Trump Makes Third Texas Trip in a Month as Paxton-Talarico Senate Race Tightens

SAN ANTONIO — Donald Trump is back in Texas. Again. The president is due to take the stage at San Antonio’s Freeman Coliseum on Wednesday evening at 6 p.m. CT alongside Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton — his third trip to the state in a month, after headlining a midterm convention in Dallas on September 9 and 10 and rallying voters in Denton on October 1. When a president who won a state by 14 points keeps showing up in that state like it’s a swing county, the panic is doing the talking.

Texas was supposed to be settled. Republicans now lead the Senate 53-47, and losing the seat here on November 3 would complicate their path to keeping that majority — not to mention mark an embarrassing stumble in the party’s longtime stronghold. But polls keep showing Paxton trailing Democrat James Talarico, and the president’s rescue mission has the energy of a man trying to put out a fire he partly started.

The raceToss-up territory

The numbers tell the story. A New York Times/Siena poll conducted September 21 to 30 had Talarico ahead of Paxton 51% to 49% among 615 likely voters — within the 5.2-point margin of error, but an extraordinary place for a Democrat to be in Texas. A Siena College poll released October 3 widened the gap: Talarico 51%, Paxton 45%. The Cook Political Report has moved the race to toss-up.

That’s remarkable in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988 — and where Democrats haven’t won a statewide race at all since 1994. Trump carried Texas by 14 points in 2024. The fact that Republicans are now spending heavily to defend ground they expected to win comfortably tells you everything about how this midterm is going.

An uneasy alliance"A pain in the ass sometimes"

The strangest part of Wednesday’s rally is the relationship on display. Trump surprised many Republicans back in May when he backed Paxton over longtime Sen. John Cornyn in the party runoff — party leaders had seen Cornyn as the safer bet. The president picked his fighter, and he got one: Paxton carries heavy baggage into the general election, from bribery allegations to marital drama that have shadowed him for years — the kind of candidate party leaders quietly preferred to avoid.

Since then, the alliance has looked awkward. Trump has publicly mocked Paxton’s clothes, speaking style and appearance, and last week called him "a pain in the ass sometimes" before adding that Republicans "need Ken so badly." Then there’s the recording, according to the New York Times, of Paxton telling donors that "the numbers, when we did that convention, it dropped our numbers" after the Trump-centered Dallas convention. His campaign has disputed that the remarks were criticism of Trump, but you don’t dispute a recording you’re comfortable with.

James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told Reuters that losing the Senate race would be "devastating for Republicans and devastating for Donald Trump" given the president’s personal investment in Paxton. "I think the president clearly will do a lot to try to avoid that outcome," Henson said. Hence tonight’s rally.

Beyond the SenateA battleground nobody ordered

The Senate race isn’t the only Texas fire. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is in a closer-than-expected re-election fight against Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa: the same Times/Siena poll had Hinojosa at 49% to Abbott’s 46%, within the margin of error. Abbott told a law enforcement roundtable in Houston on October 5 that he wouldn’t appear with Trump in San Antonio because of previously scheduled campaign events — though he was quick to add that Trump helps turnout: "When the president shows up, it creates excitement among the base."

Republicans are also defending competitive House seats in South Texas, where new district lines — drawn by the GOP-led legislature and called a partisan gerrymander by Democrats — have created unusual openings. In San Antonio, Republican Carlos De La Cruz, an Air Force veteran running in one of the newly redrawn districts, is expected to speak at Wednesday’s rally.

Renee Cross of the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs says the underlying numbers show Texas isn’t as conservative as its reputation: about 45% Republican, 40% Democrat, 15% independent in registration. "Among independents, Trump is polling terribly," she told USA Today. And Mark Jones, a political-science professor at Rice University, put it bluntly to USA Today: "Republicans are really on their heels in Texas."

The Catch-22He can inspire as much as he can repel

Trump’s answer to all of it is more Trump. His 32-day campaign blitz has taken him through Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio and Nebraska — red states that were expected to be safely in hand — while Vice President JD Vance has campaigned in Alaska. "My rallies are saving the Republican Party, again," Trump posted on Truth Social this week.

But rallying the base may be, in the words of University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus, "necessary but not sufficient" for Paxton. "Trump’s visits are a Catch-22," Rottinghaus told Reuters. "The president can inspire as much as he can repel."

The deeper problem for the Texas GOP is demographic. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 24% of Hispanic voters approving of Trump’s performance — a group that was central to his 2024 success, when he won nearly half the Hispanic vote, and a bigger share of the electorate in Texas than most states. That’s the crowd a San Antonio rally needs to energize. It’s also, increasingly, the crowd that isn’t feeling it.

Early voting begins in about two weeks. Trump lands in San Antonio tonight betting that his presence moves the needle. The polling — and the president’s own nominee’s leaked doubts about what that presence did in Dallas — suggests the needle may be moving in more than one direction. Texas has been the Republican Party’s bank account for three decades. On November 3, we find out whether the account is overdrawn.