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US Midterms 2026
17JUL

Texas Senate, TX-35 both slip to Leans Republican

3 min read
13:49UTC

Cook Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball both moved Texas Senate from Likely Republican to Leans Republican on Wednesday 27 May; Sabato also downgraded TX-35, citing split-ticket vulnerability that the district's redrawn boundaries introduced.

← Back to Graham's death strands the SAVE Act routeJump to analysis ↓
PoliticsDeveloping
Key takeaway

Cook and Sabato's simultaneous downgrades confirm Texas Senate has moved from a structural Republican hold to a contested seat.

Cook Political Report moved Texas Senate from Likely Republican to Leans Republican the day after Paxton's runoff victory. Sabato's Crystal Ball, run by the University of Virginia Center for Politics, made the identical move the same day and extended its reassessment to TX-35, the San Antonio-area congressional district redrawn under PlanC2333 1.

The TX-35 downgrade turns on a measurable split-ticket gap. Trump carried TX-35 by ten points in 2024; Senator Ted Cruz won it by under four points in the most recent Senate race 2. Redrawn boundaries did not erase the district's tendency to diverge on Senate candidates, and Sabato's assessment suggests Paxton's documented controversies make a repeat of the Cruz-Trump gap likely. Sabato framed the full House map as "a bit redder, but not by enough to protect Republicans from a wave" 3, which places TX-35 in the category of seats the redistricting harvest was designed to insulate but cannot guarantee.

Cook and Sabato are nonpartisan forecasting services whose Solid/Likely/Lean/Toss-up ratings are the industry reference for race competitiveness; a simultaneous move from two independent services in one calendar day carries more weight than either rating in isolation. The Senate majority is currently a three-seat cushion; Texas had been priced as safe, and now it is not. The newly competitive rating does not mean Talarico is favoured; it means the NRSC must budget for Texas on top of the seats it was already defending, thinning its resources across a wider front.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Two of the most widely followed US election forecasting services, Cook Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball, rate every congressional and Senate race on a scale from 'Safe Republican' through 'Toss-up' to 'Safe Democrat'. Moving a race toward the competitive end means more resources will be deployed there and that the outcome is genuinely uncertain. Both services moved the Texas Senate seat from 'Likely Republican' to 'Leans Republican' on 27 May, the day after Paxton won the primary. A 'leans' rating means the seat tilts toward one party but is not out of reach for the other. TX-35 is a congressional district in the San Antonio area redrawn in 2026 under a Republican-drawn map called PlanC2333. Even under that friendly map, the district showed split-ticket behaviour: voters there backed Trump by a wide margin but voted much more narrowly for Republican Senate candidates. That gap is why forecasters flagged it as vulnerable.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

The TX-35 downgrade rests on a specific redistricting arithmetic introduced by PlanC2333. The district was redrawn to pack Democratic-leaning Latino voters in sufficient concentration to be described as Republican-performing but not Republican-safe. Cruz's sub-four-point margin there in prior Senate cycles indicates the district contains a significant bloc of voters who back Republican presidential candidates but split to moderate Democrats or independents in lower-profile races.

At the Senate level, the downgrade reflects a compounding of two independent factors: Paxton's candidate-quality discount from legal exposure, and a generic ballot environment now at D+6.9 that shrinks the effective Republican structural buffer in red-leaning seats.

Sources:Texas Tribune·Sabato's Crystal Ball
Mentions:Cook Political Report →PlanC2333 →Texas →Virginia →Nevada →Heritage Foundation →Donald Trump →National Republican Senatorial Committee →TX-35 →Ted Cruz →Sabato's Crystal Ball →
First Reported In

Update #7 · Paxton wins; maps lock

Texas Tribune· 29 May 2026
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Causes and effects
Caused by
Paxton routs Cornyn despite nine-to-one spend
Paxton's 63.8% runoff win directly triggered Cook and Sabato's same-day and next-day moves of Texas Senate and TX-35 to Leans Republican.
Occurred 26 May 2026
Read story →
This Event
Texas Senate, TX-35 both slip to Leans Republican
Two independent forecasters downgraded the same Texas seat within 24 hours of Paxton's win, signalling that candidate quality has converted a structural Republican advantage into a genuine Senate majority risk.
Led to
Letlow's 15-point lead collapses to a tie
Cook and Sabato moving Texas Senate to Leans Republican after the Paxton win signalled the pattern of outside-money failure that the Louisiana poll now echoes.
Occurred 16 Jun 2026
Read story →
Letlow routs Fleming by 13.6 points
The post-Paxton ratings shift set the benchmark against which Letlow's rout is now read.
Occurred 27 Jun 2026
Read story →
Different Perspectives
Non-US foreign-policy commentary (Jerusalem Post)
Non-US foreign-policy commentary (Jerusalem Post)
Jerusalem Post coverage frames Graham's death chiefly as a foreign-policy loss, citing his role as the Senate's most vocal advocate for Ukraine and Russia sanctions and Israel-related security votes, distinct from Washington's floor-arithmetic framing. That reporting adds that South Carolina has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1998, so control of the seat itself was never genuinely contested.
Election-law and voting-rights critics
Election-law and voting-rights critics
Election-law critics point to South Carolina's own arithmetic: the federal 45-day overseas-ballot deadline for the 11 August primary fell on 27 June, a fortnight before Graham died, and Section 7-11-55 contains no voter-eligibility language despite grounding the June-primary voter bar. They read both as design gaps a state can exploit through inaction, not through any single deliberate violation.
South Carolina State Election Commission
South Carolina State Election Commission
Commission director Conway Belangia declared the eligibility review "completed" on 16 July, barring anyone who voted in June's Democratic primary from the 11 August Republican primary, citing only "the requirements of South Carolina election law". The commission is standing behind that ruling and its filing-to-runoff calendar without naming the statute either rests on.
Senate Democratic opposition
Senate Democratic opposition
Senate Democrats have not cast a floor vote against the House Budget Committee's 20-14 resolution yet, but their standing objection, that documentary-proof-of-citizenship rules burden voters who lack ready access to those documents, applies directly to the $10bn grant structure it just advanced. They are counting on the Byrd Rule to do what floor votes could not.
Senate Republican leadership
Senate Republican leadership
Majority Leader John Thune moved within two days of Graham's death to install Ron Johnson as Budget chair, whose office says he is "prepared to serve", though no conference vote has confirmed it. Leadership pushed the FY2027 resolution through committee 20-14 on 16 July, treating the vacancy as a gap to close, not a reason to pause the SAVE Act.
Labour-market economists
Labour-market economists
Economists note June payrolls rose just 57,000, about half the forecast 115,000, with April and May revised down further. They call it the only development this week bearing directly on how incumbents can run on the economy in November.