Democrat James Talarico is expected to win the race for the American Senate in Texas, defeating Republican candidate and state prosecutor General Ken Paxton, according to the projection CNN– You.
Talarico, 37, becomes the first elected Democrat in the US Senate to represent Texas in the last 38 years, as well as the first democrat to win a state-level race since 1994.
His victory is considered one of the greatest surprises of the 2026 middle school elections. That was after he managed to defeat the republican candidate in a state President Donald Trump had won at nearly 14 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election.
Talarico, who is the Presbyterian seminarist and former teacher from Round Rock, was relatively unknown in Texas before launching the campaign in September last year.
However, he managed to gain support in Texas and at the national level, placing religious faith at the center of his electoral message and extending the appeal to independent and Republican voters.
The candidacy of Republican Ken Paxton, who faced a series of controversy during the campaign, also affected his victory.
Among them was his mate’s request for divorce, which she had presented with reference to Scriptural reasons.
Paxton was also accused of fraud with valuable letters in 2015, while in 2023 he was dismissed from the Texas House of Representatives through a dismissal procedure (impeachment), but was later declared innocent by the State Senate.
In 2024 he reached an agreement with prosecutors to pay compensation to victims in the case of fraud, thus avoiding judgment. /Telegraphy/