Is Blexas un-canceled?
Historic lows for incumbents, the base matters more than ever, the politics of 18-year olds, the cheapest races, people who use AI like it, the FiveThirtyEight archive, booming prediction markets
No. 403 | May 29, 2026
🤠 Do Democrats have a shot in Texas?
The Texas Senate race is set after Donald Trump ousted his second incumbent Republican Senator this month. Nate Cohn makes the argument that a blue Texas blue Texas isn’t just a dream for Democrats anymore — using current national polling, you can get to a place where it’s a better pickup opportunity for Democrats than Ohio or Alaska based on demographics alone:
Or consider another example: Imagine we adjusted the results of the last presidential election by shifting each racial demographic group’s support to match the latest Times/Siena poll results. Based on the poll’s findings, Texas would be expected to tilt Democratic in this national political environment. Interestingly, the other red states Democrats are targeting in their pursuit of Senate control — like Ohio and Alaska — would still remain red in this exercise, even though each voted more Democratic in 2024 than Texas. That’s because Democratic gains among nonwhite voters help Democrats more in Texas, since it is a much more diverse state.
Count me skeptical. Even conceding some Hispanic reversion, you’d not only need to roll back Trump’s gains in 2024, but his and the GOP’s gains in 2020/22 too. Remember that Hispanics swung something like 30-40 points right between both elections combined. And a favorable environment for Democrats gets you back to something like the 2020 pre-election polling, where Biden led by 8 nationally (similar to Dem generic leads today) but Trump was up by just 2 statewide, leading many to take seriously that it could be a part of a 400+ EV plus anti-Trump landslide. The trouble is the partisan baseline then was much softer than it is now — Trump +14 now, but Trump +8 in 2016, Cruz +2-3 in 2018, and ultimately Trump +6 in 2020.
The difference between now and then is not just Hispanic gains — but that the Texas suburbs have revealed themselves to be anything but the “hydrogen bomb of D votes” proclaimed by old-school Election Twitter. Texas has been just as big a magnet for right-leaning migrants from the rest of the country as Florida, bolstering Trump’s position in 2024. While a newly minted Texas exurb might see the R+40 or R+60 margins of what it replaced, R+20 off a larger population base tends to be the norm. And a large share of these exurban voters are largely untouched by the aesthetic considerations that held sway in the old-school Republican inner suburbs in 2016 and 2018.
That said: Ken Paxton is somewhere between Herschel Walker and Roy Moore in candidate quality—and a lot hinges on where he lands on that spectrum. But the campaign to polarize the conservative electorate against James Talarico—with comments heavy on veganism and gender ideology—has only begun. And in a state like Texas, polarization is usually enough.
Looking back on the primary this week, John Cornyn’s 36% in the Texas Republican Senate primary runoff is the lowest two-person share for an incumbent senator in a primary since 1974.
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🫏 All about that base
Even without independents, your part has an enormous advantage if you’re winning your own party’s voters by Assad margins. And that’s true for Democrats this cycle. Democrats are in array with 96% support among their own voters, to Republicans at 91%. That works out to about a 10 point net advantage for Democrats relative to Republicans. Applied to around 40% of the electorate that might identify with or lean towards the Democrats, that’s good for a 4 point shift in the generic ballot numbers.
Historically, that 91% figure for Republicans isn’t bad—but 96% is astronomical. At this point in the 2018 cycle, both Democrats and Republicans were much less loyal to their parties than they are now, showing how much more it’s become about the base.
And it’s also all about adding safe seats in redistricting. To avoid a midterm wipeout, Republicans have added up to 14 new safe seats, defined as Trump +10 or more, for a total of 204 — but that’s pending redistricting being finalized in Alabama and Louisiana (it’s not moving forward in South Carolina, where Jim Clyburn survives). I talked about the analysis from last week’s newsletter with CNN this week, stating that the biggest consequence of redistricting is not whether Democrats can win the House (they can) but the size of the majority and the number of seats Republicans would have to win back in 2028 (cut by as much as two thirds).
🧑🧑🧒 18-year-olds are independent — just not always from their parents
VoteHub analyzes voter file data of 18-year olds, finding only 20% of registered voters born in 2008 registered with a major party. Partisanship among the rest varies by state, but it seems to be highly influenced by registration among others in the household. For instance, in North Carolina, very few of these young voters buck their parents of the same party, but there’s a Republican skew in mixed households.
📺 Let’s hear less about PVI and more about DMAs
It’s not just about whether the partisanship of a state makes it competitive — but whether buying ad time is cheap enough to allow you to carpet bomb the state or district with relatively few resources. Crystal Ball reviews which races that a prospective donor can get the biggest bang for their buck, with Alaska taking the top spot.
🌎 A decade since Brexit, the populist right is stronger than ever
In June, it’ll have been a decade since the Brexit vote. Pew Research details the rise of the populist right in Europe since.
🤖 Negative views of AI come mostly from those who don’t use it.
Those who use AI in the workplace are more likely to say it saves time, improves quality of work, and improves their career.
🦊 Where to find FiveThirtyEight data now that it’s been pulled down
Earlier this month, ABC quietly pulled down the archive for FiveThirtyEight. In response, independent archivists have been racing to preserve the site’s work — including a newly expanded database cataloging roughly 13,000 charts and 3,000 illustrations scraped from FiveThirtyEight’s HTML and saved individually for public access. The archive includes a couple of my articles on whether you can buy a presidential election and Black voter turnout.
🎰 Prediction markets are officially big business
Trading volumes on prediction markets have exploded since the middle of 2025.
