Every two years, the same headline appears in the mainstream media: this is finally the year Texas flips blue.
A new poll has Democrats buzzing once more, but the state’s last three decades of actual election results tell a very different story than liberal polls.
The latest spark came from a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday, showing Democratic state Rep. James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton locked in a dead heat, 47% to 47%, in the race for John Cornyn’s open Senate seat.
According to the poll, Talarico leads big with independents, 58% to 31%, and runs especially strong with Black voters (80%) and Hispanic voters (61%).
It is a poll that Texans have seen before in the past, but that has never once translated into an actual Democratic victory in a statewide race.
When the polls close, Republicans win in Texas.
Beto O’Rourke ran one of the most expensive Democratic Senate campaigns in modern history against Ted Cruz, raising a then-record $80 million in donations and generating wall-to-wall national media coverage.
The final result: Cruz won by a comfortable 2.6 points, 50.9% to 48.3%. It is the high-water mark Democrats have chased ever since.
Four years later, O’Rourke tried again, this time against Gov. Greg Abbott. Polling shared by the media throughout the summer and fall of 2022 showed the race was razor thin.
The actual result on election night: Abbott won by 10.9 points, 54.8% to 43.8%. O’Rourke carried just 19 counties, down from 32 in his 2018 run, and Republicans flipped Williamson County, a suburban Austin county O’Rourke himself had won four years earlier.
The pattern repeated again in 2024. Cruz, running for reelection against Democrat Colin Allred, was frequently described as vulnerable in pre-election polling and analysis. He won by a massive 8.9 points, 53.1% to 44.4% — a wider margin than Cruz’s comfortable 2018 win against O’Rourke.
Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to any statewide office since 1994, the longest active Republican winning streak of any state in the country.
None of this means Talarico can’t make the race close on Election Day. But what history shows that he is unlikely to outperform his media’s polling numbers, and quite likely to underperform them once “undecided” Republican-leaning independents come home to the Republican candidate in the fall, just as they did for Abbott in 2022 and Cruz in 2024.
Texas Democrats have been here before. They were here in 2018. They were here in 2022. They were here in 2024. Each time, a close summer poll became a comfortable November Republican win. The 2026 version of that story is now underway.
Don’t buy the media hype. Texas is deep red.