Expect these TPOR polls monthly now.
Rep. James Talarico
Texas Public Opinion Research (TPOR)—a nonpartisan polling initiative dedicated to exploring Texans’ beliefs and priorities—today released a new poll of likely Texas general election voters, focused on the 2026 statewide races, including the contests for U.S. Senate, Governor, Attorney General, Lieutenant Governor, Comptroller, Agriculture Commissioner, Land Commissioner, and Railroad Commissioner.
This is the first in a series of monthly tracking polls that TPOR will release through the November 3 election.
The poll finds Democrat James Talarico (48%) leading Republican Ken Paxton (42%) by six points in the U.S. Senate race. Meanwhile, Republican Greg Abbott (49%) leads Democrat Gina Hinojosa (42%) by seven points in the Governor’s race. In the Attorney General’s race, Republican Mayes Middleton leads Democrat Nathan Johnson by three points (44% to 41%).
Note: For this tracking poll series, topline results include leaners.
The survey of 1,000 likely Texas voters was conducted from August 21 to August 24, 2026 and has a margin of error of ±3.3 percentage points. The full topline is available here, and crosstabs are available upon request.
That’s the second poll to have Talarico up after that one poll that had him down. TPOR has been the most frequent pollster of this race so far, and their results have been consistently good for Talarico – he’s been up five, three, five again, and now six.
Both this poll and the UT/Texas Politics Project one have a wider gap between Talarico and the rest of the Dem ticket, most notably Gina Hinojosa, who has been closer to Greg Abbott in some results than she is in these two most recent ones. I wouldn’t make too much of it, there’s always going to be some variation even in a static race. In this particular case, you can see the difference in Talarico’s performance with white voters (38-52) versus Hinojosa’s (31-61) and his performance with Latinos (59-32) versus hers (53-35). That also shows up in how each candidate did among voters by party – Talarico wins Democrats 94-1 and loses Republicans 80-12, while it’s 90-4 for Hinojosa among Dems and the same margin among Rs for Abbott. Don’t sweat the subsamples, they will have bigger swings by nature.
Two other items of interest while we await the next polls. Newsweek compares the polls from 2018 to now.
[Beto] O’Rourke generated national attention and record fundraising in 2018, but the final polling picture still favored Cruz.
RealClearPolitics’ last average placed Cruz at 51.3 percent and O’Rourke at 44.5 percent, a Republican lead of 6.8 points. Its final four surveys all had Cruz ahead, by margins ranging from 3 to 10 points.
Election Day was considerably closer. Cruz won 50.9 percent to 48.3 percent, meaning O’Rourke finished about 4 points closer to Cruz than the final average suggested.
Talarico, by contrast, has posted outright leads in multiple 2026 surveys. RealClearPolling’s average through August 13 showed him ahead by 1.7 points, 46 percent to 44.3 percent, although individual results ranged from a 5-point Talarico advantage to a 2-point Paxton lead.
That is a more favorable starting point than O’Rourke had late in 2018. It is not a prediction that Talarico will win.
[…]
[Nate] Silver cited O’Rourke’s 2018 result as one example in which Texas polls did not overstate Democratic support: O’Rourke lost by a smaller margin than the final polling average indicated.
His FLIPR model recently placed Talarico’s victory probability around 59-61 percent, moving the race between “toss-up” and “leans Democratic.” Silver described that as only a slight edge, not confidence about the outcome.
Polling supplies part of the case. Silver also said a favorable national environment for Democrats, Paxton’s controversies and Talarico’s fundraising strength pull the model toward the Democratic nominee.
Even so, he identified fundraising as a possible source of overconfidence because modern political giving is increasingly nationalized.
Silver’s broader warning is methodological: Texas’ long Republican winning streak may shape expectations, but repetition is not evidence that the next election must end the same way.
Make of that what you will. Meanwhile, Gina Hinojosa’s outreach to Republican moms seems to be going well.
Last Sunday at a venue in the Austin suburb of Kyle, Merideth Keller delivered a speech to local attendees that took square aim at a man she once voted for back in 2014: Governor Greg Abbott. Over the course of her 12 years on the school board of Hays Consolidated Independent School District, a position she left in 2022, Keller began to lean more to the left as she watched a crisis unfold in Texas’ public education system. She’s not buying what Abbott’s selling with his latest education initiatives, and she hopes voters of various stripes will follow her lead.
“Greg Abbott set the fire, watched it blaze, and now wants to put it out to get the glory,” said Keller, who now considers herself more of a moderate, helping to elect both Democrats and Republicans down the ballot. She was there to kick off the first stop of the Save Our Schools tour, a statewide effort by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa to turn growing education issues in Texas into an effective electoral cudgel in November.
“I have to say, I voted for Greg Abbott, and I had to learn that that was the wrong choice, so that other people can admit it too,” Keller said.
Read the rest, it’s good stuff. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, but it’s still nice to have some anecdotes.