Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is in a dead heat with Democratic state Rep. James Talarico three days before Election Day, the latest sign that a Senate race in one of the country's most reliably Republican states has turned into a genuine nail-biter.

A Hobby School of Public Affairs poll at the University of Houston, surveying 2,000 likely voters between Oct. 10 and 14, found Talarico leading Paxton 48% to 46%, with Libertarian Ted Brown drawing 3% and 3% undecided — a gap well inside the survey's roughly 2.9-point margin of error, according to Fox 7 Austin's report on the poll.

It's the latest in a string of close surveys. An earlier TPOR poll had Talarico up 51%-47%, while other recent polling has shown the race essentially tied, reinforcing a consensus that Texas — a state that has not sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen's re-election in 1988 — is genuinely in play this cycle.

Why Texas is suddenly close

Paxton, the state's three-term attorney general, enters the race carrying years of legal baggage, including a 2023 impeachment by the Texas House (he was acquitted by the Senate) and a long-running securities fraud indictment that has shadowed his career since 2015. He first had to get past incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary, a bitter intraparty fight that underscored the hard-right energy fueling his campaign, according to The Texas Tribune's polling coverage of that primary. Talarico, a 36-year-old former middle school teacher serving in the Texas House, built his general-election campaign around messaging aimed at independents and crossover Republicans.

ALL THE POLLING WE'RE SEEING HERE IN TEXAS IS REFLECTING THE COMPETITIVENESS OF THE RACE

"All the polling that we're seeing here in Texas is reflecting the competitiveness of the race," Josh Blank of the Texas Politics Project said, in comments on the Hobby School survey carried by Sinclair-affiliated stations including Oklahoma City's OKCFOX. Blank and other analysts caution that the margins in every recent poll are too thin to call the race outright, but the fact that it's within range at all marks a sharp break from recent Texas Senate contests, which Republicans have typically won comfortably.

Early voting in Texas ran through Oct. 30, with both campaigns pouring resources into get-out-the-vote efforts in the race's final stretch. Control of the Senate is on the line nationally — Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority, and Democrats are defending fewer seats than the GOP this cycle, meaning a single upset in a state as large as Texas could meaningfully reshape that math.

What's next

Texans vote Tuesday, Nov. 3, alongside the rest of the country in what both parties have cast as a referendum on the first two years of the current Congress. Paxton's campaign has leaned on his conservative credentials and name recognition in a state Donald Trump has carried comfortably in past elections; Talarico's camp is betting that dissatisfaction with Paxton's legal troubles, combined with a focus on affordability, can do what no Democratic Senate nominee has managed in nearly four decades.