Talarico Raises Record $27 Million as Texas GOP Senate Race Splinters

Texas Republicans are spending the spring fighting each other instead of building toward a general election, and James Talarico is already acting like the beneficiary. The Democratic nominee raised $27 million in the first three months of 2026, a haul his campaign says is the largest first-quarter total ever reported by a Senate candidate, and more than $10 million arrived after he won the March 3 primary over U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

Talarico’s campaign said its total fundraising since he entered the race in September 2025 has now topped $40 million, fueled by more than 540,000 individual donors in 246 of Texas’s 254 counties. The campaign said it accepted no corporate PAC money, a contrast designed to underline the scale and breadth of its donor base as Democrats search for a credible path into a statewide race that has eluded them for more than a generation.

The Republican side remains unsettled, and that is the central reason Talarico’s numbers matter. John Cornyn and Ken Paxton are headed to a May 26 runoff after no one won the March 3 primary outright, and the contest has grown increasingly nasty and personal. President Donald Trump has not endorsed either man, leaving the party without the unifying signal that often settles a modern GOP fight.

The financial edge still sits with Cornyn, but the damage from the primary is harder to measure. Cornyn ended the first quarter with more than $8 million cash on hand and reported roughly $9 million in fundraising across his campaign and joint fundraising committees. Paxton, after a more limited quarter, reported $2.2 million raised and finished with $2.6 million in the bank. Talarico, meanwhile, entered April with about $9.9 million cash on hand, a reserve that gives Democrats room to define both Republicans before the runoff and the eventual nominee afterward.

For Democrats, the question is not whether money alone can erase Texas’s structural Republican advantage. It cannot. No Democrat has won a U.S. Senate race in Texas since 1988, and no Democrat has won statewide office since 1994. The question is whether a fractured GOP, a bruising runoff and a nominee forced to spend months attacking a primary opponent have opened the clearest statewide opportunity Democrats have seen in years. Talarico’s fundraising suggests they believe the answer may finally be yes.