vote.
Figure 9 provides the distribution of who the respondents that voted in the 2024 presidential election voted for, with 56% reporting that the cast a ballot for Trump, 43% for Harris and 1% for other candidates. When asked again in September how they would vote if they could turn back time and go back and do it all over again, 49% say they would still vote for Trump, 45% for Harris and 2% for other candidates, with 2% saying they are unsure how they would vote and 2% saying they would not vote.
In all, Trump’s vote share dropped from 56% to 49% (a 7 percentage point decrease) while Harris’s vote share rose from 43% to 45% (a 2 percentage point increase). While Trump bested Harris by 13 percentage points among these voters in November 2024, if the election were held today among these same voters, he would defeat Harris by only 4 percentage points.
[…]
Figure 10 draws on the data in Table 9 to display the range in the percentage point decline in Trump’s vote among 15 key socio-demographic sub-groups. In no case did Trump’s vote intention increase among any of these sub-groups. Trump lost the least ground among Republican (2 percentage points), Black (3 percentage points), Silent Generation/Baby Boomer (4 percentage points), and White (5 percentage points) voters. Trump lost the most ground among Democratic (10 percentage points), Latino (12 percentage points), Gen-Z (16 percentage points) and Independent (20 percentage points) voters.
While Trump’s advantage over Harris among these Latino voters in 2024 was 8 percentage points (53% to 45%), if these Latino voters could vote again for president, Harris would lead Trump by 11 percentage points among Latinos (52% to 41%), marking a 19 percentage point shift. This finding suggests that any modeling of Latino voter behavior based on Trump’s unprecedented success with Texas Latino voters in 2024 could be significantly overestimating the 2026 Latino vote intention for Republican congressional candidates in the recently redrawn Texas U.S. House districts. And, as a result, Republicans may have a more difficult time than expected defeating Democratic incumbents Henry Cuellar in the 28th Congressional District and Vicente Gonzalez in the 34th Congressional District, while also suggesting that Republican victories in the 9th, 15th, and 35th Congressional Districts, though still the most likely outcome, are not nearly as certain as they would be if Latino voters cast ballots for Republican candidates in 2026 in the same way that they did back in 2024.
I’ve been talking about this for awhile. I’ll stipulate, it’s one poll, with a subsample of voters, and next November is a long way off. But this result is consistent with what we’ve seen in national polling, and I have to ask, what do you think is likely to happen that will make these disaffected Trump voters go back to him? I think it’s more likely that these numbers get worse for Republicans between now and then.
Part 2:
Based on a combination of a prospective intention to participate in the November 2026 general election and a past record of participation in the 2022 and 2024 general elections, a total of 1,183 registered voters (with a margin of error of +/- 2.85%) were determined to be likely to vote in the November 2026 U.S. Senate election.
In all, 12 unique two-candidate November 2026 election scenarios were evaluated, featuring three potential Republican candidates (Cornyn, Hunt, Paxton) and four potential Democratic candidates (Allred, Crockett, O’Rourke, Talarico). The vote intention for each candidate as well as the proportion of likely voters who reported that they were unsure how they would vote is contained in Table 11.
Figure 11 displays the Republican margin of victory in these 12 hypothetical November 2026 races (in no instance did a Democratic candidate lead in vote intention). With this election still more than a year away, much of this vote intention is explained by partisanship, although within the relatively constant support for Republican and Democratic candidates based on partisanship, there is some variation in the Republican candidates’ margins of victory.
The GOP candidates’ margins of victory range from 1 percentage point to 6 percentage points, with a median margin of victory of 3 percentage points. The four races where the Republican candidate enjoyed the largest lead were Cornyn vs. Crockett (6 percentage points), Hunt vs. Talarico (6 percentage points), Hunt vs. Crockett (5 percentage points), and Hunt vs. Allred (5 percentage points). The four races where the Republican candidate enjoyed the smallest lead were Paxton vs. Allred (1 percentage point), Paxton vs. Crockett (2 percentage points), Cornyn vs. Allred (2 percentage points) and Hunt vs. O’Rourke (2 percentage points).
Among the three Republican candidates, the top performer was Hunt, with leads of 6, 5, 5, and 2 percentages points, followed by Cornyn, with leads of 6, 3, 3, and 2 percentage points. The weakest performer was Paxton, with leads of 3, 3, 2, and 1 percentage points. Hunt’s average margin of victory was 4.5 percentage points, Cornyn’s was 3.5 percentage points, and Paxton’s was 2.25 percentage points.
Among the four Democratic candidates, the top performer was Allred, with margins of defeat of 1, 2, and 5 percentage points, followed by O’Rourke with margins of defeat of 2, 3, and 3 percentage points, Talarico with margins of defeat of 3, 3, and 6 percentage points, and Crockett with margins of defeat of 2, 5, and 6 percentage points. Allred and O’Rourke both had an average margin of defeat of 2.67 percentage points, followed by Talarico with a margin of defeat of 3 percentage points and Crockett with a margin of defeat of 4.33 percentage points.
You can click over and see the individual results, but filtering for the two declared Dems and the two original Republicans – sorry, I don’t think Wesley Hunt will win – we get
Cornyn 48, Talarico 45
Cornyn 48, Allred 46
Paxton 49, Talarico 46
Paxton 48, Allred 47
Again, one poll, it’s early, etc etc etc. But these are some encouraging numbers. Now we have to build on them.