Credit Katy Tur with doing something most analysts have never done while covering the Senate race in Texas. Tur actually hit the ground here and talked with Texans, and now the M-SNOW host has a very different perspective on the reliability of polling.
Those must have been some interesting conversations to pierce through the pollster fog in 2026 (via Twitchy):
💥NEW: MS NOW Host Katy Tur *ADMITS* she is “MORE SKEPTICAL OF THE POLLING IN TEXAS” following her trip there💥 Tur said after talking to Texas voters on the ground, she feels like Republicans will ultimately remain loyal to their party. Talarico's supposed lead over Paxton is down to 1.5%, according to the RealClearPolling average. Texas hasn't elected a Democrat Senator since 1988. When even an MS NOW host is doubting the polls, it only makes a blue Texas seem like more of a pipe dream.
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) October 23, 2026
Note: Tur mentions Angie Nixon, for some reason, who is the DSA candidate in Florida's Senate race. She means Angela Paxton, who made an explicit pitch for voters to support "the team."
Talarico's supposed lead over Paxton is down to 1.5%, according to the RealClearPolling average.
Texas hasn't elected a Democrat Senator since 1988.
When even an MS NOW host is doubting the polls, it only makes a blue Texas seem like more of a pipe dream.
It's worse than even Jason Cohen notes. Texans haven't elected a Democrat to statewide office in 32 years, a much longer drought than Republicans have suffered in Minnesota. The GOP's 20-year losing streak will almost certainly come to an end in the Attorney General race this year, and Michele Tafoya has a pretty good shot at winning the Senate seat from Peggy "Fraud-Again" Flanagan, Ms. Lie Beta Kappa herself.
Polling in this cycle has been uniquely awful, and that's not even counting corrupt outfits like Wedgewood and Median Strategies. Supposedly reliable pollsters had Abdul El-Sayed up 15 points in the Democrat primary in Michigan, and had Francesca Hong up more than 20 points before she lost to David Crowley in Wisconsin's gubernatorial contest. All of the polling errors have gone in the direction of socialist and socialist-adjacent candidates, which means pollsters are either cooking results or their sampling is fixated on young activists. Polling has grown increasingly poor over several cycles, but this is the worst performance I've ever seen in terms of predictive reliability.
Frankly, we're probably better off ignoring polls, although they are catnip to the media – including us. The better models are likely going to be registration advantages and historical trends. That may not give Republicans good news everywhere, but it certainly does in Texas.
Tur accurately describes the polling here, where the RCP aggregate average has Talarico up 1.5 points over Paxton. Paxton carries a lot of baggage, but Paxton has also won three statewide elections. Talarico hasn't even won a citywide election in Austin. Furthermore, the same polls only give Gov. Greg Abbott a 2.3-point lead in the aggregate over Gina Hinojosa, a hard-left state legislator who's barely known at all, and what is known is usually anathema to most Texans outside her legislative district. Four years ago, Abbott beat the far-more-well-known Beto O'Rourke by eleven points. Abbott has increased his popularity in Texas over the last four years in his crackdown on illegal aliens and the recovery from the 2021 Texas grid debacle, and Hinojosa is not Beto – and for that matter, neither is Talarico.
And what about registration advantage? Texas does not have party affiliation on its registrations, so that's a little trickier to determine. A poll (I know, I know) from the University of Houston in 2025 put the GOP advantage at +3, but the election results suggest a much larger advantage in actual elections. The best result achieved by Democrats in statewide elections for the last decade was Beto's loss to Ted Cruz in 2018 by 3.5 points, and O'Rourke followed that up with his eleven-point loss to Abbott four years later.
Is some of that "supporting the team," as Tur puts it while getting Angela Paxton's name wrong? Sure. It is in most elections already, and that impulse is not limited to Republican voters, either. In this cycle, that factor will be even stronger for Republicans, but that's due to the radicals that Democrats have put on ballots from Texas to Michigan to Maine. Democrats made themselves and radical socialism the issue in 2026 when they could have recruited moderates and kept the pressure on Donald Trump and the GOP.
All one needs to do is talk to Texans to find out how they feel about Talarico and Democrats. It took Tur a long time to figure that out, but ... better late than never, I suppose.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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