Paxton Up on Talarico by 2 Points in Poll
with 25% of Cornyn Voters Backing Dem
Texas General Election Polls
Capitol Inside
June 22, 2026
A new poll on the U.S. Senate race had good and bad news for Republican Ken Paxton on Monday when he was leading James Talarico by a margin that was narrow due to the Democrat's strong support from Texans who supported the incumbent John Cornyn in the primary election.
Paxton was up on Talarico by 2 points with 49 percent support in the Red Eagle Politics/SoCal Strategies survey of 800 Texas voters that was conducted on Sunday. The poll by the conservative firms marked the second time this month that the Texas attorney general has led the state representative from Austin by 2 points. A third poll on the Texas Senate race in June found Talarico and Paxton running dead even.
Talarico - in contrast - had been ahead in the polling on the contest that was taken here between the primary vote in March and a runoff election that Paxton won when he eliminated Cornyn with 64 percent of the vote. While the candidates are inside the Red Eagle/SoCal poll's margin of error, Paxton's numbers have vaulted about 6 points since he knocked the 24-year Senate veteran out in the second round. That's presumably a reflection of Cornyn voters who've shifted their allegiance to Paxton in the runoff's wake.
But the conservative pollsters found that one in every four Cornyn supporters are backing Talarico now after swearing to never cast a vote for Paxton in the aftermath of the runoff when the incumbent and his allies portrayed the AG as a crooked politician who cheated on his wife and got sued for divorce after five dozen Republican state representatives impeached him on public corruption charges.
The Red Eagle/SoCal survey showed Paxton with support from 71 percent of Republicans who backed Cornyn in the primary while Talarico got the nod from 25 percent of the incumbent's first-round voters in the new poll. Two other polls on the Texas Senate fight this month found that 7 percent to 8 percent of Cornyn supporters planning to back Talarico in the general election.
Talarico had a 10-point lead among independent voters in the Red Eagle/SoCal survey. But the Cornyn voters who favor the Democrat in the Senate competition appear to account for the difference between Paxton's razor-thin advantage and a double-digit lead that Governor Greg Abbott had in the Red Eagle/So Cal poll over Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa.
The poll found the third-term governor leading Hinojosa by a dozen points with 54 percent support in a bid for four more years as the state's top leader. The survey was the first that found Abbott ahead by more than 8 percentage points in the pairing with the Democratic state representative, who's also from Austin.
The Cornyn voters in Talarico's camp now could be costing Paxton as much as 10 percentage points when the margin by which the Republicans leads in the Senate race is sized up against the advantage that Abbott enjoys in the poll.
Cornyn received 910,382 votes in the first-round vote on March 3 - 42 percent of the total cast in the GOP primary. Paxton advanced to overtime with 40.5 percent after scoring 878,564 votes in the initial election. Paxton tallied 9,632 more votes in the runoff than he did in the first election - an increase of 1 percentage point. But Cornyn had 406,944 fewer votes in round two than he did initially - an 81 percent plunge.
One-fourth of the Cornyn primary total computes to 227,596 votes. To put that in perspective, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz beat Democrat Beto O'Rourke by 214,921 votes in race at the top of the Texas ticket in the midterm election in Trump's first term in 2018.
Red Eagle Politics has a repution as a highly partisan organization on the hard right. But it came closer than anyone on the runoff when it found Paxton leading Cornyn by 21 points in a poll several days before the AG won by almost 28 points.
The GOP primary had the potential to be close before Trump issued an endorsement to Paxton a week before the runoff election after teasing Cornyn for months on the possibility of landing it himself.
more to come ...
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