AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Democrats haven't won a single statewide race since 1994. Yet with the November 3 election closing in, four separate polls this summer point to the same trend: Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is peeling away Hispanic support that carried Donald Trump to his best-ever performance in Texas back in 2024.
The four surveys don't agree on how big that shift is. They don't even agree on who's currently ahead in the race overall. But every one of them moves in the same direction, and that consistency is enough to have Republican strategists on alert in a state Trump won by roughly 14 points less than two years ago.
Nationally, Trump's gains with Hispanic voters were one of the defining storylines of 2024, a sharp break from decades of that bloc leaning Democratic. Texas, given the size of its Latino electorate, is the biggest live test of whether that realignment survives into a midterm year — which is why both parties are also tracking a similar pattern in the governor's race between Republican incumbent Greg Abbott and Democrat Gina Hinojosa.
The Fox Number, and What It Doesn't Say
A Fox News poll fielded July 23–27 among 1,006 registered Texas voters found Talarico ahead of Republican Ken Paxton statewide by three points, 51% to 48%, within the margin of sampling error. The survey oversampled Hispanic voters by adding 296 respondents to the base sample, bringing that subgroup to 556 total — among whom Talarico's lead widened to 18 points, 59% to 41%.
Talarico also carried 68% of independents and roughly a quarter of self-identified non-MAGA Republicans in the same poll. Voters seemed more concerned with character than ideology: more respondents told Fox News they were troubled by Paxton's conduct than considered Talarico too far left.
"He has considerable work to do with non-MAGA Republicans and independents," said Daron Shaw, the Republican pollster who conducts the Fox survey alongside Democratic pollster Chris Anderson, pointing to bruises from Paxton's primary fight against ousted Sen. John Cornyn.
An Outlier Worth a Second Look
Stack that 18-point Hispanic gap against other polling and the picture gets messier. A Texas Public Opinion Research survey taken July 15–17 put Talarico's Hispanic lead at 46 points — 66% to 20% — more than double Fox's number and, according to TPOR's own May poll, a jump from a four-point Hispanic edge just weeks earlier.
That's a bigger swing than any other pollster in this race has recorded, and it comes from an organization with a detail the original coverage didn't always mention. The firm brands itself nonpartisan, but according to Fox 7 Austin, the operation is headed by Luke Warford, who sought a Texas Railroad Commission seat as a Democratic candidate back in 2022.
A More Recent — and Tighter — Snapshot
The newest public poll complicates the idea that Talarico is simply pulling away. An Emerson College Polling survey conducted for Nexstar stations August 9–10 had Paxton narrowly ahead statewide, 47% to 46%, essentially a dead heat. Among Hispanic respondents specifically — a subgroup of 224 people in that poll, small enough to carry a wide margin of error — Talarico's favorability stood at 50.5% against Paxton's 33.9%, a gap that lines up more closely with Fox's 18-point figure than with TPOR's 46-point outlier.
Put the three side by side and a pattern holds even where the magnitude doesn't: Fox found an 18-point Hispanic gap, Emerson's favorability numbers imply something similar, and TPOR found one more than double that size. All three still show Hispanic voters breaking toward Talarico. None of them agree on how far that break has gone — and the statewide horse race itself is split, with Fox and TPOR showing Talarico ahead and Emerson showing Paxton up by one.
The Number Behind the Trend
The clearest evidence that 2024's rightward shift isn't fully locked in comes from UnidosUS, the Latino advocacy group, which polled 500 registered Latino voters in Texas between April 27 and May 14. One in five Texas Hispanic voters who backed Trump in 2024 said that, given a redo, they'd sit that vote out or choose someone else — a smaller reversal than the 25% UnidosUS measured nationally, but notable in a state where Trump's Latino support was already historically narrow. Two-thirds of Texas Hispanic voters overall told UnidosUS they disapproved of Trump's job performance, citing the cost of living and immigration enforcement most often as the reasons why.
"Latino voters in Texas know exactly what they need," said Eric Holguin, the group's Texas state director, framing the numbers as unfinished business for both parties rather than a win for either one.
Just how big Trump's actual 2024 Hispanic vote in Texas was is itself disputed — Fox's post-election voter analysis put it at 50%, while other estimates run as high as 55% — but every source agrees it marked uncharted territory for a party that had trailed badly with Latino voters for decades.
Where the Numbers Still Need Feet on the Ground
Much of the movement UnidosUS measured is concentrated in five battleground congressional districts the group oversampled: the 15th and 23rd, Hispanic-majority seats Democrats hope to flip, and the 28th, 34th and 35th, Democratic-held districts Republicans have targeted since redistricting. The 15th and the Rio Grande Valley portion of the 34th sit at the center of Trump's 2024 gains, while the same redrawn boundaries have reshuffled how Houston-area Latino voters are grouped. No independent, on-the-ground interviews with voters in Harris County or the Valley were available for this piece.
Paxton's campaign isn't buying the polling gap. "The only poll that matters is November 3rd," senior adviser Nick Maddux told the Houston Chronicle. Inflation ranks as the top issue for Hispanic and non-Hispanic voters alike in every poll cited here, and with roughly ten weeks left before Election Day, both campaigns are fighting over an electorate that looks far less settled than it did after 2024.
