Two new Texas polls bracket a close Senate race; forecast holds at 70-30

Two new surveys of the Texas Senate race point the same direction with different force. A ReconMR/Siena Research Institute/Texas A&M Bush School poll of 614 likely voters, fielded September 8-11, had Democrat James Talarico at 49 percent and Republican Ken Paxton at 43. An Emerson College survey for Nexstar of 1,000 likely voters, fielded September 12-14, had Talarico at 47.4 percent and Paxton at 46.4, with 1.9 percent for others — a one-point gap that is too small to treat as a lead.

Our forecast did not move. The model gives Talarico a 70 in 100 chance in the open seat now held by Republican John Cornyn, who is not on the ballot, against 30 percent for Paxton. The mean projected margin ticked from D+3.1 to D+3.2, and the 5th-to-95th percentile range narrowed fractionally, from R+6.7 to D+13.0 to R+6.5 to D+13.0. That is the smallest movement our runs register: the new polls confirmed what the average already contained rather than adding to it.

The spread between the two surveys is worth noting on its own. Six points and one point are both consistent with a race our model puts near a low-single-digit Democratic edge, and with a distribution that still includes Republican wins by mid-single digits at the fifth percentile. A 70 percent chance is not a result.

Texas matters to the national picture because the Senate is close in our simulations. Our model gives Democrats a 47 percent chance of winning Senate control and Republicans 53 percent, with a mean of 50.0 Democratic seats. Democrats need 51 seats for control; Republicans need 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to them. Our generic-ballot average stands at D+7.2 across 27 polls in a 45-day window.