Tuesday night, Texas Republicans handed Donald Trump another scalp. Four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, a pillar of the GOP establishment, fell to Attorney General Ken Paxton — and the Lone Star State is now set for the most consequential Senate race it has seen in a generation.

The Senate Runoff: Paxton Routs Cornyn

With Trump’s late endorsement acting as a rocket booster, Ken Paxton dispatched John Cornyn by a staggering margin, capturing roughly 62% of the Republican vote as of Tuesday night’s returns. Cornyn, who had led the March primary with 41.9% to Paxton’s 40.8%, found himself on the wrong side of MAGA gravity once the president weighed in just one week before Election Day.

Paxton, thanking Trump from the stage at his Plano watch party, declared the president’s endorsement “the most powerful force in politics.” Cornyn, for his part, told supporters he would back the Republican ticket in November — a pledge that landed with the hollow ring of a man who spent months warning that a Paxton nomination would be a “dead weight” on the GOP in the general.

“Texas will be the radical left’s number-one priority,” Paxton said Tuesday night. He wasn’t wrong about that.

Down-Ballot Results: A Full Picture

The Senate race grabbed the headlines, but several other runoffs shaped the November battlefield in important ways.

Voter Turnout: A Tale of Two Electorates

More than 671,000 Texans cast early ballots in the Senate runoff alone — an extraordinary figure for what is typically a sleepy second round of voting. Historically, Texas runoffs draw only a fraction of primary voters; in 2022, just 8.2% of registered voters participated in the runoff. Tuesday appears on track to shatter that precedent.

The Republican surge in the runoff stands in contrast to a striking Democratic edge in March. In the March 3 primaries, Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans by nearly 7% — the first time since 2020 that Democrats led primary turnout in Texas — with 2.3 million Democrats casting ballots versus 2.16 million Republicans. The energy was palpable across the state, including in historically red Tarrant County, where Democrats outpaced Republicans in early voting for the first time in recent memory.

Can Texas Turn Blue in November?

The honest answer is: it’s a long shot — but the longest shot in a very long time. A Democrat has not won a U.S. Senate seat in Texas since 1988, and not a single statewide office since 1994. Trump carried the state by nearly 14 points in 2024. These are towering headwinds.

But several factors conspire to make November genuinely unpredictable. First, Talarico is a singular candidate — a former public school teacher turned Presbyterian seminarian whose populist, faith-inflected message has cracked open communities Democrats haven’t reached in years. His March primary total shattered Colin Allred’s 2024 Senate primary benchmark by more than 1.3 million votes.

Second, Paxton is a uniquely vulnerable opponent. He has been indicted on securities fraud charges, impeached by the Texas House in 2023 (though acquitted by the Senate), and has faced persistent allegations of abuse of office and an extramarital affair. Cornyn spent millions warning Republicans that Paxton would be a liability in November — and those attacks now become Talarico’s ammunition.

Third, there are roughly 3 million independent voters in Texas whose partisan home is genuinely in play. As data modelers at L2 have noted, neither party holds a majority of registered Texans — and statewide Republican margins have been tightening. Ted Cruz won re-election in 2024 by just 53%; Cornyn won with the same margin in 2020. Texas may not be red so much as it is a state where Republicans have reliably turned out independents. Paxton’s baggage and polarizing persona may not.

The five months ahead will be a referendum on Trump’s Texas, Paxton’s scandals, and whether Talarico can sustain the extraordinary enthusiasm that lit up March’s primaries. The polls, the money, and the history all point to a Republican hold. But in 2026 Texas, for the first time in a generation, Democrats have reason to believe in something more than moral victories.

“What if Texas has actually been purple this entire time?” — Independent Voter News, March 2026

The Lone Star is hanging in the balance.

When the polls closed Tuesday night on the May 26 primary runoff, Travis County had recorded one of its most active off-cycle election performances in recent memory. Combining the five-day early voting period with Election Day returns, the county logged a combined total of roughly 97,540 votes across both party primaries.

Party Comparison

Democrats outvoted Republicans by a margin of 54,609 to 42,931 — a gap of nearly 12,000 ballots, or about 56% Democratic to 44% Republican of all runoff votes cast in the county. That edge held across both in-person and mail channels, though it was sharpest among mail voters: Democrats returned 5,584 mail ballots versus 2,175 for Republicans, a ratio of more than 2.5 to 1.

Early Voting vs. Election Day

Of the Democratic total, 33,152 votes were cast during the early voting window (May 18–22), meaning roughly 21,457 Democrats showed up on Election Day itself. On the Republican side, 27,247 early votes were recorded, implying approximately 15,684 Republicans voted on Election Day — a substantial surge that likely reflects the nationally watched Paxton-Cornyn dynamic driving GOP turnout.

“Democrats cast more than 2.5× as many mail ballots as Republicans — a pattern that has become structurally embedded in Travis County runoffs.”

Ballot Integrity and Reconciliation

The preliminary reconciliation documents, signed by presiding judges on May 27, show a clean accounting on both sides. Of 54,609 Democratic ballots cast, 199 were rejected or pending — just 0.035% of voters — leaving 54,391 counted ballots. The Republican reconciliation was equally tight: of 42,931 ballots, 120 were rejected or pending, yielding 42,813 counted.

Both reconciliation documents flag “fleeing voters and unreconciled party details” in the notes field — standard language indicating a small number of voters who checked in at a polling location but left before casting a ballot. An additional 3,499 Democratic and 831 Republican mail ballots had not yet been returned as of reconciliation and could still be added to the final certified count.

What It Means

Travis County’s numbers reinforce a picture already visible in the statewide data: Democratic enthusiasm in this runoff was real and measurable, not just a polling artifact. A combined 10.5% turnout in a primary runoff — historically among the quietest elections on the calendar — is a signal that both parties have highly motivated bases heading into November. For Talarico, the local numbers are encouraging. For Paxton, they are a reminder that the state’s largest Democratic county is not going quietly.