Nate Silver and Major Prediction Platforms
Make Talarico Favorite in Texas Senate Bid
Texas General Election Polls
General Election Rankings
Capitol Inside
August 11, 2026
Nate Silver - the nation's most vaunted elections forecaster for the past 20 years - gave Republicans new cause for concern about a blue wave on the fall horizon when he listed Democrat James Talarico's probability of winning a U.S. Senate seat in Texas on Tuesday at 63 percent.
Silver's publication Silver Bulletin sent shock waves through GOP circles in swing states when it projected that Democrats would reclaim the U.S. Senate majority in November with 51 seats. Democrats have been significat favortes to take the majority in the U.S. House back as well.
Silver rated Senate seats leans Democrat in Michigan, Maine, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas where Talarico has been leading Republican Ken Paxton in the polls for the past six weeks. Some of the country's other most prominent election projectionists like the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato and the Cook Political Report still had the Texas Senate contest in the leans Republican column on Tuesday in their outlooks for the general election on November 3.
But Silver arguably is the king of that specialist profession - having gained fame when his site FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winners in the presidential race in 49 states in 2008 when Barak Obama won the White House and Democrats took back the majority in the House.
Capitol Inside shift the Texas Senate race to leans Democrat during the weekend in the rankings for the general election in 2026. The contest had been in the leans Dem column for a brief period in the wake of Paxton's victory in a primary runoff election when he eliminated 24-year Senate veteran John Cornyn with a winning boost from an endorsement from President Donald Trump a week before the overtime vote. But we moved the Paxton-Talarico bout back to the toss up list after the Republican attorney general surged for several weeks in June after the runoff.
The prevailing sentiment had been that Cornyn would run in the fall as the favorite if he survived the primary. Cornyn had a massive advantage over Paxton in campaign cash from the starting gates to the finish line in OT in May when the challenger captured 64 percent of the vote. But Paxton knew the money would be irrelevant if he had Trump in his corner for the runoff.
The forecasts began going blue in Texas on Sunday after Capitol Inside reclassified the Texas race with Talarico as the favorte for the second time this summer. The prediction market Kashi, which put Paxton's chances of victory at 58 percent a month ago, had Talarico in the lead for the first time at 51 percent going into Monday before upping his chances to 52 percent on Tuesday.
Paxton remained in the lead on the trading platform Polymarket with a 51 percent probability of winning on Monday. But Polymarket matched the competitor Kalshi on Tuesday when it listed Talarico as the favorite at 52 percent.
Paxton has been banking on Trump to propel him back into the inside track when the president is set to appear at a novel GOP midterm convention in Dallas on September 9 and 10. Paxton's camp has floated the possibility that Trump will travel to Texas more than once on his behalf between now and the election 83 days from now.
Paxton is a distant second in the fundraising after raising $9 million by the end of June in a fight with a Democrat who's been breaking fundraising records with a haul of nearly $70 million by the start of July. The Republican nominee has trailed Talarico by an average of 3.3 points in six polls that were taken on the Texas race in July. Paxton had surged from behind in June when he pulled even with Talarico and led him by a point or two in a couple of polls.
But Paxton's advantage evaported quickly after he put his campaign in a holding pattern while vacationing with a female friend in Europe during the July 4th weekend. And he's struggled since he returned to the point where he felt compelled to issue a plea for help on Fox News on Monday in an attempt to inspire contributions to his campaign.
more to come ...
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