As Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data discussed with VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini, high-turnout elections usually see high turnout for both parties. But last night, we saw high turnout for Democrats and low turnout for Republicans, suggesting a decent portion of voters were persuaded to cross the aisle.

“Persuading people in a special election is actually harder than persuading the general electorate because these are more engaged voters. So it then leads to the point that Republicans are seeing a very big and pronounced swing in public opinion away from them.”

Check out the full video to hear more about what made last night’s elections unique.

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He joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini on Wednesday to discuss the Democratic party’s resurgence among non-college educated voters.

“With non-college whites, this is probably the best that the Democratic Party has looked in, you know, since the Obama years, 2014 maybe,” said Lakshya.

The guys also turned their attention to Florida: “A win for Democrats in Florida is to make Republicans sweat and send some money there,” suggested Zachary.

Notably, many of the Florida Republican nominees are under-performers: “In this one strip across Central Florida, you have two really bad Republicans, two really good Democrats and Anna Paulina Luna… she’s weak.”

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Maine’s Senate race is one of the most competitive in the country. Democrats are seeking to unseat long-time Senator Susan Collins in their bid to take back the Senate.

This year, just two Republican-held seats are up for grabs in states that Trump didn’t win by double-digits: Maine and North Carolina. In North Carolina, Democrats are fielding popular former Gov. Roy Cooper as their candidate, but the situation is decidedly less clear in Maine.

Simply put, the race for the Democratic nomination in Maine is between “weak” and “weaker.” One candidate, incumbent Gov. Janet Mills, is 78 years old and not especially popular. The other, oyster farmer Graham Platner, brings with him a litany of scandals, including a series of controversial social media posts and a Nazi tattoo on his chest.

Ordinarily, it would be unthinkable for either party to bypass a sitting governor in favor of a political novice dogged by controversy. And if Mills and Platner were facing off even two years ago, there’s little doubt that Mills would have cruised to victory. Today, however, her position is perilous.

Polling of the Democratic primary is fairly sparse, but every survey done agrees that Platner is leading; the question is simply whether it’s close (as Quantus and Pan Atlantic indicated), or a blowout (as the University of New Hampshire and Emerson both found).

The enthusiasm for Platner is understandable. Many commentators believe that with his background and image, he’s the rare Democratic candidate who can make significant inroads with men and working-class whites. But to fully understand his momentum despite the scandals, we have to understand his opponent.

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Boring doesn’t mean safe

In throwing their weight behind Mills, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the geriatric Democratic establishment are ignoring their base’s dissatisfaction.

Mills, with her long political career, signals continuity rather than change. Given the party’s abysmal favorables with their own voters, support for Platner is best understood as an act of rebellion, an expression of the belief that it’s time to do something different.

While Platner is certainly…different, his primary advantage over Mills may disappear during a general election.

Platner is virtually guaranteed to face tens of millions of dollars of attack ads that remind voters constantly of his Nazi tattoo and his social media comments on rape. These are beginning to feature heavily in primary discourse, and they will almost certainly impact his ability to cut into Collins’ prior support with independents and moderates.

Platner’s self-presentation as the voice of the working class is a big part of his electability argument.

But the data doesn’t back this up.

Despite his reputation as a working-class whisperer, Platner is actually doing far better with upscale Democratic whites than with non-college Democrats. Each primary poll with regional breakdowns has shown a common theme: Mills does far better among the blue-collar Democrats in the rural north of the state, while Platner cleans up with wealthy, coastal liberals who skew college-educated.

In other words, the data suggests Platner is not the candidate of the working class, but rather of upwardly mobile Mainers who have an idealized working-class aesthetic.

Both parties are fighting for control of the working class. Trump has lost significant ground with this once loyal base of supporters and Democrats are furiously debating whether this demographic is yearning for economic populism, cultural moderation, or some other kind of outsider.

Primary voters in Maine are gambling that a rough-talking oysterman is the key, but despite national media narratives, it looks like Democrats will field a candidate whose appeal is strongest with voters they were already going to win, and whose vulnerabilities are greatest with the voters they actually need.

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He joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini on Wednesday to discuss the implications.

“Donald Trump, right now, about 17% of his 2024 voters disapprove of him. And just to be clear, that is absolutely bonkers because you do not get that normally,” said Lakshya. “These are numbers that you had to get to, like, Joe Biden post-debate to hit at.”

Crucially, not only are voters (particularly nonwhite and non-college voters) starting to flee Trump’s coalition, but the usual suspects are increasingly no longer standing up for it.

“Whenever you see really lopsided victories, right? Doug Mastriano, Mark Robinson, Roy Moore, whoever it is, right? A lot of that boils down to the fact that, simply, people, the people who should be defending those candidates can’t or will not,” said Thomas. “And from a mechanical campaign perspective, if Trump continues the war, the tougher and tougher it becomes for all of his people to defend that.

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There’s an interesting tension within the Democratic Party’s coalition: To win national majorities, Democrats depend on nonwhite voters, many of whom have pretty conservative views but vote for Democrats anyway.

In The Argument’s aggregated national polling data, just 6% of white conservatives planned to support the Democratic candidate for Congress this fall. But 15% of Hispanic conservatives and a remarkable 61% of Black conservatives planned to vote blue in the midterms.

The statistic among Black voters is particularly interesting because they are widely considered the backbone of the Democratic Party. Of all racial groups in America, Black voters are by far the most likely to identify as and vote for Democrats. Yet just 34% of them call themselves liberals.

What explains this phenomenon? Do Black voters have a different conception of what ideological labels like “liberal” and “conservative” mean?

Our polling data shows that Black voters aren’t just applying a different label to themselves. On a range of issues, particularly those relating to gender and sexual orientation, Black voters have much more conservative preferences than other Democratic voters. The exceptions are issues connected to race, like policing and affirmative action, where they’re notably more liberal.

For the older generation of Black voters, two things keep them voting for Democrats, despite their policy disagreements: First, peer pressure. Second, what political scientists call “ideological innocence,” which is the fact that many voters neither think about their views in an ideologically consistent way nor do they have stable views on policy at all. That’s why it’s easy to come across a voter who both self-identifies as a conservative and wants the government to do big things like Social Security and Medicare.

But both of these forces are weakening, which helps explain why Democrats are bleeding support among younger Black voters — especially young Black men.

Black voters really are more conservative than most Democrats

Based on Catalist data, 85% of Black voters backed Kamala Harris in 2024. But looking at self-reported ideology, Black voters are only a hair more liberal than the general population and much less liberal than Harris 2024 voters on both economic and social issues.

In The Argument’s aggregated survey data from August 2025 through March 2026, just under two-thirds of Harris 2024 voters called themselves liberal on social issues, compared to just 38% of Black voters. On economic issues, 55% of Harris voters called themselves liberal, while just 35% of Black voters did.

Black voters were 12 percentage points less likely than voters overall to agree that same-sex marriages should have the same legal protections as traditional marriages, and a whopping 33 points less likely than Harris 2024 voters.

Compared to Harris 2024 voters, Black voters were also much more likely to agree that it’s better “when men look and act like men, and women look and act like women,” to support a return to traditional gender roles, and to say that being transgender is morally wrong.

It’s not just these broad values questions either. In our poll’s questions about transgender policy, Black voters were generally aligned with the median voter, which is to say they were much more conservative than Harris voters.

That’s not to say that Black voters are just more conservative than their party across the board, though. On racial issues, they’re much more liberal.

Black voters are much more liberal on race

These days, the conventional wisdom is that “Defund the Police” is and was: (a) a dumb idea, (b) unpopular, and (c) something that Black people didn’t actually want.

Defund was indeed dumb and unpopular, but it’s actually not true that Black people were opposed to it. For example, here’s a Morning Consult/Pollitico poll from June of 2020. Half of Black respondents supported the slogan “defund the police,” and 61% supported the general idea of redirecting police funding.

Another good example is race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In a Pew survey from 2023, just a third of all U.S. adults approved of the practice — but a plurality of Black voters did.

Here’s a Gallup poll from after the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case was decided. While 68% of voters said the decision was mostly a good thing, Black voters were evenly split; half of Black respondents thought the ruling would negatively impact higher education, and 52% thought it would make things harder for Black applicants.

Peer pressure or ideological innocence?

So what’s going on here? How is it that large majorities of Black voters identify as conservative or moderate while also voting for the liberal party?

One strand of literature argues that Black voters are overwhelmingly Democrats, despite many of them holding conservative views, for group-interest reasons. A 2022 paper by Julian J. Wamble, Chryl N. Laird, Corrine M. McConnaughy, and Ismail K. White argued that “black Democratic partisanship is upheld, in part, through black Americans’ use of social sanctions (both positive and negative) to encourage compliance with a group norm of Democratic Party support.”

They found that Black voters were more likely to identify as Democrats — and more likely to donate to Obama — when faced with a Black interviewer.

In a 2024 paper, the Stanford political scientist Hakeem Jefferson took a different tack, arguing that “the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are unfamiliar to many Black Americans,” causing respondents who are “unfamiliar with these terms [to] misapply them and choose ideological labels that fail to align with their partisan preferences.”

Jefferson examined American National Election Studies data and created an index of familiarity with the terms “liberal” and “conservative” based on whether survey respondents correctly identified the Republicans (and Republican presidential nominees) as more conservative than the Democrats.

Among Black people who scored lowest on familiarity (those who were least able to identify the Republican Party or Donald Trump as conservatives), self-identifying as conservative had either no relationship with partisanship or a negative relationship with it.

That is, among low-familiarity Black respondents, calling yourself “conservative” tells us essentially nothing about your partisanship.

Blexit is real for the younger generation

Since 2012, Democrats have lost three to four points of support among Black voters each presidential cycle. But that decline is especially large among Black voters under 30, particularly among young Black men. Among Black men aged 18 to 29, Harris got just 75% of the vote, compared to 94% for Obama in 2012.

Here’s how I think you can square the arguments in the two political science papers I cited above:

Historically, it is true that Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic — including Black voters with more conservative views — because the Democratic Party was seen as the party of civil rights. Voting blue was a way of practicing in-group solidarity.

That solidarity was enforced by institutions like the Black church and the memory of the civil rights movement, which helped keep the most conservative Black voters in the Democratic coalition.

But today, that’s changing. The civil rights movement is less salient now, partly because some of the battles it fought are now considered settled issues, and partly because younger Black voters simply weren’t alive for it. Racism is by no means over, but it has abated significantly.

Institutions like the Black church are also weakening, as a growing share of young people of all races become religiously unaffiliated. And voters now have more information than ever before about what each party’s positions are.

The net effect is that young Black people are increasingly ideologically polarized, which means that Black conservatives are beginning to leave the Democratic Party.

I don’t expect this trend to be a straight line. As my colleague Lakshya Jain noted in a recent piece, polling shows that Democrats are gaining the most ground with noncollege and minority voters ahead of the midterms. And I do expect to see a large “bounce back” for Democrats in 2026 with Black and Hispanic voters that shifted away from the party in 2024. But it’s unlikely to be a return to 2012 levels of Democratic support, and over the longer run — that is, the next few decades — I expect to see Democratic support among conservative nonwhites continue to erode.

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Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data, joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini on Wednesday to discuss the implications.

“Normies have no appetite for war during times of economic uncertainty and economic upheaval,” argued Lakshya. “And that’s what we are getting right now.”

Indeed, if the war drags on and oil prices keep surging higher, the Democrats’ dubious Senate hopes look more and more realistic. It could even put Texas squarely in play, which we noted two weeks ago was a stretch for Democrats no matter who won the primaries.

“I think the only way that Texas is really competitive, especially with the litany of stuff that’s coming out from James Talarico in terms of past things that he said, is if the economy and the macro climate is actually bad enough that you get Republicans to overlook their base partisanship and say, ‘Screw it, we’re going to vote for a Democrat because it’s the only thing we can do,’” explained Armin.

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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A firebrand Republican challenger, plagued by scandals and riddled with vulnerabilities, has nevertheless mounted a serious, credible challenge against a generic Republican, the epitome of the old-school establishment.

You might expect the MAGA base to coalesce around the firebrand and for Trump to come through with an endorsement that delivers the final hammer blow to the establishment candidate.

But in Texas, it’s not so clear that this story, which began in such a familiar way, is going to play out quite as expected. After last week’s primary, incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is showing surprising strength headed into a runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the race is anyone’s game.

It’s not an overstatement to say that the result could quite literally decide control of the United States Senate.

Polls — and the conventional wisdom — previously suggested that Cornyn was in deep trouble. But in a first round that set spending records, Cornyn actually finished ahead of Paxton by a slim margin of 42% to 41%.

And Congressman Wesley Hunt, who underperformed1 pre-election polling, finished a distant third with only 13.5%. Data suggested that he may have taken more votes from Paxton than from Cornyn (an effect that ran counter to what Republican operatives initially feared).

Since the election, the atmosphere has modulated, with reports surfacing of Trump preparing to endorse Cornyn. And you would be excused for thinking that, on its face, this would settle the election; after all, Trump has maintained a solid track record with his endorsements since his first term.

But it’s not perfect. Readers may remember Trump endorsing establishment candidate Luther Strange in Alabama, only to see him lose to MAGA favorite Roy Moore. Early polling suggests that a Texas-sized repeat of this can’t be ruled out just yet.

So, even if Trump endorses the incumbent, Paxton might still be able to come out on top. Polling from Texas Public Opinion Research found that Paxton leads Cornyn 49% to 41% at the moment, and that he would still lead 44% to 43% even if Cornyn received a Trump endorsement. (Perhaps relatedly, talk of an imminent endorsement for Cornyn has suddenly died down.)

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And the outcome of the runoff has significant general election implications.

Texas, which backed Trump by double digits in 2024, remains a reliably Republican state on paper. But a favorable national environment gives Democrats an outside chance — especially if Paxton were to win the runoff.

Paxton may be the most problematic Republican candidate since Herschel Walker. During his tenure as attorney general, he has been indicted for securities fraud, divorced for infidelity, and impeached by a Republican House chamber for abuse of office.

Meanwhile, Democrats avoided a serious candidate quality issue by nominating the affable James Talarico over the uncompromising Jasmine Crockett. While neither of these candidates is moderate, Talarico is, at the very least, perceived by voters as being closer to the median Texan than Crockett is.

And while Republicans have found plenty to attack in Talarico’s record, an energized Democratic base, supplemented by independents and perhaps some moderate suburban Republicans repulsed by Paxton’s scandals, could make the race competitive. (It’s also worth noting that Talarico has already made a very, very good impression on Joe Rogan.)

Strategically, from a Republican perspective, Trump would be mistaken not to endorse Cornyn. Why? Just look at the math.

Our last poll placed the national environment at D+6, which means Democrats hold a six-point advantage over Republicans in the generic congressional ballot. In this environment, Texas, which is roughly 12 points to the right of the nation, would be R+6.

Cornyn is an incumbent, and incumbent members of Congress generally get an average baseline boost of three percentage points in margin. So Talarico would need a nine-percentage-point overperformance to beat a relatively uncontroversial Cornyn, and a six-percentage-point one to beat Paxton.

On paper, those both seem totally doable. After all, 12% of the Senate races in the Trump era (2016 onwards) have seen WAR scores of D+9 or more, and 28% have seen overperformances of D+6 or greater.

But this is a bit misleading. Most of those strong performances came from extremely strong, entrenched incumbents like Joe Manchin, Amy Klobuchar, or Jon Tester, whose circumstances simply aren’t anything like Talarico’s.

Here’s a more relevant datapoint: Since Trump’s 2016 election, only four nonincumbent Democratic candidates have managed an overperformance of 9 points or more: Phil Bredesen (a popular, former two-term governor), Doug Jones (who ran against a pedophile), Amy McGrath (who ran against Mitch McConnell), and Mike Espy (who was a former Congressman).

In other words, it’s extremely hard for Talarico to muster up the overperformance necessary to beat a generic, relatively scandal-free incumbent in John Cornyn, considering his circumstances. But overperforming by six points when you’re facing a scandal-plagued candidate like Paxton is much more doable.

And we have precedent for this — Ruben Gallego overperformed by seven against Kari Lake in 2024, and there’s a good case to be made that Paxton is a more problematic candidate than Lake was.

No matter the result of the primary, the Republicans are still favored; a Paxton vs. Talarico general election would still yield a Republican win as the modal outcome.

But it’s a lot easier to see the case for a Talarico victory if he’s facing Ken Paxton.

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On this week’s Substack Live, The Argument’s Director of Political Data Lakshya Jain joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini to discuss what’s happening in the state.

Democrats may be leaning toward the more bombastic candidate because they think that is what has worked for Republicans, but Lakshya is skeptical of this strategy:

“The reason Republicans don’t have 60 seats in the House or in the Senate right now, the reason that they don’t have 235 in the House is, is actually down to the fact that they nominate people like Joe Kent and Kari Lake regularly in swing districts,” Lakshya said. “I kind of think Graham Platner is going to shape up to be more like Joe Kent or Herschel Walker than he’s going to shape up to be someone like, you know, like Ruben Gallego.”

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Last night saw several primaries, but most eyes were on Texas, where Democrats nominated state Sen. James Talarico over Rep. Jasmine Crockett, while the Republican candidates Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will duke it out in a runoff.

A big story of the night was Talarico's strength in Hispanic areas, where Trump has been bleeding support.

“I do think the sky’s the limit for the Hispanic shift back to Democrats in 2026,” said Donnini.

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While there’s been a lot of back and forth over whether moderate candidates do better in elections, in 2026, it’s basically a moot point. Lakshya and Armin argued that in all of the biggest Democratic primary races, from Maine to Texas to Michigan, we see elections pitting liberal candidates against other liberal (or leftist) candidates.

In the Texas Senate race, Lakshya pointed out that both James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett are so far left of the median Texan voter that even the unpopular Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton falls closer to their views.

“Neither Talarico nor Crockett are especially moderate,” said Lakshya. “Voters rate themselves, in Texas, on a scale of 1 to 10 — one being the most liberal, 10 being the most conservative — voters rate themselves as about a 6.5 … they say Talarico is like a 3.5 and Crockett is a two. Neither of those two are closer to the median voter because Paxton is at eight. So they’re like, Paxton is closer to them than Talarico is.”

The same story holds in Maine, with Gov. Janet Mills being a reliable liberal and Graham Platner running an outsider, leftist campaign, and in Michigan, which sees the liberal Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow facing off against leftist physician Abdul El-Sayed.

Of course, any of these candidates could still win if the national environment is favorable enough for Democrats. But we shouldn’t expect any of them to persuade Republicans to cross the aisle, Armin explained.

“Unless you have a really, really good reason to generate a permission structure for Republicans to switch over and cross over to a Democrat, you’re probably not going to get much of a different result from the baseline expectation,” said Armin.

The Argument will be running Substack live videos with Split Ticket on a semi-weekly basis this election season. Tune in this Wednesday when we’ll discuss the outcome of tomorrow’s Texas primary and how the results could impact the general election.

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In 2024, Donald Trump rode a wave of anger at high prices back into the White House. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani’s laser focus on “affordability” led him to an upset victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Looking ahead to the midterms, Democrats think that they have a winning hand in cost-of-living-focused messaging; the president, for his part, has decided that affordability is a “fake word by Democrats.”

If you look at practically any poll conducted within the last few years, you’ll notice that most voters are indeed fired up about the cost of living.1 But beneath this now-well-trod, surface-level consensus, issue priorities vary dramatically by income, age, partisanship, and education level.

This variation highlights an uncomfortable reality: The voters most insulated from economic precarity are the ones most likely to prioritize abstract threats. Among Harris voters, that manifests as a heightened focus on democracy; among Trump voters, it manifests as a heightened focus on immigration.

But voters most affected by high prices can’t afford such luxury beliefs.

Affordability is especially important to younger, poorer, and less-educated voters

Unsurprisingly, affordability is more important to the poor than to the rich.

In our polling, the poorest group of respondents was 23 percentage points more likely to list cost of living as one of their top two issues than the wealthiest group, and nine percentage points more likely to list health care.

The wealthiest were eight points more likely to list immigration as a top issue and 14 points more likely to list democracy.

Prioritizing immigration or democracy over the cost of living could be considered a “luxury belief” — writer Rob Henderson’s term for an idea “that confer[s] status on the upper class, at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” But democracy is beneficial, not harmful, to the lower classes. And our polling data doesn’t directly tell us whether rich people who prioritize immigration favor more immigration or less, but this effect is almost entirely driven by rich Trump 2024 voters, so you can draw your own conclusions.2

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Regardless, to some extent, a laser focus on democracy and immigration can read as highbrow, even as it crowds out a focus on cost-of-living issues.

The income gap in immigration is mostly driven by white voters. Rich white voters were eight points more likely to list immigration as a top issue than poor white voters, while rich nonwhite voters were only four points more likely to do so than poor nonwhite voters.

The youngest voters are much more concerned about affordability, being 12 points more likely to list cost of living as a top issue than seniors. Prioritization of health care was uncorrelated with age; just over a third of respondents in all age brackets listed it as a top priority.

For both white and nonwhite voters, cost of living and health care were rated as the most important issues, but white voters were nine percentage points more likely to say that immigration was a top issue.

Young people are also less concerned about immigration and democracy than older people. Thirty percent of respondents over 65 listed immigration as a top issue, compared to just 17% of respondents under age 30; similarly, 28% of respondents over 65 said democracy was a top issue for them, while just 16% of respondents younger than 30 said the same.

Affordability may be “crowding out” other issues for young people. That is, young people are so focused on the cost of living that they’re not putting as much weight on other issues.

The Democratic data scientist David Shor has floated the hypothesis that young people today are more focused on making money than previous generations, and other survey data shows that Gen Z’s bar for financial success is over twice as high as the average American’s.

To the extent this is true, social media is a big reason why. It’s a lot easier to compare your lifestyle to others’ on Instagram, and short-form video content (think “get ready with me,” “day in the life,” or “5 to 9 after or before by 9 to 5” reels) often implicitly or explicitly valorize material wealth.

Finally, while our data showed that cost of living and health care were the top issues for voters of all races, there were substantial differences across education levels.

In our data, nonwhite voters’ views differed less across educational attainment levels than did white voters’. Voters without a college degree were much more likely to say that cost of living was most important and much less likely to say that democracy was a top issue. Across education levels, voters placed roughly equal weight on the importance of health care, though nonwhite voters were slightly more likely to say it was a top issue.

The education gap on cost of living and democracy was largest among white voters — see the left two columns of the chart above — and much smaller among nonwhite voters. White noncollege voters were particularly likely to list immigration as a top concern; research has linked this phenomenon to both concerns about labor market displacement and nativism.

Democrats and Republicans have very different priorities

Regardless of who people voted for — or whether they voted at all — everyone’s top issue is the cost of living. What’s really interesting is what respondents’ second priorities were: for Trump voters, it was (perhaps unsurprisingly) immigration, while for Harris voters, third-party voters, and nonvoters, it was health care.

Democracy was a much more salient issue for Harris voters — 38% said it was one of their most important issues, compared to 12% of third-party/nonvoters and just 5% of Trump voters. To the extent that Harris pivoted from talking about the economy to talking about threats to democracy in the final weeks of the campaign, that messaging appealed more to her base than anyone else.

Even among voters who backed the same candidate, income, education, and race shaped which issues came second after cost of living. White and college-educated Trump voters were far more focused on immigration than their nonwhite noncollege counterparts.

Meanwhile, white and college-educated Harris voters were far more focused on democracy than nonwhite and non-college-educated Harris voters.

In other words, the divide isn’t just between the two parties — it runs through each of them.

For 18- to 29-year-olds who voted for Trump, cost of living was the top issue, followed by immigration and crime. Cost of living was also the top issue for 18- to 29-year-old Harris voters, followed by health care and democracy. Seniors who voted for Trump prioritized cost of living and immigration equally; Harris voters 65 and up said that democracy and cost of living were their top issues, followed by health care.

Among Trump 2024 voters, cost of living was rated more or less the same across race and educational attainment level. But there were large gaps in what different types of Trump voters said was their second most important issue. White Trump voters were much more likely to list immigration as a top issue compared to nonwhite Trump voters (42% vs. 31%), and college-educated Trump voters placed a lower weight on cost of living and health care and a higher weight on immigration and crime than did Trump voters without a college degree.

Across race and education levels, Harris voters placed roughly the same weight on health care. However, white Harris voters cared relatively less about cost of living and much more about democracy than nonwhite Harris voters, as did college-educated Harris voters compared to those without a degree.

The lesson isn’t complicated. Affordability is everyone’s top issue, while democracy and immigration are, by and large, the preoccupations of voters comfortable enough to prioritize something other than making rent.

If the last two election cycles have shown anything, it’s that the politicians who forget this lesson tend to lose and then waste a lot of time wondering why.

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A political earthquake shook Texas this week: Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a machinist and Air Force veteran, flipped Texas’ 9th state Senate district in a stunning special election upset. He won by 14 points in a district that voted for Trump by 17 points in 2024.

His victory is made all the more impressive by the fact that the GOP went all-out to defend the seat. Rehmet’s Republican opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, received a massive financial boost from the party, along with the endorsements of Donald Trump and Greg Abbott.

Democrats’ strong performance in the district aligns with the usual midterm pattern for the party out of the White House. Accounting for all the special elections in 2025 and 2026, the average swing from 2024 is 12 points in favor of the Democrats.

Our polling also picked up this shift: In our recent survey, though Democrats led by four points with all registered voters, they led by 10 among voters who said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote in 2026.

But the million-dollar question remains: Is the race for Texas’ U.S. Senate seat going to be competitive?

The simple answer is that it depends entirely on the candidates. That sounds cliché, but this is probably the race most prone to candidate quality variance, given the extremes on both sides.

If incumbent John Cornyn wins the Republican primary, it’s likely that he wins re-election somewhat comfortably in the Trump +14 state. But he is being challenged from the (far) right by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Congressman Wesley Hunt. Normally, this wouldn’t matter, but Paxton is so deeply flawed and plagued with scandal, that if he wins, it would immediately endanger the Republican chances of holding the seat against a strong Democratic candidate.

But will the Democrats field one? That’s up in the air. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico will face off in a primary that polling suggests will be a close contest.

Between the two, I think Talarico would have a better chance of beating Paxton because Crockett has shown no interest in winning swing voters, going instead with a theory of “expanding the electorate” and doubling down on partisan rhetoric.

For what it is worth, this trick does sometimes work in off-cycle and primary elections, but rarely is it successful in a midterm election, especially in a state as large as Texas. And there’s no reason to think that Crockett is going to be the exception.

The betting markets think Talarico is better poised to pick up undecided primary voters based on his fundraising, campaigning, and potential appeal among white and Latino Democrats.

Normally, in Texas, this would just be a fight over a relatively academic question: “How much will the Democrat lose by?” (And if you listen to Crockett, that’s actually similar to how she describes the race.)

This time, however, I’m not so sure that’s the case. Assuming that our D+10 January survey result among enthusiastic voters is the environment the candidates face in November (and it’s fair to be skeptical, but there are some reasons to believe that we’re on track for something a touch bluer than 2018’s D+7), then Democrats will need just a four-point overperformance in order to win the race.

That’s extremely doable. It’s not easy, but Talarico seems a bit more likely to pull it off than Crockett.

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