Talarico leads by five in Texas poll; our forecast returns to 68-32

A YouGov poll sponsored by Univision, fielded August 27 to September 4 among 1,000 registered voters, puts Democrat James Talarico at 48 percent and Republican Ken Paxton at 43 percent in the open Texas Senate race.

Our model now gives Talarico a 68 in 100 chance of winning the seat, with a mean margin of D+2.9 and a 5th-to-95th percentile range running from R+7.2 to D+13.1. The previous run, from 2:32 PM ET today, had the race at 61-39 with a mean margin of D+1.7 and a range of R+8.5 to D+11.8. So the new survey moved the estimate seven points toward the Democrat and narrowed the distribution slightly at both ends. It also returns the forecast to the same 68-32 we published on August 31, after a tied poll pulled it back in between.

That is the whole of the change. The direction is consistent with what our average has been showing in this race for several weeks, and a single survey of registered voters does not settle a contest our own model still treats as genuinely competitive: roughly a third of our simulations have Paxton winning, and the 90 percent interval spans a mid-single-digit Republican win as well as a double-digit Democratic one.

Nationally, our model gives Democrats a 42 in 100 chance of winning Senate control. Democrats need 51 seats for a majority and Republicans need 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to the Republicans; our mean Democratic seat count is 49.8. Our generic-ballot average stands at D+6.3 across 25 polls in the past 45 days. In the House, our model puts the Democratic chance of a majority at 94 percent, with a mean of 239.4 seats against the 218 needed.