Perhaps. But perhaps the bigger question after last night's debacle in Michigan is whether pollsters have their thumbs on the scale for socialist newbies in the 2026 cycle.
Going into last night's primary, practically every pollster in the field had Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Haley Stevens by double digits. The RCP aggregate showed El-Sayed ahead by slightly over ten points; he finally won the primary this morning by barely one point, failing to win a majority of his own party's voters in the process. That's a huge miss by every pollster, well outside their margins of error in their final surveys before the primary.
With that performance in mind, we have to take the recent spate of polls showing James Talarico with a lead in Texas with a grain of salt about the size of Lot's wife. The RCP aggregate gives Talarico a one-point lead over Ken Paxton, but the average of the three most recent polls puts Talarico up around three points – still within a reasonable margin of error. Bear in mind that no Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994, the longest streak of statewide futility in the nation. How likely will it be that an obscure, progressive state legislator from Austin who has alienated black voters already will be the one to break that streak?
And even if we accept the poll numbers at face value, a peek under the hood of these surveys shows a real problem for Talarico. Matt Mercer pointed it out at Breitbart yesterday:
Both polls indicate Talarico has maxed out the Democrat coalition in the state while Attorney General Ken Paxton works to bring traditional Republican voters into his camp. The polls both give Talarico a nominal +2 advantage, 48 percent to 46 percent in Wedgewood and 47 percent to 45 percent in Texas Southern.
However, the remaining uncommitted votes center on right-leaning voters who traditionally vote Republican.
“Talarico is not winning meaningful crossover support from 2024 Trump voters; his lead instead rests on near-total consolidation of 2024 Kamala Harris voters,” Wedgewood confirms, noting Paxton had consolidated 85 percent of Republican voters, and 9 percent of those who backed President Trump in 2024 were undecided.
The more mainstream TSU/YouGov survey shows the same pattern, Mercer notes:
“Virtually all Democrats (97 percent) intend to vote for Talarico, with 1 percent intending to vote for Paxton and 2 percent undecided. In contrast, only 85 percent of Republicans intend to vote for Paxton today,” according to the pollster.
Let's get back to the crossover numbers in a moment. I find the conclusion that Talarico has already united Democrat voters in Texas very suspicious. Talarico just announced that he plans to spend nearly half his present cash-on-hand advantage over Paxton to woo black voters he alienated in the primary. That announcement came during the same period of time where pollsters showed Talarico up two and three points, the latter from Fox News that laughably showed Talarico with 51% support.
If Talarico had that kind of strength at this point, he wouldn't need to spend $25 million just to get black Democrats to turn out in November. Jasmine Crockett, Colin Allred, and Black Lives Matter activists are refusing to support his run. Crockett is still telling black voters that Talarico's win in the primary proved that the election was "racist." Not every black Democrat will abandon Talarico over that, but they certainly aren't rallying to him either, which is why Talarico now has to spend $25 million just to re-fight the primary all over again.
The polls may say one thing in Texas, but the money speaks for itself.
With that in mind, the "crossover" voters are likely to be next to nil. Ken Paxton has personal baggage, but that's not going to convince Texas Republicans to vote for a pro-abortion activist who wants to force girls to compete against boys in school sports. Talarico also opposes school choice, a popular policy in Texas, and wants to increase the power of teachers unions at the expense of parents on curricula. Paxton needs to unite his own base and bring the donors back after his primary challenge to John Cornyn, and then press Talarico on his radical positions when voters start really paying attention. If Paxton can succeed at that – and El-Sayed's win in Michigan likely just gave him a large boost – then Talarico has no chance of outperforming Beto O'Rourke or Colin Allred in a statewide election.
With that in mind, Talarico may not have topped out yet, since he's still having to spend $25 million just to recover to that level. It's pretty clear that he faces a socialist ceiling in deep-red Texas anyway, which makes this Paxton's race to lose. And he's won three statewide elections already, which is three more than Talarico or any other Texas Democrat still alive and in the game.
