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Talarico Leads Both Republicans in Runoff
in Fight that Resembles Trump's Pageants
Capitol Inside
March 9, 2026
As Democrat James Talarico seized the lead in the U.S. Senate race in Texas on Monday in the first poll since the primary election last week, the fight between incumbent John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton across the aisle for President Donald Trump's endorsement conjured memories of the Miss Universe sweepstakes when he was the pageant king for nearly 20 years.
While it would be a stretch to peg the state representative from Austin as the favorite for the Senate seat in November, Talarico found himself in relatively unfamiliar territory when he had a slight edge over both of the GOP's runoff conteders in hypothetical fall pairings in a survey that the Senate Majority PAC released today.
Conducted by Public Policy Polling for the pro-Democrat committee at the national level, the new poll of likely Texas voters on March 4 and 5 found Talarico up on Paxton by 2 points while leading Cornyn by one in potential match-up for the fall.
Talarico was favored by 44 percent of the PPP poll's participants compared to 43 percent for the incumbent who's had the job for 23 years and counting. The Capitol City lawmaker got the nod from 47 percent of the Texans in the poll while 44 percent expressed plans to back the state's attorney general since 2015 in November. Both scores are within the poll's margin of error - meaning that the Democratic nominee is actually running neck-and-neck with both of his possible foes in the fall in a race that both sides have a 50-50 shot to win for all practical purposes.
Governor Greg Abbott sought to get a jump on the pollsters when he promised late last week on social media that the Democrats had zero chance of flipping the Texas Senate this year. Instead of focusing on how and why Talarico managed to beat Jasmine Crockett by almost 7 points in a primary race he ran as the underdog, Abbott spent the past few days attacking the Democratic nominee based on remarks and posts that he made five or six years ago in an attempt to paint him as a radical left-winger who's as different as night and day from the Republicans in Texas. The strategy could be highly risky in light of the fact that Talarico received a record-shattering number of primary votes from Democrats, Republicans and independents who like him because he's nothing like the politicians who control Texas now.
Abbott and other Republicans sought to portray Talarico as a pansy psycho on Monday when they circulated an old interview in which he admits that he loves trans children. This could be dangerous territory for the GOP in light of Talarico's status as a Presbyterian minister who claims to adhere to the teachings of Jesus and makes it a point to love everyone like the "barefoot rabbi" from Nazareth did as a consequence.
Talarico trailed congressional member Jasmine Crockett by as much as 18 percentage points in polling on the Democratic Senate primary during the weeks before the March 3 vote. Talarico won more than 1.2 million votes while Crocket had the second highest total of the four major contenders for the Senate seat in the GOP and Democratic primaries with almost 1.1 million votes - slightly more than 46 percent.
Cornyn and Paxton were forced to share GOP primary voters with a third major candidate in the Senate contest - U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston - who scored almost 14 percent of the vote in round one last week. While both of the major Democratic contenders surpassed the seven-digit mark in their individual totals, Cornyn and Paxton advanced to overtime with 907,205 and 881,115 votes respectively. Cornyn ran first with 42 percent while Paxton was on his heels at 41 percent.
But the hottest GOP primary race at the statewide level in the history of the Lone Star State has degenerated into a beauty pageant for all practical purposes since Trump announced on the day after the primary election that he'd decided to pick the nominee for the Republicans in the Senate race with the candidate he was on the verge of endorsing. Trump said he would demand that the loser in the competition for his support drop out of the race.
There have been no reports of old white men parading around a stage in swimsuits, no signs of gray-haired politicians doing dance numbers for a talent competition, no tweets of men with pale faces exclaiming "world peace" when judges ask what their wish would be if they could have one. Trump's endorsement might be the only possible answer if Cornyn or Paxton got to choose.
But the similararities between the Texas candidates' frantic quest to be the president's pick in overtime in the Senate race and the Miss Universe pageant when Trump owned and operated it are more stark than a lot of folks may realize. Trump sold Miss Universe in 2015 after NBC and Univision backed out as sponsors when he started making derogatory claims about immigrants in the infant stages of his first White House race. Trump was hands-on when it came to the competition to see which of the beautiful women from around the world would wear the crown for a year. He even tapped himself to direct it when the competition was held in Moscow two years before he unloaded the organization that operated it after the TV sponsors bailed.
One of the main differences is the fact that a panel of judges was assembled every year for Miss Universe with people who were experts in fields like fashion and the arts. But Trump was widely known for picking the winners - overruling judges he enlisted as experts in fields like fashion and art if they didn't chose the woman he wanted to wear the crown for a year. Trump reportedly intervened after his first year as the pagent owner when he was criticized for calling out the eventual winner - Miss Venezuela - after she emerged with the title because he thought she was overweight.
Trump appeared poised last week to endorse Cornyn as the GOP establishment choice in the contest. But he stalled the annoucement in the face of a furious backlash among conservatives. The PPP poll today found that 25 percent of Trump's voters here in 2024 would not support Cornyn in his re-election race while 19 percent indicated they would not vote for Paxton if he's the nominee this fall.
more to come ...
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