Two years ago, Donald Trump carried Texas by 14 points, his biggest margin in three runs. Democrats hadn't won a single statewide race here since 1994.

On Tuesday, that streak ended, and not by a little. Democrats won the governor's office, the U.S. Senate seat and every other statewide office on the ballot, from lieutenant governor to railroad commissioner. They took the Texas House. And a congressional map Republicans drew to win five more seats ended up costing them two of their own.

Not every Republican lost. Sixteen House Republicans on this site won, most of them with less than 55%. And the richest man in the world spent more than $200 million trying to stop it.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: Democrats swept the statewide offices

Greg Abbott lost his bid for a record fourth term to Democrat Gina Hinojosa, 52.8% to 45.7% with 99% of the vote counted, according to NBC News. Four years ago he won with 54.8%. He conceded before the AP had even called the race. "Mathematically, we are not going to be able to win this election," he told supporters, KUT reported.

Hinojosa will be the first Democrat elected governor of Texas since Ann Richards in 1990, and the first Latina to lead the state. She ran on public schools and the cost of living. When Abbott ordered state agencies to cut their budgets, his health agency asked to eliminate an autism therapy program for 583 kids, and his $1 billion private school voucher program was exempt.

Ken Paxton lost the U.S. Senate race to Democrat James Talarico, 55.1% to 43.0%. The AP called it shortly after 10 p.m. Paxton is the first Republican Senate candidate in Texas to lose in 38 years. The last time a Democrat won a Senate race here, Talarico wasn't born yet.

Paxton's own party warned him this would happen. In the primary, Sen. John Cornyn argued that Paxton's trail of scandal would put the seat at risk. That trail includes a securities fraud indictment, an impeachment by the Republican-led Texas House (the Texas Senate acquitted him), and a "blind trust" that put $600,000 into a convicted mortgage fraudster's company. Trump endorsed him anyway. The Texas Tribune reported that Paxton's favorability stayed deeply underwater, below Trump's, and that many of his own supporters told pollsters they were voting against Talarico more than for Paxton.

Down the ballot, Republicans lost every one of the other statewide offices:

• Lieutenant governor: Democratic state Rep. Vikki Goodwin beat Dan Patrick, 51.7% to 45.6%. Patrick, first elected in 2014, outspent her 25 to 1, according to the Houston Chronicle.
• Attorney general: Democratic state Sen. Nathan Johnson beat Republican state Sen. Mayes Middleton, about 52% to 46%, to take Paxton's job.
• Comptroller: Democratic state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt beat Don Huffines, whom Abbott appointed this year. At Abbott's request, Huffines had been examining the finances of several public school districts. Now Eckhardt will run the $1 billion voucher program, and she has promised to audit it.
• Land commissioner: Democrat Benjamin Flores beat Republican Dawn Buckingham.
• Agriculture commissioner: Democrat Clayton Tucker, a Lampasas rancher, beat Republican Nate Sheets. He's the first Democrat elected to the office in 40 years.
• Railroad commissioner (the state's oil and gas regulator): Democratic state Rep. Jon Rosenthal, a former oilfield engineer, beat Bo French, a nominee Paxton backed in May. In September, French posted a photo of South Asian students at a UT game and called it a "problem."

The AP called the comptroller, land and agriculture races on Wednesday. Each Democrat won more than 51%.

Democrats won in the courts too. They beat all four Republican justices on the ballot for the Texas Supreme Court, which was entirely Republican. Each won with more than 52%, and Maggie Ellis will be the first woman elected chief justice. Two Democrats unseated Republican judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, and a third was leading Wednesday afternoon. Republicans still hold the Supreme Court, 5–4, because only four of its nine seats were on the ballot.

The Texas House flipped

Republicans had run the Texas House since 2003. Democrats came into Tuesday holding 62 of its 150 seats and needed to flip 14.

By early Wednesday afternoon, the AP had called 11 Republican-held seats for Democrats, and Republican incumbents had conceded three more, the Texas Tribune reported. That's 14. Democrats also led in at least seven more. If those leads hold, they'll have 83 seats to Republicans' 67. Republicans outspent Democrats in most of the competitive races.

A few of the seats that flipped:

• In San Antonio, Democrat Kristian Carranza won the seat Republican John Lujan gave up to run for Congress, and Republican Rep. Marc LaHood lost his.
• In South Texas, Republican Reps. Janie Lopez and Denise Villalobos both lost.
• In Garland, Republican Rep. Angie Chen Button was unseated.
• In Fort Worth, Republican Rep. John McQueeney trailed Democrat Beth Llewellyn McLaughlin by more than 1,000 votes. He outspent her 30 to 1 from July on.

The head of House Democrats' campaign arm says the new majority's early priorities will include expanding Medicaid and repealing school vouchers. That matters here more than almost anywhere. Texas has the highest uninsured rates in the country, for children and for working-age adults, and under Abbott it never expanded Medicaid. State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, the longest-serving woman and Black lawmaker in Texas history, is running for speaker. She would be the first woman and the first Black legislator to hold the job.

Five Democrats also beat their Republican opponents for the State Board of Education, which decides what Texas's 5.5 million public school students learn. A sixth Democrat led a Houston-area race by fewer than 600 votes, which would give Democrats a majority on the board for the first time since 1994. In Harris County, Democrat Letitia Plummer was elected county judge. She is the first Black person elected to lead the nation's third-largest county.

Trump's map backfired

In 2025, Trump pushed Texas Republicans to redraw the state's congressional map in the middle of the decade. They turned five Democratic seats into districts Trump would have carried by at least 10 points. They hoped to send 30 Republicans to Washington out of 38. Democrats fled the state to hold up the vote, but the map passed.

The map didn't work. Republicans lost four of the five seats they drew to flip, and two of their own, according to the Texas Tribune. Instead of 30–8, the delegation will be 24–14. That's one Republican seat fewer than they started this Congress with.

Three of the Republicans who lost are on this site:

• Monica De La Cruz lost the Rio Grande Valley seat she's held for two terms to Tejano singer Bobby Pulido, by more than 20 points according to the Chronicle, in a district Trump would have won by double digits.
• Brandon Herrera, a YouTuber who laughed along on a podcast as a co-host questioned the Holocaust's death toll, lost the open 23rd District to Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, a San Antonio lawyer and former teacher. The seat leaned 15 points toward Trump.
• Carlos De La Cruz, Monica's brother, lost the newly drawn 35th District, a seat Trump carried by 10 points, to Bexar County sheriff's deputy Johnny Garcia. The AI and crypto industries spent $2.1 million trying to elect him, about what his own campaign had raised by mid-October.

In Houston, Democrat Leticia Gutierrez won a district Trump carried by 20 points two years ago, while being badly outspent. Her opponent had raised $2.8 million.

The bad: they won, by less

Sixteen House Republicans on this site won. All of them voted twice for the budget bill that experts blame for pushing Texas food stamp enrollment to a 17-year low. Twelve of the 16 won with less than 55%. These are NBC News's counts with 99% of the vote in:

• Michael Cloud held on in the 27th District, 51.2% to Democrat Tanya Lloyd's 48.8%, a margin of 6,543 votes. Two years ago he won about 66%, according to the Victoria Advocate. Lloyd was leading at 9:15 p.m., and the AP didn't call it until Wednesday. Cloud wrote a bill that would abolish every federal agency on a timer, including the ones that warn Texas about hurricanes.
• Lance Gooden won the 5th District, 51.5% to Democrat Chelsey Hockett's 48.5%, according to the AP. He's under House Ethics investigation, and his first move was to call the investigators "dishonest unelected bureaucrats."
• Jake Ellzey won the 6th District with 52.2%. He announced a "historic investment" in rural health care after voting twice for the law that cuts $137 billion from rural Medicaid.
• Keith Self won the 3rd District with 52.7%, against Democrat Evan Hunt. When he was asked whether he'd debate Hunt, Self called the district "my seat".
• Craig Goldman won the 12th District with 53.1%, and lost the Tarrant County part of it. As a state lawmaker, he chaired the committee that put gas companies' Winter Storm Uri costs on Texans' bills through 2039.
• Beth Van Duyne won the 24th District with 53.4%. She called it "the golden age of DOGE." Then the GAO reported that DOGE couldn't show its work on 96% of its grant savings.
• Pete Sessions won the 17th District with 53.6%. He once wrote that a $7 billion Ponzi schemer was "a man of great strength, character and financial stability".
• Brian Babin won the 36th District with 53.6%. His campaign paid the FEC $26,700 after a donor funneled illegal contributions to him.
• Roger Williams won the 25th District with 53.7%. He's a car dealer who slipped an exemption for car dealers into a recalled-car safety bill just before midnight. It was stripped from the final law.
• John Carter won the 31st District with 53.8%. His last in-person town hall was in 2013.
• Randy Weber won the 14th District with 54.0%. Eighteen years after Hurricane Ike, the barrier meant to protect his coast has gotten $5.5 million in federal money toward a price tag in the tens of billions.
• Brandon Gill won the 26th District with 54.5%. He voted to cut food stamps by $187 billion, then filed a bill to stop people from buying a hot meal with them.
• Pat Fallon won the 4th District with 56.1%. He went on Fox Business and said we can't leave Iran until American troops are on the ground.
• August Pfluger won the 11th District with 59.5%. He voted for the bill that KFF projects will leave 480,000 Texans uninsured, and now he's writing the sequel.
• Ronny Jackson won the 13th District with 65.3%. A Pentagon investigation found he bullied, belittled and humiliated the staff who worked for him.
• Nathaniel Moran won the 1st District with 69.0%. He told a Rotary Club that Congress would have to weigh in on the Iran war after 60 days. When it did, in May, June, July and September, he voted no every time.

The ugly: $224 million from one man

Nearly half of the money Elon Musk spent on this year's elections went to Texas.

Elon Musk spent at least $474 million on the 2026 elections and "funneled $224 million, or nearly half, into Texas alone," according to a CNBC analysis of campaign finance records. His favored candidates there were Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott. Both lost.

Where the money went

At the start of September, Talarico led independents by 20 points or more. Then Republicans, led by Musk, started pouring money into Texas, the Tribune reported:

• A $188 million "rescue mission" led by Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, with money that the Tribune reported "almost entirely came from Musk."
• $10 million to seed the main pro-Paxton super PAC.
• At least $47 million more through his own group, America PAC.

Trump's super PAC, MAGA Inc., spent for Paxton too: $43.3 million in all. Altogether, Republicans put more than $280 million into ads, over $200 million of it from Musk. Counting the primary and the general, the race drew nearly $590 million in TV, radio and digital ads. The media tracking firm AdImpact says that makes it the most expensive race for anything short of president on record.

Abbott got his own share. Musk gave him $5 million on September 28, nearly a fifth of his biggest fundraising haul of the race. All the while, Abbott's office was fighting to keep its emails with Musk's companies hidden.

What it paid for

For two months, Texans were flooded with ads. Republican groups spent hundreds of millions of dollars on attack ads built from Talarico's old remarks, according to the Tribune: that God is nonbinary, and that there are six genders. Others cast him as backing transgender athletes in girls' sports, a position Talarico says he opposes. Paxton's campaign went further and released an AI-generated video of Talarico giving a speech he never gave.

Before the outside money arrived, Paxton and his allies stayed off the air all summer while Talarico ran ads. "He's lazy and doesn't raise money," Cornyn told the Tribune in August.

What it bought

Nothing. Talarico won by about 12 points, by NBC's count, after making Musk's money part of his pitch. "We just sent a message to every billionaire mega donor, every trillionaire mega donor," he said on election night. "Power belongs to the people." The next morning he told CBS he wants to get big money out of politics "so a trillionaire like Elon Musk can't buy public politicians to do his bidding," the Houston Chronicle reported.

It wasn't only Texas. By CNBC's count, as of Wednesday morning, Republicans backed by America PAC had lost 29 races and won just three, with 12 still uncalled. "More than $80 million — or 93% of its spending — went toward races Republicans lost."

The rest of the ugly

• America PAC's lawyer is going to Congress. Republican Chris Gober won Rep. Michael McCaul's safe seat. Before he ran, he was the chief lawyer for Musk's America PAC, which the Tribune says has channeled $216 million toward Republicans this cycle.
• Republicans kept the Texas Senate, 19 seats to 12. The Chronicle reported it could stand in the way of Hinojosa's appointees and of Democrats trying to repeal Republican laws. Goodwin will preside over it as lieutenant governor, but the Tribune reported the Republican majority was expected to consider new rules limiting her powers. "Texas stands as long as the Texas Senate Republican caucus holds the line," Republican Sen. Charles Schwertner said on election night.
• Paxton's office tried to stop people from being reminded to vote. One day before early voting ended, his office sued to pull Harris County's "Go Vote" ads off Facebook, claiming they were aimed at Black, Latino and Asian voters. Harris County went on to vote in record numbers. Paxton stays attorney general until January.

What the results show

Texas Republicans lost the governor's office, the U.S. Senate seat and every other statewide office on the ballot. Greg Abbott fell from 54.8% four years ago to 45.7%, Ken Paxton lost the Senate seat by 12 points, and Democrats flipped at least 14 seats, counting three where Republicans conceded, to take the Texas House for the first time since 2003. The congressional map Trump pushed Republicans to draw for a 30–8 delegation produced 24–14, costing Monica De La Cruz her seat and Brandon Herrera and Carlos De La Cruz their races. Elon Musk put $224 million into Texas, more than $200 million of it into the Senate race, and the candidates he paid for lost.

Source

Texas election results: Democrats break decades-long losing streak in Texas as Talarico wins Senate race, Hinojosa unseats Abbott — Lucio Vasquez, The Texas Newsroom / KUT, updated November 4, 2026.