Election Forecasters Shift Ratings in Texas Senate Race After Paxton Nomination

Two top election forecasters this week shifted their ratings of the Texas Senate race after state Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary runoff.

The Cook Political Report on May 26 and Sabato’s Crystal Ball on May 27 both moved the seat from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican,” a one-step shift on the scales they use to rate the competitiveness of federal races. The new ratings still favor Republicans, but signal that the forecasters now view the race as closer than before.

Paxton defeated Cornyn 64 percent to 36 percent on May 26, receiving 885,949 votes to Cornyn’s 501,725, according to the Texas secretary of state. The runoff was required after no candidate reached 50 percent in Texas’s March 3 primary. Paxton will face Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, an Austin-area lawmaker and Presbyterian seminary student, in the November general election. 

Cornyn won only two of Texas’s 254 counties in the runoff: Travis County, home to the state capital of Austin, and Kenedy County in South Texas, according to election results.

Cook editor Jessica Taylor wrote that Paxton starts the general election with “a litany” of allegations for “Democrats to exploit,” citing allegations of bribery and misuse of his office. Paxton was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 on charges that he abused his office as attorney general. The Texas Senate acquitted him.

Taylor also flagged a weakness for Talarico, writing that his “cultural liberalism could alienate” the moderate Republicans and Independents Democrats will need to win statewide.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, run by the University of Virginia Center for Politics, made the same move on Wednesday. Editors Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman wrote that Texas Republicans “went with a riskier general election candidate” but cautioned that “riskier can still win.”

The Crystal Ball editors also moved Texas’s 35th Congressional District, a newly drawn San Antonio-area House seat, from “Likely Republican” to “Leans Republican” after Democrats nominated Bexar County sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia in a primary runoff Tuesday.

In a joint statement Tuesday night, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Republicans are “facing their nightmare scenario” and that Texas voters will reject Paxton and elect Talarico.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee disputed that view. Regional press secretary Samantha Cantrell said in a statement Tuesday night that a state that President Donald Trump won by nearly 14 points in 2024 will not elect Talarico, whom she described as a “radical leftist.”

The Crystal Ball editors wrote that they would need to see Talarico polling “into, at least, the higher 40s” before considering moving the race to a true toss-up. They noted that Texas has shifted to the right since 2018, when then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke came within 2.6 points of unseating Sen. Ted Cruz.

Texas voters have not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988, when Sen. Lloyd Bentsen won reelection.

The seat Cornyn currently holds has been in Republican hands since 1961, when John Tower won a special election to replace then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate race in Texas in the modern era, according to Sabato’s Crystal Ball.