Senate Race Polling Reveals Republican Turnout Challenges – and the Trajectory of the Texas GOP
The April 2026 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll was the latest in a handful of surveys that included hypothetical two-party, head-to-head matchups between either John Cornyn or Ken Paxton as the the Republican candidate and Democrat James Talarico. In each matchup in the Texas Politics Project Poll, fielded April 10-20, Talarico led – by 7 points against Cornyn (40% to 33%) and by an indistinguishable 8 points against Paxton (42% to 34%).
It’s far too soon to conclude that Talarico is ahead or that in the fall Texas will turn…well, you know. But digging below the toplines does illustrate the reasons for many Texas Republican stakeholders’ concerns that the main challenges facing the state’s hegemonic party will be Republican enthusiasm and turnout in the face of a potential surge in the Democratic vote. The Senate head-to-heads illustrate how much the vicious Senate primary is contributing to these challenges – and suggests that the conventional wisdom about Cornyn being the superior general election candidate fails to fully recognize the preferences of the Republican electorate in Texas.
While causes for concern abound, at this moment in political time, the most telling internal illustration of the nature of this problem can be found in Republican views of the two candidates still attempting to claw their way out of the Senate primary. Both Paxton and Cornyn elicit negative sentiments from significant slices of the Republican electorate in the head-to-heads, which reflect correspondingly negative views of each evident in their individual favorability ratings. Should these negative sentiments continue into the fall general election, they threaten to have a dampening effect on Republican turnout in an election environment already more inhospitable to Republican incumbents than in the last three cycles.
While the poll results also found Republicans maintaining advantages in the races for Governor and Lt. Governor, as well as in generic ballots for Congress and the legislature, these margins are narrower than the baseline advantages generally ascribed to Republican candidates.
Two key considerations limit how much can be extrapolated from Talarico’s lead in both results, neither of which found the Austin state representative earning a majority: first, the significant interval between the April polling and the general election, and second, the impact of the ongoing run-off election in the Republican race, which will not be resolved until the end of May.
The first consideration is a familiar one to those accustomed to interpreting polling data collected early in an election year. Six months remain between now and the November election. Patterns in public opinion can shift as campaigns unfold and as voters' attention increases — and polling conducted closer to election day is, unsurprisingly, more indicative of the final outcome.
The impact of the timing of the poll relative to Election Day is directly evident in the data. While nearly one in three voters (32%) said that they had heard “a lot” about the 2026 U.S. senate race in a battery of items assessing attention to political or other newsworthy stories, this represented a new high-water mark for that item. Texans’ attention to the Senate contest still trailed other major stories like the war in Iran, the Artemis moon mission, funding for the department of homeland security, and the “No Kings” protests. This lack of general attention, no doubt, fuels the nearly one in five registered voters (19%) in both the Cornyn-Talarico and Paxton-Talarico match-ups who didn’t opt for one of the proposed candidates.
The second consideration — the implications of the still-unresolved Republican nomination — is much less straightforward. With millions of dollars of ongoing spending in the service of deeply negative and personal campaigning continuing through the final weeks of the contest, the scabrous runoff campaign between Cornyn and Paxton prevents any straightforward assessment of the state of the Republican electorate in the general election.
A basic look at partisan cross tabulations from the UT poll illustrates why one shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the direct predictive value of the head-to-heads. As we wrote in the initial post accompanying the poll’s release on April 29:
While Talarico is the choice of 80% or more of Democrats in the two match-ups (80% versus Cornyn, 82% versus Paxton), neither Paxton nor Cornyn succeeds in attracting the same level of support among their Republican base: Paxton is the choice of 63% of Republicans, with 11% choosing Talarico, 6% someone else, and 20% with no opinion. Cornyn is the choice of a slightly smaller 60% of Republicans (well within the margin of error for this subgroup estimate), with 10% choosing Talarico, 9% someone else, and 21% with no opinions.
The asymmetry in partisan support in the head-to-heads illustrates the immediate impact of the ongoing conflict among the GOP base. The brutality of the Cornyn-Paxton fight threatens the ability of the state’s long-running majority party to reunify its base in order to mobilize GOP voters for a fall election in which Democrats are likely to have the political winds at their backs.
But just how much resistance might we expect from supporters of the losing run-off candidate when asked to turn out to vote for the winning candidate in the fall? Digging deeper into the data illustrates the mobilization challenges facing Republicans.
The most obvious way to look at this is to use the current UT/TxPP data to calculate the share of Republican voters, now in the midst of the heated run-off election, willing to state their intention to vote for either Cornyn or Paxton rather than Talarico in November; and, by extension, the share of Republican voters who were only willing to commit to one of either Cornyn or Paxton in the hypothetical match-up against Talarico.
Even with the increased attention and, likely, historic amount of money being spent, the focus of the run-off is on the tiny slice of the electorate who will turn out to vote in that election, while the general election calculus in Texas for the majority party will prioritize maximizing turnout among the state’s Republican voters.
Among Texas Republicans, half (50%) supported both Cornyn and Paxton over Talarico in a hypothetical Senate match-up. Among the remaining voters:
- 13% said that they would be supporting Paxton against Talarico, but withheld support from Cornyn;
- 10% said that they would be supporting Cornyn against Talarico, but withheld support from Paxton;
- 26% made up of some combination of those GOP voters who said that they hadn’t thought about it enough to have an opinion and/or said that they would be supporting someone else.
The potential loss of support, or additional cost in mobilizing, 10% or 13% of the GOP base resistant to the eventual opponent to Talarico would create a logistical challenge for Republicans if early indications of a Democratic surge are actually realized in the fall. Who are these GOP holdouts, and how strong is their resistance to Cornyn and Paxton?
| Texas Republicans and the U.S. Senate Contest (April 2026 University of Texas / Texas Politics Project Polling) |
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| Republicans Supporting Cornyn and Paxton | 50% |
| Republicans Supporting Paxton, but not Cornyn | 13% |
| Republicans Supporting Cornyn, but not Paxton | 10% |
| Other/Undecided | 26% |
Looking at the same results by the intensity of Republican party identification shows similar levels of resistance to each among key groups in the Republican base.
Self-identified “strong Republicans” make up large shares of both the Cornyn-only (59%) and Paxton-only (67%) votes, and, not surprisingly, a similarly large share of the unified Republican vote (67%). For scale: self-identified “strong Republicans” constituted 30% of the overall sample, and 60% of all Republican voters. “Strong Republicans” are reliable voters, and not surprisingly, 56% of them say they would vote for either candidate, while a slightly larger share said that they were Paxton only supporters (15%) compared to Cornyn only supporters (10%).
A similar pattern emerges with respect to ideology, but here, we see the fracture between four-term incumbent Senator John Cornyn and the GOP base that has allowed Paxton to mount such a strong challenge. The poll finds 41% of Republicans who say that they will be supporting both candidates also describing themselves as “extremely conservative,” nearly identical to Paxton only supporters (43%), but significantly higher than the share of Cornyn-only voters who describe themselves as “extremely conservative” (17%); 45% of Republican, Cornyn-only voters identify as “somewhat conservative.” And while 63% of “extremely conservative” Republicans (33% of all Republicans in the April survey) said that they would vote for both candidates, the gap widens: 17% would only support Paxton compared to 5% who say they would only support Cornyn.
Another way of assessing the potential threat of low Republican turnout is to examine the favorability ratings of the candidates among these distinct GOP subgroups. Here, the poll finds Paxton-only supporters holding slightly more intensely negative views towards Cornyn than Cornyn-only voters hold towards Paxton. Among Republicans who say that they will vote for Paxton, but not Cornyn, 51% hold a negative view of Cornyn, with 41% indicating a very unfavorable view. Among Republicans who indicate support for Cornyn, but not Paxton, more than half, 53%, also hold an unfavorable view of the Attorney General, but a somewhat lower 33% hold a “very unfavorable” view. This implies slightly more willingness among Cornyn-only voters to eventually cast a vote for Paxton than vice versa. (Though slight as this might be, small increments of voters will be hard-fought in this mid-term environment.)
| Views among "Cornyn-only" and "Paxton-only" Republicans (April 2026 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll) |
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| Cornyn-Only Voters' Views towards Paxton | Paxton-Only Voters' Views towards Cornyn | Committed Republican Views towards Paxton | Committed Republican Views towards Cornyn | |
|
Very Favorable |
8% | 7% | 32% | 22% |
| Somewhat favorable | 17% | 13% | 42% | 44% |
| Neither | 17% | 22% | 14% | 11% |
| Somewhat unfavorable | 20% | 10% | 9% | 14% |
| Very unfavorable | 33% | 41% | 1% | 6% |
| No opinion | 5% | 8% | 3% | 3% |
| "Cornyn-only" voters are those Republicans who indicated that they would be supporting John Cornyn over Democrat James Talarico in a hypothetical head-to-head Senate match-up, but did not indicate support for Ken Paxton in a hypothetical race against Talarico. "Paxton-only" voters are those Republicans who indicated that they would be supporting Ken Paxton over Democrat James Talarico in a hypothetical head-to-head Senate match-up, but did not indicate support for John Cornyn in a hypothetical race against Talarico. "Committed Republicans" include those Republicans who indicated that they would vote for both Cornyn and Paxton over Talarico in a hypothetical head-to-head contest. | ||||
Among Republicans who say that they’ll be voting for both candidates, 66% hold a favorable view of the incumbent Senator, with 20% holding an unfavorable view, while 76% hold a favorable view of the Attorney General, with 10% holding an unfavorable view.
(These small differences in the respective shares and comparative intensity of favorable and unfavorable views among Republicans, and in particular, among Republicans expected to be overrepresented in run-off elections, is likely informing speculation that Paxton holds an advantage in the much anticipated run-off.)
The clear need to consolidate Republican support after the primary adds a state-level challenge to the expected drag on Republican enthusiasm fueled by Donald Trump’s sagging approval numbers and the sources of that discontent.
Trump remains central to both the Republican brand and Republicans’ need to gin up their voters’ enthusiasm in the fall, even in the face of his toxicity to (and countermobilizing potential among) Democrats and independents. He has already been an integral presence in the Senate primary — from his still withheld but much discussed endorsement in the race to his need for both candidates to demonstrate continued fealty — and he is likely to play a large role in the general election campaign.
Alignment with Trump was a requirement for statewide as well as legislative and congressional candidates during the primary season: In the April poll, 82% of Republicans approved of the job Trump was doing and 13% disapproved, significantly better than the 45% approval and 50% disapproval that he received from the overall electorate. His personal favorability numbers followed a similar pattern. Trump remains the embodiment of the Republican brand, though his strong approval numbers among his base remains below his highs at the outset of his second term.
Yet whoever emerges from the Senate primary will need to triangulate between a Republican electorate still largely enthralled with Trump, and the remaining voters who are somewhere in between, with many voters outside Trump's base increasingly and decidedly not under the president’s spell. While candidates frequently need to reposition their appeals after winning a contested primary, the intensity of the polarized views towards the president goes beyond the usual challenges of “moving to the middle.” There isn’t much of a middle where Trump is concerned.
The more Republican friendly results in polling for the top state offices demonstrates a more familiar, if narrower than normal, baseline advantage for Gov. Greg Abbott in the governor's race. (Abbott led Democrat Gina Hinojosa by 6 points, though his 78% job approval was just below Trump’s in April). Abbott’s deep pockets and secure position with his base provides some insulation from the Trumpian cross pressures that will define the national election. But Trump will remain a largely unavoidable factor in the race.
Looking again at a different set of crosstabs for the Senate head-to-heads, Trump’s approval is highest and most intense among the half of Republican voters who supported both Paxton and Cornyn: 93% approve (62% strongly) while 5% disapprove. In an echo of Paxton’s most potent criticism of Cornyn, views of Trump are significantly more supportive among “Paxton-only” Republicans (91% approve/3% disapprove) than among “Cornyn-only” supporters (61% approve/30% disapprove). So the share of “Cornyn-only” voters disapproving of Trump registered ten times higher than among Paxton only supporters. However much Cornyn seems the epitome of Republicanism to a certain strata of Republican stakeholders, his most fervent supporters are much more anti-Trump than the Republican base as a whole.
Should Paxton emerge as the nominee, the non-trivial share of Republican voters who harbor antipathy toward both Paxton and Trump will likely require some degree of persuasion to rejoin the GOP fold in the fall. Paxton’s unconditional fealty to Trump will continue to be an asset among most, though not all, Republicans, but will provide an easy target for Democrats looking to exploit the President’s capacity to counter-mobilize their base.
Should Cornyn pull off a victory in the runoff, the matter of his allegiance to Trump will be re-litigated in a general election arena. In the face of Paxton and MAGA supporters’ charges that Cornyn has been disloyal to the president, Cornyn’s campaign has argued strenuously that the Senator has supported the President’s agenda. Whatever the evidence each offers on that count, Cornyn’s die-hard supporters are clearly much more likely to be critical of the president than Republicans overall. Cornyn’s central challenge would be balancing his need to mobilize the votes of Republicans who question his MAGA credentials with an effort to minimize the countermobilizing effect of the inescapable association of Texas Republicans with Donald Trump among Democratic and independent voters.
The head-to-head results thus point more toward unresolved issues among the Republican electorate that might fly in the face of the conventional wisdom circulating among Republican poobahs since the beginning of the race.
To the extent Republican Party leaders and campaign mechanics worry about mobilizing their base in the fall, Paxton may be the better bet given that his supporters look more like the Texas Republican Party overall – and hold slightly more intensely negative views of their Senator than Cornyn voters hold of their attorney general, while holding more positive views of a president who will define the Republican brand in the 2026 election.
This doesn’t mean Paxton would have a glide path to a November victory. But he does appear better able to consolidate a Republican base that clearly reflects the dominance of Trump and the long-present forces he, along with Texas allies like Ken Paxton, have unleashed in the Texas GOP – reducing the need to persuade voters who, at this point in time, largely appear unlikely to be open to considering any Trump-aligned candidate. Cornyn’s calculus is comparatively grim: it will be difficult for Texas Republicans to distinguish their candidates from Donald Trump no matter which Senate contender is at the top of the ballot, Cornyn suffers from both comparatively weaker Republican support in today’s party, but the inability to meaningfully separate himself from the president enough to persuade anti-Trump voters.
In either case, the GOP party apparatus confronts a mobilization challenge unlike any they’ve faced during their long reign over Texas. Party leaders and other professional Republicans are poised to face the reality of the trajectory of their base in the electorate after the tandem transformations wrought by the Tea Party and the consequent rise of Donald Trump as the party’s defining presence. It’s been an article of faith among many GOP professionals that Cornyn would be the stronger general election candidate. But this likely underestimated Paxon’s fit with the current GOP electorate, and overestimated Cornyn’s ability to reach out to “persuadable” voters. If Cornyn epitomized the ascendant Texas GOP when voters first sent him to Washington in 2002, Ken Paxton may well occupy a similar space in the Texas GOP of 2026, however much the holdovers from Cornyn’s heyday want to deny it.