James Talarico out raises Ken Paxton in Texas’ U.S. Senate race. By how much?
State Rep. James Talarico raised more than three times his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in the second quarter of 2026, according to numbers released by the U.S. Senate campaigns on Wednesday.
Talarico, Texas’ Democratic nominee for Senate who faces Paxton in the Nov. 3 general election, raised more than $30 million between April 1 and June 30, according to a statement issued his campaign. Paxton’s campaign said earlier that he had raised more than $9 million, the majority of which came in after his May 26 GOP runoff against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
Both campaigns cheered the hauls as they work to win what will surely be an expensive statewide election. Recent polls have shown a tight race for the Senate seat.
“I’m honored to stand alongside more than 780,000 neighbors who are tired of being divided into teams — red versus blue, left versus right, rural versus urban,” Talarico said in a written statement. “We are uniting Texans onto one team to change this broken, corrupt political system and bring down costs for working families.”
His campaign said the total fundraising for his effort is the “largest amount ever raised by a U.S. Senate candidate in the second quarter of an election year.”
“Running a truly competitive campaign in a state with nearly three times the population of any other battleground state will take unprecedented resources,” Talarico’s campaign manager Seth Krasne said in a written statement. “While the Supreme Court creates new loopholes for billionaires and special interests to prop up their puppets, we’re going to continue building a movement to take back power for working people. Because Big Money is nothing compared to People Power.”
The Paxton camp took its quarter two fundraising as a “clear signal that conservatives are rallying” behind Paxton ahead of the fall general election.
The campaign said its latest campaign finance numbers mark the “largest quarterly fundraising haul announced by an non-incumbent Republican Senate candidate in the country so far this cycle.”
“Ken Paxton is building a movement to defend the Lone Star State by uniting every Republican across the country to defeat James Talarico, the most radical and well-funded Democrat running in Texas history,” a Paxton campaign spokesperson said in a written statement. “But the job is far from finished. We will continue to raise the funds necessary to expose James Talarico’s record, keep Texas strong, protect our elections, defend our freedoms, and keep Texas out of the radical left’s grip.”
