Democrats swear this is the year they finally win a statewide race in Ted Cruz’s home state.
Plenty of conservatives brush off the scary polls as liberal fiction.
And Ted Cruz just looked at one set of numbers even he can’t wave away.
Ted Cruz Skipped the Pep Talk and Went Straight to the Bad News
US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) usually sounds like a man itching for the next fight.
Not this time. On the latest episode of his podcast, The Verdict, Cruz opened with six words no campaign consultant wants to hear from a sitting Republican Senator in the final stretch before an election.
“Overall, I am deeply, deeply worried,” Cruz said.
Then he laid out exactly why.
“What we’re seeing across the country is massive Democrat turnout. Democrats are showing up. They’re energized. They hate, hate, hate Donald Trump. And I don’t want to bury the lead. I want to start with the bad news right now. If the election were over today, if just the early votes cast so far were counted, Republicans would lose massively. It would not be close. We would lose both the House and the Senate. It would be a bloodbath,” Cruz said.
But he saved the real gut punch for his own backyard.
“By the way, Texas is excruciatingly close. Understand, we could lose Texas. Let me repeat that. We could lose Texas. And by the way, not just the Senate race. We could lose every single statewide race in Texas. That’s how close these numbers are,” he warned.
Every single one. That means the Senate seat Democrat state Representative James Talarico wants to take from Attorney General Ken Paxton. It means Governor Greg Abbott’s bid for a record fourth term against Democrat Gina Hinojosa. It means everything further down the ballot, too.
Cruz then went after a comfort blanket plenty of folks on the Right pull over their heads every October.
“Now, some conservatives, they say, ‘I don’t trust the polls. The polls are all wrong.’ Well, let me tell you, there is a bias in the polls. They do skew left, but I can tell you, having run a lot of campaigns, having examined a lot of numbers, these data are not fake. The Democrats are massively out-turning out the Republicans. We gotta fix that,” Cruz said.
He also called the November 3 vote “the most important midterm, I believe, of our lifetimes.”
The Early Vote Totals Back Up Every Word
Cruz isn’t working off a hunch.
With one day of early voting left, Texans had already cast more than 6.4 million ballots, smashing the old midterm record of 5.5 million. Harris County alone logged about 862,700 voters, compared with roughly 564,500 at the same point in 2022.
Derek Ryan of Ryan Data and Research found Democrats holding a 115,000-vote edge among early voters after the first week. At the same stage four years ago, Republicans led by about 400,000.
“I think the story over those first seven days is the surge in Democrats voting in those first few days compared to their Republican counterparts,” Ryan said.
The polls point the same direction. Talarico led in five of six public surveys released during the last full week of October, though every one of those leads sat inside the margin of error. Abbott holds roughly a two-point edge in the RealClearPolling average, and his top strategist has already called one poll showing Hinojosa ahead “bogus.”
Now, a caveat worth keeping in mind. Early votes aren’t the final score.
Texas Republicans love their Election Day. A Texas Politics Project survey found 63 percent of Democrats planned to vote early, compared with 48 percent of Republicans, and 40 percent of Republicans said they’d wait for Election Day itself. So a Democrat lead in the early count was always coming. The size of it is what has Cruz losing sleep.
Ted Cruz Already Survived One Record-Breaking Scare
And if anybody in Texas politics knows what a close midterm feels like, it’s Cruz.
That old 5.5 million early-vote record dates back to 2018. Democrat Beto O’Rourke raised more than $80 million that year, and the national press spent months measuring the drapes for him in Washington, DC. Willie Nelson even played a rally for O’Rourke in Austin that fall, which stung plenty of Texans who grew up wearing out his records.
Cruz held on by about 215,000 votes, roughly 51 percent to 48 percent.
Donald Trump helped drag him across the line. Trump flew into Houston that October for a packed arena rally and swapped out his old “Lyin’ Ted” nickname from the 2016 primary for a new one: “Beautiful Ted.”
So when Cruz says the 2026 numbers look worse, he’s grading them against his own near-death experience.
Where the Party Bosses Spent the Spring
But Cruz left one uncomfortable chapter out of his podcast.
Paxton beat incumbent Senator John Cornyn in a bruising May runoff, and the Senate GOP establishment fought him every inch of the way. Senate Majority Leader John Thune backed Cornyn, called Paxton “scandal-plagued,” and answered Trump’s endorsement of Paxton with a curt “It’s his decision.”
Thune’s super PAC network came around after the primary. Texas PAC, an arm of the Senate Leadership Fund, disclosed more than $148 million in spending for Paxton by mid-October. But the National Republican Senatorial Committee still wasn’t running coordinated ads with him as of late September, and those early months of trashing Paxton handed Democrats a free supply of attack material.
Cornyn, the man who helped write the 2022 gun control law Joe Biden signed, has kept his checkbook shut for the nominee.
“Paxton’s a poor campaigner,” Cornyn said as he announced he’d raise money for Senate Republicans everywhere except Texas.
He then hosted a Dallas fundraiser for battleground Senate candidates with former President George W Bush and left Paxton off the list. Asked about spending in Texas, Cornyn warned against putting money into “lost causes in some of these places that aren’t looking good.” Pressed on whether Paxton counted as one, he answered, “I’m going to leave that up to the voters.”
MAGA reinforcements picked up some of the slack. Trump’s political operation jumped in, and Lone Star Liberty PAC, backed by a $10 million check from Elon Musk, kept Paxton on the air.
Michigan tells a very different story. When progressive Abdul El-Sayed knocked off Haley Stevens, the candidate Democrat leaders wanted, Chuck Schumer and the party machine lined up behind the winner instead of pouting. Democrats circle the wagons around their rebels. Republican insiders spent the spring trying to sink theirs.
Anger Is Doing the Heavy Lifting
Notice what Cruz pinned the Democrat surge on. He didn’t mention Talarico’s ideas or Hinojosa’s platform. He said Democrats “hate, hate, hate Donald Trump.”
That’s turnout fueled by fury at a President whose name isn’t even on the ballot.
And it lets Talarico skate past his own record. He sells himself as a gentle seminary student with a moderate streak, yet he voted against the 2023 Texas law banning transgender medical procedures for minors. Rage at Trump buries that kind of detail.
The stakes stretch well past Austin. Republicans hold a 53-47 Senate majority, and Democrats need a net gain of four seats. Republican-held seats in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas are all in play. A Democrat Senate would mean subpoenas instead of confirmations, fresh pushes for amnesty, and louder talk about expanding the Supreme Court.
Cynics will say Cruz is running the oldest play in politics, scaring his own voters off the couch with a doom speech. Maybe so. But the early-vote totals are public record, and they don’t care about motives.
Close numbers could also mean a long election night, with the outcome hanging until the last rural counties report.
But the comparison Cruz knows best sits right there in the record books. In 2018, the last time Texans broke the midterm early-voting record, Ted Cruz kept his seat by about 215,000 votes. This time the record fell with a full day of early voting still on the calendar.
Sources: Mediaite; Newsweek; The Dallas Morning News; NBC DFW; The Texas Tribune; The Washington Sun; Punchbowl News; CBS News Texas; The Texan; Fox 7 Austin; MultiState