The race for the US Senate seat in Texas could determine which party controls Congress next year. Analysts consider it one of the most closely watched in this year's midterms.
Democratic candidate James Talarico, a 37-year-old former teacher who studied to become a Christian priest before entering politics, has a narrow but stable lead in the polls. His victory would flip the Texas Senate seat blue for the first time since 1988, breaking a streak of Democratic defeats in Texas state elections lasting more than three decades.
The race has become the most expensive in US history — total spending has exceeded half a billion dollars. Talarico was a relatively unknown state-level Democrat in 2025, but on Tuesday evening he appeared before a crowd at the Fiesta Center in Lubbock, a city on the western plains with a population of around 250,000 that voted for President Donald Trump by a large margin two years ago. He took the stage before an estimated 3,000 supporters, while another thousand people listened to the programme via speakers set up outside.
Talarico pledged to advocate for a "comprehensive anti-corruption agenda" in the Senate and stated that "Texans are ready for change". The slogan of his last two weeks of campaigning is "clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose", taken from the series Friday Night Lights, a popular television drama from the early 2000s about a high school football team from a small Texas town. His music playlist relies heavily on Texas country, celebrates Texas breakfast tacos and cites legendary Texas singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett, and he often highlights that his ties to the state go back eight generations.
Andrew Robinson, a 26-year-old student from nearby Texas Tech University, was among those in attendance. A few kilometres away, in a hall with twice the capacity, Trump performed alongside Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. "If you turn out and vote, we will have a huge victory in Texas", Trump told the crowd. Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in his podcast on Friday: "Understand, we could lose Texas", adding that "Democrats are massively outperforming Republicans in turnout".
Don Huffines, who is running for state treasurer, wrote on the network X that "Texas is the foundation of the Republican Party in America" and that "when the foundation breaks, everything falls apart. When we lose Texas, we lose the US". Party leaders have been warning for weeks that a liberal breakthrough in Texas could have severe consequences. Republicans fear that a Talarico victory would encourage more local Democrats to run for state and federal offices, and that better-funded candidates could lead to a snowball effect similar to the Democratic inroads in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.
Steinhauser assessed that it is a "perfect storm" and that "everything that could go right for Democrats is going right", while "everything that could go wrong for Republicans is going wrong". "The days when this could be waved away and said that Texas would never turn blue are over", Steinhauser said. Voters, for their part, are dissatisfied with high living costs, including the price of fuel.
