James Talarico has opened a 6.5-point favorability edge over Ken Paxton in Texas, a polling average that gives the Democrat a clearer path in a race Republicans had treated as theirs to lose. FiftyPlusOne.news says Paxton is carrying a net favorability rating of -14%, while Talarico is running at 46.6% positive and 40.0% negative.
The numbers come from an average of 12 polls, not a single survey, which makes the gap harder to dismiss as a one-day blip. Paxton is viewed unfavorably by 51.7% of Texans and favorably by 37.5%, the worst favorability rating of any Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in the group tracked by the site. Talarico’s standing matters because favorability is the kind of metric that can move early money, shape campaign messages and alter how seriously a state is taken before November’s midterms.
That is the reason James Talarico Texas Senate odds are getting fresh attention now: the same polling average that puts Paxton at the bottom also says Donald Trump has the lowest-ever net approval for a president heading into a midterm, and it places Texas in the same competitive frame. The state is not being described as a lock for either side. Instead, the forecasting model now has Texas leaning Democratic, a sharp change from 2024, when Trump won the state by 14 percentage points.
That shift would have been hard to imagine not long ago. Paxton remains a familiar Republican figure in Texas, but his name is also tied to years of baggage from his time in state politics, including impeachment by the Texas House of Representatives in May 2023 and acquittal by the Texas Senate in September 2023. The polling average does not measure character alone, but it does suggest those liabilities have not faded into the background.
The larger problem for Republicans is that Paxton is not an outlier in the wrong direction so much as the clearest example of one. None of the Republican Party’s nominees for U.S. Senate in competitive races have positive favorability ratings on average. Talarico’s lead over Paxton is also said to be the biggest gap between any pair of candidates in the country, roughly 21 points, which turns Texas from a presumed Republican hold into one of the most consequential Senate tests on the board.
For now, the question is not whether Talarico has momentum in the polling average. He does. The real question is whether Paxton can repair a standing that has already put Texas into the leaning-Democratic column before voters have even arrived at the polls.
