2026 Election Tracker
Texas Election Odds - 2026 Live Betting Odds & Voting History
Texas 2026 election odds for Greg Abbott's record fourth term, the Paxton-Cornyn Senate runoff result, all 38 House races on the new map, plus Texas history.
| Electoral votes | 40 |
|---|---|
| 2024 presidential result | Trump 56.2% / Harris 42.5% (R+13.7 margin) |
| Current governor | Greg Abbott (R), running for 4th term |
| U.S. senators | John Cornyn (R, on 2026 ballot), Ted Cruz (R) |
| 2026 races on the ballot | Governor, U.S. Senate, attorney general, all 38 U.S. House seats under new map |
| Cook PVI | R+5 |
Texas is the second-largest state in the country and the largest reliably Republican state, with 40 electoral votes and a 2026 ballot that produced some of the most consequential primary results of the cycle. On May 26, Attorney General Ken Paxton crushed four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn 64-36 in the Republican Senate runoff, one week after President Trump endorsed Paxton and ended one of the most expensive Senate primaries in Texas history. State Sen. Mayes Middleton beat Rep. Chip Roy in the GOP attorney general runoff the same night, and a new congressional map drawn at President Trump's request and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2025 is expected to add five Republican seats to the state's House delegation. Governor Greg Abbott is on track to become Texas's longest-serving governor if he wins re-election. Our team here at ElectionOdds.com is pricing all of it.
Is Texas a Red State or a Blue State?
Texas is a red state, though one that has been slowly trending less red. Republicans have won every Texas presidential election since 1980 and every statewide elected office since 1994, the longest one-party statewide streak in the country. Trump carried Texas by 13.7 points in 2024, up from 5.6 in 2020 and 9 in 2016. Cook PVI rates Texas R+6. Despite years of talk about a coming Democratic breakthrough driven by demographic change, Texas in 2024 actually moved further right than it did in 2020.
The state's voting pattern is shaped by its size and diversity. The five major metro areas (Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso) lean Democratic at the urban core but have Republican-leaning suburbs and exurbs. The Rio Grande Valley, historically Democratic, moved decisively toward Trump in 2020 and 2024 on the strength of Latino-male and working-class realignment. Rural Texas votes Republican by overwhelming margins, often 80% or more.
The Democratic ceiling in Texas has proven lower than expected. Beto O'Rourke came within 2.6 points of Ted Cruz in 2018, the closest Texas Senate race in decades, but Democrats have not come that close in a major statewide race since. Colin Allred lost to Cruz by 8.5 points in 2024. The 2026 Senate race between Ken Paxton (R) and James Talarico (D) is more competitive than usual because of Paxton's personal vulnerabilities, but Talarico still faces the structural Texas Republican advantage of roughly 8 points. Texas has 40 electoral votes for the 2028 election, making it the country's second-largest electoral prize after California. Its 38 U.S. House seats include several competitive districts in Houston and Dallas suburbs, though the 2025 mid-decade redistricting locked in a roughly 30R-8D split for the rest of the decade. The state's growth, projected to add three more electoral votes after the 2030 census, makes it increasingly important to the national Electoral College math even as it remains red.
Will Texas become competitive? The demographic case for an eventual Democratic Texas is real but the timeline has been wrong for 20 years. Latino voters in Texas vote Republican at rates higher than the national average. Suburban Anglo voters have moved back toward Republicans after a brief Democratic shift in 2018. A Democrat winning a Texas statewide race would require either a dramatic shift in the national environment or a Republican implosion. Neither is on the near-term horizon. For a full state-by-state comparison, see the red states vs. blue states map.
Texas Governor Betting Odds
Greg Abbott is running for an unprecedented fourth term. He won the March 3 Republican primary with 82% of the vote against ten token challengers, and entered 2026 with $105.7 million in cash on hand, the largest war chest of any incumbent governor in the country. His campaign raised $22.7 million in the second half of 2025 alone. If Abbott wins re-election and serves a full fourth term, he will become Texas's longest-serving governor at 16 years, surpassing Rick Perry.
The Democratic nominee is state Representative Gina Hinojosa, a civil rights and union lawyer who represents Austin. She won the Democratic primary with 59% in a nine-way field, easily clearing the runoff threshold. Hinojosa raised $1.3 million in the final ten weeks of 2025, a fraction of Abbott's haul. Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, and prediction markets are pricing the general election as a near-certainty for Abbott. The race draws limited market volume relative to the Senate contest below. See current election odds to be the next governor of each state.
Governor
2 marketsTexas Governor Election History
Texas has not elected a Democratic governor since Ann Richards in 1990, and her 1994 loss to Republican George W. Bush is the most recent time a Democratic gubernatorial nominee even cracked 45 percent. Bush's win launched a Republican takeover that wiped out the last Democratic statewide officials by 1998. Rick Perry then governed for a record 14 years after Bush left for the White House, and Greg Abbott, elected in 2014, has won three terms, the last by 11 points over Beto O'Rourke in 2022.
Abbott's 2026 bid for a fourth term would make him the longest-serving governor in state history, passing Perry. Backed by a war chest north of $100 million and running in a state his party has dominated for three decades, he is a prohibitive favorite over Democrat Gina Hinojosa. The Democratic drought in statewide Texas races, unbroken since 1994, is the longest in the nation, and the markets do not price the governorship as competitive.
Texas Senate Betting Odds
This is the headline race of the cycle in Texas and one of the most-traded markets on Polymarket and Kalshi. On May 26, Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated four-term incumbent John Cornyn 64% to 36% in the Republican primary runoff, a blowout that turned what had been polling as a tight three-to-five-point race into one of the worst losses ever suffered by a sitting Texas senator in a party primary. Cornyn conceded on election night.
The runoff turned on a single piece of news. After months of public neutrality, Trump had teased an endorsement after the March 3 primary but never delivered one, the president endorsed Paxton on May 19, exactly one week before the vote. Slingshot Strategies modeling earlier in the cycle had projected that a Trump endorsement of Paxton would push the race from a roughly 3-point lead to something near 55-35; the actual margin ran even wider. The endorsement was Paxton's third-act gift after Cornyn had spent more than $60 million attacking him over his impeachment, his FBI investigation, and his wife's 2024 divorce filing accusing him of adultery. It is the second consecutive Trump-backed primary defeat of a sitting incumbent in May 2026, following Rep. Thomas Massie's loss in the Kentucky 4th the week prior.
Paxton now faces state Rep. James Talarico in November. Talarico, who defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the March 3 Democratic primary, has out-raised every Senate Democrat in the country in 2026. Democrats have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1988, but Paxton begins the general election as a uniquely vulnerable Republican nominee, pre-runoff polling showed 24% of Cornyn primary voters telling pollsters they would consider voting for Talarico over Paxton, and Paxton's personal-conduct liabilities will be litigated for the next five months without the wall of GOP institutional money that defined the primary. Prediction markets still favor Paxton, but the race is now meaningfully closer than a generic Texas Senate matchup, and trading volume should rise sharply as fall polling rolls in. See the latest senate election odds here. Ted Cruz, the state's other senator, is not up in 2026. His next election is 2030.
Texas attorney general: Ken Paxton's move to the Senate left the attorney general's office open for the first time since 2014, and the May 26 runoff set the November matchup. On the Republican side, state Sen. Mayes Middleton defeated Rep. Chip Roy with roughly 56% of the vote. Middleton, a Galveston oilman and former chair of the Texas House Freedom Caucus, finished first in the March 3 primary at 39% to Roy's 32% and spent more than $11 million of his own money in the runoff phase attacking Roy for past criticism of President Trump. Neither Trump nor any major statewide Republican formally endorsed in the GOP runoff. On the Democratic side, state Sen. Nathan Johnson of Dallas defeated former Galveston Mayor Joe Jaworski with roughly 60% of the vote. Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, and prediction markets price Middleton as a heavy favorite for November. The AG seat is one of the most influential statewide offices in the country given Texas's role as the lead state litigator against federal policy under both parties.
U.S. Senate
2 marketsSenate primary
Texas U.S. Senate Election History
Texas has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen, who held his seat until 1993. Both seats have been Republican ever since, through Kay Bailey Hutchison, Phil Gramm, John Cornyn, and Ted Cruz, whose closest call came in 2018 when he beat Beto O'Rourke by 2.6 points in the most expensive Senate race in the country that year.
The 2026 cycle produced a political earthquake. Ken Paxton challenged four-term incumbent John Cornyn from the right, forced a runoff in March, and then won it in a 64-36 blowout on May 26 after a late Trump endorsement, one of the worst primary defeats ever suffered by a sitting Texas senator. Paxton now faces Democrat James Talarico in a race handicappers moved toward the competitive column, precisely because Paxton's legal and personal controversies give some Cornyn Republicans pause. It is the best Democratic Senate opportunity in Texas in a generation, even if the state's fundamentals still favor the GOP.
Texas House Betting Odds
Texas's congressional delegation is the second-largest in the country at 38 seats and the largest where mid-decade redistricting has actively flipped districts. After President Trump asked Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps in mid-2025 to protect the House majority, Texas was first to move. Governor Abbott signed the new map in August 2025. It is designed to expand Republican representation from the current 25 seats to 30, with the five new GOP-favorable seats carved out of previously Democratic-leaning territory in Houston, Dallas, and South Texas.
The map immediately drew lawsuits from the League of United Latin American Citizens and other civil rights groups, who argued the new district lines were the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. A three-judge district court panel agreed on November 18, 2025, blocking the map and ordering Texas to use the 2021 map for 2026. Texas appealed, and on December 4, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court, through an order written by Justice Samuel Alito, reinstated the new map. Alito wrote that Texas's motivation was "pure and simple" partisan advantage, which the Court has previously ruled is permissible. The three liberal justices dissented. The full case continued in lower courts, and on April 27, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its final ruling clearing the map permanently.
The May 26 runoffs resolved two of the highest-profile primary fights on the new map. In TX-18, the Houston seat where redistricting consolidated two Democratic incumbents into the same district, freshman Rep. Christian Menefee defeated 11-term Rep. Al Green in the Democratic runoff, ending one of the longest tenures in the Texas delegation. In TX-33, former Rep. Colin Allred, who left the House to run for Senate in 2024, defeated Rep. Julie Johnson in the Democratic runoff to claim the nomination in the newly drawn North Texas seat, completing a political comeback eighteen months after his loss to Sen. Ted Cruz. Both seats are heavily Democratic and the runoff winners are favored in November.
The new map was used in the March 3 primary. Prediction markets are pricing both the seat-by-seat outcomes and the meta-question of whether the GOP's five-seat gain will fully materialize in November, since aggressive gerrymanders can backfire by spreading Republican voters too thin in newly competitive districts. See the latest election odds for the house of representatives.
U.S. House districts
36 marketsTexas U.S. House Election History
Texas's House delegation has grown with the state, from 30 seats in the 1990s to 38 today, and Republicans have controlled the majority of it since the mid-2000s, helped by aggressive redistricting, most famously the 2003 Tom DeLay-engineered redraw. Heading into 2026 the split was 25 Republicans to 13 Democrats, with Democratic strength concentrated in the urban centers and parts of South Texas.
The 2026 cycle made Texas the leading edge of a national redistricting arms race. At Trump's urging, the legislature redrew the map in 2025 to target a 30-8 Republican advantage, cracking Democratic-leaning areas in Houston, Dallas, and South Texas. After a lower court blocked it, the Supreme Court reinstated the map in December 2025 and cleared it permanently in April 2026. The redraw prompted Democratic-controlled states like California to respond in kind, and the central market question is whether the engineered five-seat gain fully holds or whether thinned-out Republican margins create new vulnerabilities.
Texas Presidential Election Betting Odds
Texas has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980. Trump's margin has expanded each cycle, 9 points in 2016, 5.6 points in 2020, and 13.7 points in 2024, his largest Texas win ever. The shift was driven by significant gains among the state's Latino voters, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley, where multiple counties that voted Democratic for decades flipped to Trump.
For 2028, prediction markets are treating Texas as safe Republican regardless of the nominee. The interesting question is whether Texas's 40 electoral votes function as a baseline Republican floor or as a stepping stone toward an even larger Sun Belt realignment. Markets pricing the 2028 nominee race occasionally generate Texas-specific activity, Senator Cruz has been mentioned in long-shot 2028 markets, though he has not signaled interest, but the state itself is not a competitive presidential market. See the current 2028 presidential election odds here.
Texas Presidential Election History
Texas was a Democratic stronghold for a century after Reconstruction, but it has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, and the modern margins have only grown. The state that produced Lyndon Johnson became the base of the Bush family's national rise, and by the 2000s it was a reliable Republican anchor.
The recent trajectory cuts against the long-predicted Democratic turn. After narrowing to 5.6 points in 2020, Trump's margin widened back to 13.7 in 2024, his best Texas showing, driven by a dramatic rightward shift among Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley. The 40 electoral votes have not been competitive in a presidential general election in decades, and for 2028 every forecast places Texas firmly in the Republican column.
Texas Political Props & Other Markets
State-specific prediction markets tied to Texas politics, like cabinet moves, resignations, and ballot questions.
Texas Political Polls
The polls below pull the latest 2026 survey data for Texas's marquee races. The most-watched numbers are in the Senate race, where Republican Ken Paxton, fresh off ousting John Cornyn, faces Democrat James Talarico. In the governor's race you will see Republican incumbent Greg Abbott against Democrat Gina Hinojosa, with Abbott holding a commanding lead.
Texas polling has historically understated Republican strength, so treat narrow Democratic leads with caution and watch the trend rather than any single survey, especially the share of John Cornyn's primary voters who say they could back Talarico over Paxton. The Rio Grande Valley and the big-metro suburbs are the regions to watch. Where a race has no recent public polling, that section will say so rather than show stale data.
Texas governor polls
| Pollster | Dates | Sample | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| SoCal Strategies(R) | June 21, 2026 | 800 (LV) | Greg Abbott (R) 54% · Gina Hinojosa (D) 42% · Undecided 4% |
| University of Texas/Texas Politics Project | June 5–12, 2026 | 1,200 (RV) | Greg Abbott (R) 47% · Gina Hinojosa (D) 40% · Other 3% · Undecided 10% |
| Quantus Insights (R) | June 3–4, 2026 | 800 (LV) | Greg Abbott (R) 49% · Gina Hinojosa (D) 41% · Other 3% · Undecided 7% |
| Texas A&M University/ReconMR | June 1–4, 2026 | 807 (LV) | Greg Abbott (R) 49% · Gina Hinojosa (D) 43% · Other 3% · Undecided 5% |
| Texas Public Opinion Research | May 27–28, 2026 | 1,670 (LV) | Greg Abbott (R) 46% · Gina Hinojosa (D) 41% · Other 3% · Undecided 9% |
| Public Policy Polling (D) | May 22–23, 2026 | 643 (RV) | Greg Abbott (R) 48% · Gina Hinojosa (D) 44% · Undecided 8% |
Polling data adapted from 2026 Texas gubernatorial election under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Last refreshed 8 minutes ago.
Texas U.S. Senate polls
| Pollster | Dates | Sample | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| SoCal Strategies (R) | June 21, 2026 | 800 (LV) | Ken Paxton (R) 49% · James Talarico (D) 47% · Undecided 4% |
| 270toWin | May 27 – June 12, 2026 | Ken Paxton (R) 44% · James Talarico (D) 44.8% · Other/ Undecided 11.2% | |
| RealClearPolitics | April 22 – June 12, 2026 | Ken Paxton (R) 44.8% · James Talarico (D) 44% · Other/ Undecided 11.2% | |
| University of Texas/Texas Politics Project | June 5–12, 2026 | 1,200 (RV) | Ken Paxton (R) 43% · James Talarico (D) 42% · Undecided 10% |
| Quantus Insights (R) | June 3–4, 2026 | 800 (LV) | Ken Paxton (R) 45% · James Talarico (D) 43% · Undecided 7% |
| Texas A&M University/ReconMR/Siena University | June 1–4, 2026 | 807 (LV) | Ken Paxton (R) 46% · James Talarico (D) 46% · Undecided 6% |
Polling data adapted from 2026 United States Senate election in Texas under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Last refreshed 8 minutes ago.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Texas a red state or a blue state?
Texas is a red state, though one slowly trending less red. Republicans have won every statewide office since 1994 and every presidential election since 1980. Trump carried it by 13.7 points in 2024, and Cook PVI rates it R+6.
Who won the Texas Republican Senate primary?
Attorney General Ken Paxton crushed four-term incumbent John Cornyn 64-36 in the May 26, 2026 runoff, one week after a Trump endorsement, one of the worst primary defeats ever for a sitting Texas senator. Paxton faces Democrat James Talarico in November.
Is the Texas Senate race competitive?
It is more competitive than a Texas Senate seat normally would be because of Paxton's personal vulnerabilities, with pre-runoff polling showing 24% of Cornyn voters open to Talarico. But Talarico still faces a structural Republican advantage of roughly 8 points, and the markets still favor Paxton.
What happened with the Texas House map?
At Trump's request, Texas redrew its congressional map in 2025 to target a 30-8 Republican delegation, up from 25-13. After a lower court blocked it, the Supreme Court reinstated the map in December 2025 and cleared it permanently on April 27, 2026. It is in effect for 2026.
Odds are aggregated from public prediction markets including Polymarket and Kalshi and are updated multiple times daily. They reflect real-money market pricing, not polling or editorial forecasts, and are provided for informational purposes only. ElectionOdds.com does not accept wagers.