Poll Shows Paxton Narrowly Leading Talarico in Texas U.S. Senate Race

Polling shows Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) surpassing far-left challenger James Talarico (D) less than a month out from the Texas U.S. Senate race.

A survey from InsiderAdvantage released on Thursday shows Paxton with a slim lead on Democrat Texas State Rep. Talarico, 49 percent to 48 percent.

The pollster had not released cross tabs giving a further demographic breakdown as of Thursday evening. However, the survey is the second in a week showing Paxton eking past “God is non-binary” Talarico, as the Democrat faces fire for his nearly two-week absence from the campaign trail in the final action-packed stretch before election day.

Polling released on Tuesday from Quantus Insights shows Paxton and Talarico neck and neck in the most expensive contest of the 2026 midterm cycle, with the attorney general snagging a narrow lead, 47.2 percent to 46.7 percent.

Quantus Insights said Paxton’s narrow lead is owed to what Breitbart News reported in August — Talarico already maxed out support among Democrats in the state. Tuesday’s poll results showed an advantage among independent voters for Talarico, a 15-point edge of 52 percent to 37 percent. Yet Paxton’s slow growth among Republican voters who dominate the state continues to put him in position to claim the seat, Breitbart’s Matt Mercer reported.

Cook Political Report rates the race a “toss-up” after shifting it from “leans Republican” in August. RealClear Polling shows Talarico with an average lead of 2.3 points, within recent surveys’ margins of error.

I've noticed that the "modern" approach to campaigning has moved from TV advertising to cell phones. I'm getting targeted texts every hour now. I used to get junk mail and relentless TV commercials, but not any more.

I think that we're seeing what used to be called "fighting the last war," that is, the media is judging this campaign based on the expectations of past campaigns, but the battleground has changed.

See this transcript from The Michael Berry Show from a few days after the Texas primary in March, where Berry describes the "inside baseball" on campaign advertising:

Rick, you're on the Michael Berry Show. Go ahead, sir.
Caller:
Hey Michael. So this may seem like an obvious, dumb question, but I just want to know if there's more to it as far as gauging how effective you're... for lack of a better term, marketing is when you're campaigning for a candidate. Obviously, once the race is over, you know, okay, I got won or lost. But but in the midst of a campaign, is there a way to gauge, other than polling, how effective your... your marketing campaign is, So that you can tweak it.
And then also, let's say I'm going to pretend I'm Michael Berry. I want to tell the candidates, "Hey, look. See what happened to this guy, Dan Crenshaw. I sounded the alarm. I made a difference." But in these other races, you've got a lot of other competition in the marketing field, if you will. Anyway, is there something more precise as far as gauging the effectiveness of your marketing or campaigning?
Berry:
And what do you do for a living, Rick?
Caller:
I'm an insurance sales guy.
Berry:
It's interesting because most people don't think in politics of metrics and so analytically. I love that side of it. It's a good question. I'll put you on hold for a second, just so I don't hear you in the background, okay, because it'll distract me. But don't go away. I'll come back. So let me try to answer that question.
Dan Crenshaw. When he... when they realized that me hitting him so hard every day on air was the number one negative on his campaign, and he realized they were losing, they did something to try to stem the tide and that is he attacked me, and the way he did that was the most bitch move ever. He posted a text exchange that he and I had had. I have never and will never post a text message exchange with someone with whom I have had a disagreement. I will, with their permission, post a funny joke, a funny comment because you see the exchange in real time and there's something funny about that. But I'll clear that with them. When he did that, he said something. He took a comment that I made, which was, "you spent $600,000 dollars on TV and the only radio you did was Spanish. Seriously?" And he said, "See, Michael Berry just wants to get paid.
Well, first of all, a little insight into our business. I don't get paid off of political advertising in the past. My current contract just doesn't happen. But in the past I would lose money during election season. And the reason was political advertising is governed by statute or by code. There's all sorts of regulations our company has to follow. Politicians get a government rate. It's a lower rate and a standard rate, and everybody has to get the same rate. So Democrats, Republicans... that rate is lower than what the private sector pays because it's lower by law. You're required to sell it at that rate, at a set rate. And secondly, you're required to sell it equally to the candidate's the same. And third I don't get a cut of it.
Well, just like a bakery only has so many racks to make so many doughnuts or buns or whatever. Once that's done, it's done. Inventory management is a major part of our business. You know, and I know, that there are already too many spots during the break. There's no reason for me to tell you that's not true. I know it. The number one reason we don't have twice the audience is because there are so many spots. That's an unfortunate reality. It's a business, and they choose to sell a lot of those. Part of that is to pay me, which I'm good with. But it's too many spots already. When a government spot is added, or when a political spot is added, that means a spot of Cory Diamond's doesn't air, or Gallery Furniture doesn't air. I was... I'm not under this contract, but I was paid on those. I was paid on my contract based on those ads airing, okay, so for me, I lose money, and I would lose money during election season, every election, which I didn't care over the course of it all, it washes out.
I'm not Karl Rove. I don't view politics as a way I make a living. I say, and I learned this line from Eddie Martini over 20 ago, "I entertain people and tell them where to shop." I create relationships with sponsors and help them build their business. I engage people and hopefully make them better mothers, fathers, sons, business owners, employees, citizens, and in the meantime I make a good living. It works out.
Now that being said, I was so invested in Crenshaw that for him to spend $600,000 in what I believe was a lot less effective marketing was stupid, and any if you listen to my show, you know when I think something is stupid, I get a little harsh about it. And that's what I said. I didn't tell him to spend money on our show because I needed the money. I don't make any money off of that. It's important to understand that, and he knew that.
But I don't blame him, because what he was trying to do was he was trying to undercut the credibility of my endorsement of Steve Toth against him. He was trying to say, "Michael Berry's a bad guy. Don't believe him when he tells you these things about me." I get the strategy behind it. It's a bad idea. When a guy buys ink by the barrel, that's probably not somebody you want working against you, especially when even when you lose, you admit "the guy's probably more a bigger reason of why I got elected than anything else. I was in third place when he got behind me." So I will tell you that was an example of where I think quote unquote advertising is worse.
You said marketing. I think, but let's call it advertising in this case because it's not endorsement, and I think this is important. It matters a great deal. I'm gonna give you some inside advertising knowledge as it relates to campaigns. This is also true of companies. It matters a great deal whether you're running for precinct chairman, county party chairman, state rep, state senate, US Congress, or statewide. When you buy advertising, you buy advertising on a quantitative basis. That is, for television, how many eyeballs are seeing it? For radio, how many ears are hearing it. You pay on a gross number based on the size of the audience. Am I playing Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion or am I playing a honky tonk that can fit twenty people in there -- The Hideaway over off Fondren?
So the cost point per eyeball or ear is how many people are going to hear it, right? So when people buy television advertising, let's say for a state Rep seat, you're paying for the entirety of this region, not just the city and the county. You're paying all the way to Austin, all the way to Beaumont. But the number of people who can vote for you are a tiny percentage of that. But you paid for everybody to hear your message.
So this is the way this works. Rick asked the question about how effective marketing is, and it depends on the race. So if you're running in a very small race, let's say precinct chairman or even a state Rep race, which are relatively small geographic areas, the only people who matter... You have to understand, you know, we had a guy call in earlier, Jose Jimenez, and he was very upset that nobody's voting. So imagine in your mind, a pie. I stopped and got House of Pies yesterday. I bought, I brought eight pies home. My wife had a bunch of ladies over at the house. So imagine a big pie, and out of that pie, I want you to cut it in half, and then I want you to cut it in half again, so you got quarters. She had to cut one of those quarters into an eighth. I want you to cut that eighth into a sixteenth, and then a one thirty second. I think they're about thirty two.
Well maybe not that many, but let's just for the sake of argument, let's play long. You've got the tiniest sliver of that pie. What you don't want to do if every piece of that pie represents a person inside there, you don't want to pay to talk to people in Beaumont or San Antone or Austin or New York if you're trying to get the votes of the people in your district. Now, remember as Jose pointed out, there's this great frustration that almost nobody votes in a primary, so you don't want to talk to people who vote... who live in your district and don't vote in a Republican primary. Voters either vote in every Republican primary or no Republican primaries. There's a two R, three R, four R, five R. If you get what's known as a three R that is a consistent voter, they're going to vote. So what ends up happening, and this is why some of you have noticed that you get so much mail, you don't send mail to people who are not registered, they're not going to vote. You don't send mail to people who are going to vote in November but don't vote in March. And these are very easy lists to pull. You might send them one because they might accidentally vote in a primary. But the people who vote in a primary consistently, that's a very small group of people. So the most cost effective way to talk to those people is by mail a few pennies apiece.
I don't know what it is now, I haven't done that in a long time. You want to talk to that person. First, you do an introduction of yourself. Here's me. I'm a good guy. Here's a picture of me and my family. We're all dressed up. I'm a Christian, I go to church. I love the Lord, I love America, I love Trump, I love football, I love pie. All right, then you start in on the negatives on the other guy in a district that's just a few thousand people. I mean, look at the voter turnout, and even in congressional races, twenty two, twenty five, thirty thousand people, that's not that many people you can hit one of them for a few thousand dollars in mail. You can get them for less than that with a text message. That's why you're getting so many.
See, everybody's not getting as much mail as you are. You're getting mail because you're a three R or four or five R. That means you voted in those primaries, and you vote in primaries in off presidential years, so midterm years. So that means you're one of the select few. You're like a super delegate. Right, So that's why you're getting hit all the time. Everybody's not getting hit because everybody ain't voting. There's a way to know if you're a voter - it's based on whether you vote. When you show up and vote, you're going to vote in the future. That's the most predictive element to whether you're going to vote again. So the cheapest way to do that is mail, but mail has limitations. Mail allows you to build name ID, and mail allows you to be negative against your opponent. It doesn't generally allow you to build up your positives very much because everybody says "I'm a swell guy." But if you say the other guy's a bad guy and have a bad picture and he's a homo pedophile cannibal monster, Putin Cuban cast, I mean, you can do that in a negative mailer to a certain extent.
You can do a little of that, but there's limitations to that. Now as you get more money and you're running for a bigger office, say county wide or a state Senate seat, now it starts making sense to start doing something qualitative, not quantitative. And that's where talk radio comes in because the talk radio listener is spread across congressional districts, spread across state rep districts, but the talk radio listener is very engaged. They are three R's. Necessarily, you don't listen to talk radio and not vote in primaries. It just doesn't happen. You vote in primaries, you care, you're very engaged. You're also influencers. Talk radio listeners are qualitative because every vote on election night counts equally, but every person prior to that is not equal. There are people who are going to block walk, there are people who have a blast list, there are people with a social media presence, there are people who are going to do all those things. In my opinion, in the right race, that means a big enough race to make it make sense. Certainly a statewide race, you should be spending money on radio because that's where you're going to get the most engaged people who talk to most and influence other people. Malcolm Gladwell called them Mavins in the book Tipping Point.
Now television television versus radio. Television is a lot of people, but not qualitative. So when you spend money on television, you're talking to Democrats, you're talking to the unregistered, you're talking to people outside your district, and you're paying for each person you're talking to, so you're talking to almost everyone. Everyone you're talking to is not a potential voter, and that's why I go crazy? Why do people spend so much on television, let's say in a congressional race, because candidates trust consultants, and not all consultants, but many consultants just want to get paid. How do they get paid? They get the biggest commission when they buy the TV ad for the candidate, and they get their biggest commission if they buy television, so they get fifteen percent. So they don't want to do mail unless they're going to... unless they own the mail house, or they're getting a kickback from the mailhouse, which happens, but they want to get paid the most amount of money. In this sense, as in many cases with the service provider, the service provider, the consultant is not serving the best interest over the candidate. They's still like to win because it looks good on their resume, but they really want to get paid right now because they only get paid during election season. So their job is to get every penny that comes in the door spent in a way that they keep fifteen percent of it. And that's television.
They don't get the same kickback, and they don't get that amount of kickback in radio. It's all legal, but they don't get that amount of kickback. So that's when I argue with candidates. And sometimes candidates will come to me and say, "Hey, I want to be on the radio," and I'll say "no, not for the race you're running. That doesn't make any sense. It's a waste of your money and it's very expensive." So does marketing work? Yes, the right marketing for the right medium that maximize maximizes the amount of dollars you have. Now, when you look at statewide Mayes Middleton versus Chip Roy, Ken Paxton versus John Cornyn, let's look at Middleton and Roy, most expensive AG race in Texas history, $20 million spent. They'll end up into it more than that by the time all the numbers are in. In that case, let's say Mayes Middleton or Chip Roy advert on KTRH. Every listener on KTRH is a Republican primary voter, not every, but most most are going to be Republican primary voters. And it's a statewide office. So it makes all the sense in the world for them to spend money on that, right?

Even now, this seems almost obsolete despite it being from only seven months ago. The question is whether the media has adapted to the new style of campaigning, and whether the polling firms are accounting for where the "high information voter" is getting their information now?

-PJ

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