Texas Senate odds: Talarico holds at 66% after dueling Lubbock rallies and Musk feud

It was a split-screen week in the Texas Senate race. President Donald Trump flew into deep-red Lubbock to rally for Attorney General Ken Paxton, while state Rep. James Talarico drew an overflow crowd across town the same night. In the days before, Talarico traded shots with Elon Musk, the single largest funder of the outside groups backing Paxton.

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Trump spoke for more than an hour at the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center on Tuesday night. Earlier in the day, he stopped in Corpus Christi, in Nueces County, which Beto O'Rourke narrowly carried in 2018.

In Lubbock, Trump brought Paxton on stage and warned that Talarico and Democrats would repeal the Second Amendment and open the border. He kept calling Talarico "Talafreako," a nickname he and Paxton have used on the trail, and told the crowd the Democrat is "not even Christian," The Texas Tribune reported. He also used the stop to announce a rollback of Biden-era methane rules, a nod to oil country in the South Plains and Permian Basin.

Talarico answered from the Fiesta Center, less than three miles away. His campaign moved the event off the Texas Tech campus after more than 4,000 people signed up, and part of the crowd listened from outside, KCBD reported. He took the stage around 8:30 p.m., just after Trump wrapped, embraced the "Talafreako" label, and framed the race as working people against billionaires. Republicans, he said, are spending heavily because they are scared.

Talarico's sharpest line of the final stretch isn't about Paxton. It's about the man paying for Paxton's air war.

Federal filings released Oct. 15 showed Musk gave the Senate Leadership Fund $75 million on Sept. 9 and another $83 million on Sept. 23. Each time, the super PAC moved the same amount into Texas PAC, the pro-Paxton group, the following day. Musk also put $10 million into Lone Star Liberty PAC. By CNBC's count, at least $189.6 million of Musk's political spending has gone toward electing Paxton, making him the largest individual donor of the cycle.

Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman flagged the filings the day they landed: SLF was Texas PAC's only donor, which makes Musk the group's sole funder in all but name.

Musk went from silent funder to open combatant last week. He formally endorsed Paxton on X on Oct. 20, then posted the next day that something was "deeply wrong" with Talarico. Paxton replied with a one-word agreement. Talarico fired back that a system letting one trillionaire buy a senator is what's broken, and his campaign followed with an ad telling Musk that Texas is not for sale.

On the trail, the contrast has become his stump speech. Talarico says his campaign is funded by 1.3 million individual donors and that Paxton is "funded by one dude." He has also tied Musk's interest in the race to the land and water his companies want in Texas, pointing to Texas Monthly reporting that SpaceX was the prospective buyer of Boca Chica State Park, a claim Gov. Greg Abbott has denied.

He brought the same message to Lubbock. Speaking a few miles from Trump on Tuesday night, Talarico accused Musk, whose companies have major business interests in Texas, of trying to buy himself a personal senator with the more than $150 million he has put behind Paxton, NBC News reported. He paired it with a broader pitch that the state's affordability crisis is really a corruption crisis.

Only one new public poll has landed since our last update, and it's Talarico's widest lead in weeks. An N+ Univision/YouGov survey released Tuesday has him ahead 50% to 45% among registered voters, fielded Oct. 13–21 with a margin of error of about 3.8 points. Among Latino voters, his lead grows to 55% to 37%, and the poll finds immigration enforcement splitting the Latino voters who backed Trump in 2024.

The averages haven't moved. The RealClearPolitics average, which now includes the Univision poll, still has Talarico up 1.8 points, 48.5% to 46.7%, the same margin as last week. The polling average on Kalshi's market page has him ahead by about 2.5. Last week's Fox News tie remains his low-water mark.

Nearly 5 million Texans have now voted, about 26% of a record 19 million registered voters. That's ahead of the same point in 2022 (about 21%) and 2018 (about 24%), the year O'Rourke came within 2.6 points of Ted Cruz, according to KERA. Turnout is running near 32% in Tarrant and Denton counties and 31% in Travis, and the Rio Grande Valley's turnout rate is 64% higher than at this point four years ago.

Last week, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick predicted Democrats would run out of voters by mid-week. VoteHub's data says that hasn't happened yet. Through Monday, 66% of Texans who voted in the March Democratic primary had already cast a general-election ballot, compared with 60% of Republican primary voters, according to L2 data charted by VoteHub's Zachary Donnini. That gap has doubled from 3 points on the first day of early voting. Donnini noted it could still work for Paxton if reliable Republicans are simply voting later, but if it doesn't close by Election Day, Paxton can't afford for Cornyn's primary voters to stay home.

A broader cut shows how much is still unknown. Through eight days, past Democratic primary voters make up 32.3% of the early electorate and past Republican primary voters 31.7%, a lean of D+0.5, according to Theo Elections. That's a big swing from R+9 at this point in 2024 and R+11.3 in 2022, but the Democratic edge has shrunk from about 7 points after the first day. The largest bloc, 33.1%, has never voted in a primary, and how they break is the question the early vote can't answer.

The geography tells the same story. Compared with the same point in 2022, early turnout is up 59% in urban areas, 47% in the suburbs, 41% in exurbs and just 28% in rural Texas, according to analyst Adam Carlson, using county data compiled by Theo Elections. Measured against 2024's presidential pace, rural turnout is running 32% behind, compared with 10% behind in urban areas. That rural lag is exactly what Trump's stop in Lubbock was meant to fix.

Republicans argue their voters are simply running later. GOP strategist Vinny Minchillo told the Tribune that Republican voters have picked up since the first couple of days. And the lines are long in places, with some sites reporting two- to four-hour waits. Early voting ends Friday, and Vice President JD Vance rallies in Weatherford on Thursday to push the last GOP holdouts to the polls.

A presidential rally in the GOP's heartland, a public feud with the world's richest man, and roughly $190 million of his money have barely budged the topline. Traders have kept Talarico between 65% and 66% for two straight weeks, although his price did hit 67% on Wednesday.

The margin market has been jumpier. The contract on Talarico winning by 2 points or more sits at 56%, while Paxton winning by 2 or more is at 26%. Traders expect a close race, but a Paxton win by any margin is still priced at only about one in three.

The next three days decide which read holds. If the Democratic early-vote edge survives Vance's Thursday push and Friday's close, Talarico heads into Election Day with a cushion. If Patrick's high-propensity Republicans finally show up, the race returns to the coin flip the polls describe.

Kalshi markets now predict (as of 3:53 p.m. ET, Oct. 28, 2026):

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