Trump races Texas to keep Paxton’s Senate seat

People waited in lines that stretched for blocks in Lubbock on Oct. 27, 2026, to see Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. A sitting president had not come to the city in 34 years, and Donald Trump was holding his own rally less than three miles away.

That split stage, on the same night in the same red city, framed a Texas Senate race now measured in days. Election Day is one week away. Trump made stops in Corpus Christi and Lubbock to lift Republican Ken Paxton. Talarico answered with rallies in Midland, Amarillo, and Lubbock. It was Trump’s first public visit to Lubbock since he began his political career.

Paxton briefly joined Trump onstage in Lubbock. “Is it not awesome and amazing to be onstage with the greatest president in my lifetime?” he told the crowd. He said the day had begun with Trump in Corpus Christi, and that as they arrived in Lubbock the president told him he does not normally do two rallies for any candidate. “He said, ‘I must really like you.’” Paxton answered, “Mr. President, I really like you, too.”

Trump handed Marco Rubio a speaking role onstage at the Lubbock rally after Rubio had stayed off the midterm trail until that day. In Corpus Christi, the crowd chanted Rubio’s name when Trump introduced him. The choice put a wider Republican face beside the president in a contest that has tightened enough to demand it.

Talarico’s campaign said more than 4,000 people signed up for the Lubbock event. In that line, Tim Jones said, “We’re all closet Democrats.” He went further: “There are a lot of people who are finally upset at gas prices, diesel prices, inflation, lies, the war, all of it. It’s the corruption, tearing down part of the White House to build this vanity ballroom. I mean, it’s just pathetic. So people finally are deciding, ‘We’ll get out to vote.’”

Talarico cast the race in the same register. “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis. But we can change that in this election, in this state, in this race.” He added, “We are running against the embodiment of this corrupt system. We are running against the most corrupt politician in Texas.”

That is the strongest case his side is making, in its own words: that prices, distrust, and Paxton’s record are moving voters who once stayed home or voted Republican, even in West Texas. The numbers give the claim room. An Emerson College/Nexstar Media October poll had Talarico at 48 percent and Paxton at 46 percent. A Rasmussen Reports survey found the candidates tied. The MS NOW/FiftyPlusOne polling average stood at Talarico 49.2 percent and Paxton 46.5 percent. A Talarico victory would be Texas’s first Democratic U.S. Senate win since 1988 and would end a 32-year drought in which the state has elected no Democrat to statewide office.

Republicans meet that threat with the president, the base, and money. Trump referred to Talarico derisively as “Talafreako.” The crowd and Talarico later embraced the term. Almost $560 million has been spent on ads in the Senate race, according to AdImpact, with Republican spending about $400 million of that total. Elon Musk-aligned groups sent at least $158 million from a Senate GOP leadership-linked super PAC to a group boosting Paxton, after $10 million given in August. Overall ad spending by both parties in Texas this cycle has topped $1 billion.

The conservative stake is not abstract. The outcome of this seat can decide which party holds the Senate for the final two years of Trump’s term and whether the president can advance the agenda voters already chose. Texas has been the firewall. Turning it would hand Democrats a pickup they have sought for a generation and shrink the margin for judicial confirmations, appropriations, and the ordinary work of a governing majority. Paxton’s public bond with Trump is the Republican answer to a candidate who has not generated the same electricity on his own. Two rallies in one day, in cities the party once treated as automatic, show how close the party’s own side now judges the fight.