Texas Senate Race Becomes a Fact-Check War

A race that keeps rewriting itself

In the last days before Election Day, the Texas Senate contest has stopped feeling like a normal campaign. It feels like an argument that won’t end. Democratic state Rep. James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton are running in a race that the Associated Press says could make Talarico the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas in more than 30 years. The polls show Talarico narrowly ahead, a margin that has turned the final stretch into something frantic and noisy.

The national attention comes with a flood of stories about the men themselves. Talarico is a former teacher and the grandson of a preacher, a four-term state representative who is now 37 and described in campaign coverage as a Presbyterian seminarian preaching a gospel of hope. Paxton is a scandal-haunted attorney general and Trump ally backed by financial support from tech billionaire Elon Musk, a man who was indicted on securities fraud charges, the case later dismissed after he paid restitution, and who was impeached for alleged abuse of office before being acquitted by the Texas Senate.

The race has become a place where the candidates’ records are less interesting than the rumors about them. Snopes has examined a dozen claims involving the two men over the years, a catalog that ranges from alleged personal details to purported statements to their records as elected officials. The claims move quickly online, often outpacing any correction.

A preacher’s grandson in a Republican state

Talarico’s story is the kind that campaigns try to shape into a biography. He was born James Dell Causey in Round Rock in 1989. His mother Tamara Causey was a preacher’s daughter who left home at 19 and met his biological father, whom she has described as an alcoholic prone to violence. One night the abuse became too much and Tamara drove James and all her belongings in a small Ford Escort to the hotel where she worked as a sales assistant. They lived in an empty room until they found an apartment in Austin. Tamara later married sales manager Mark Talarico, who adopted James and gave him his surname.

At school he was a keen debater and actor, with roles including Danny Zuko in Grease. His high school theater director joked that the young Talarico did not so much inhabit the character as play a version of himself. When the theater department handed out superlatives, Jimmy was voted most likely to be president, a running joke among his friends that he would laugh off.

Eight years after a first fundraising event in Austin where former Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis remembers thinking “Poor kid” before Talarico began speaking, Davis says she knew something was different. “He was as articulate and unique then as he is now. From that day, I started calling him ‘Baby Obama’.” Now the campaign is a national story. Trump rallied in Texas and branded him “James Talafreako”; JD Vance implied that Talarico is gay, though he has a girlfriend; and right-wing influencers spread a baseless lie that he checked into a mental health clinic in Ohio, a claim Snopes examined in October 2026 that said he was ill with flu.

Despite those attacks, most opinion polls give Talarico a narrow edge. The campaign has raised a record $64 million in the third quarter, including donations from a vast number of small-dollar contributors. Last week Talarico told a crowd at his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, that Republicans’ billionaire donors were starting to fret. “They are terrified because they see what we see: we are about to win this election,” he said.

Rumors moving faster than votes

The rumor mill has been busy with both men. Posts have claimed Neil Bush, brother of George W. Bush, said he voted for Talarico. The claim about an Ohio mental health facility was debunked, and Snopes notes the rumor stems from a purported recording of a phone call that erupted after Talarico disappeared from public view. Republicans have claimed Talarico is vegan; he is not.

Other claims circle his public statements. Posts sharing a Talarico quote about hating Christianity omit context from a 2021 podcast. A pastor associated with Hegseth said he wants Talarico “crucified,” with context suggesting figurative language. Trump has been quoted as calling Talarico’s support of trans people an “insult to Jesus,” a quote correctly attributed to him. In 2021 Talarico said “God is nonbinary” while opposing a Texas anti-trans youth sports bill.

Paxton has his own set of stories. Snopes examined whether he was caught on video traveling to Iceland with an alleged mistress, a claim that ties to his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton’s 2025 divorce filing. The Texas attorney general’s office has been accused of letting a man accused of child sex abuse receive a short jail term as part of a plea deal.

The volume is the point. In a campaign where both sides are fighting over trust, the claims become a way to define the other candidate before voters define them for themselves.

The ad war over memory and medicine

The most consequential disagreements have centered on policy and on how that policy is remembered in ads. In Texas, ads have cited Talarico’s 2023 vote against state legislation that broadly prohibited gender-affirming care for kids, covering medications including puberty blockers and hormone therapy and surgeries. The bill stipulated that doctors could lose their medical licenses for violating the measure. Talarico voted against the bill and has said it was “overly broad.” He voted for an amendment that would have restricted the bill to banning surgeries. Experts note that gender-affirming surgeries typically take place after age 18.

A closing ad from Talarico about Crystal Mason has drawn its own fact-check. The ad says Mason received a five-year prison sentence for illegal voting “because of Ken Paxton’s crackdown on voters of color.” The story is more complicated. Mason, a Black Texas resident, was convicted and sentenced by a state judge in March 2018 for illegally casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 general election. At the time she was on supervised release following a felony conviction for tax fraud in 2011, which made her ineligible to vote. The case against Mason was investigated and prosecuted by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, not Paxton’s office, as the ad may suggest. The judge did not provide an explanation for the five-year sentence.

The ad is also linked to a broader pattern. A 2021 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union found that at least 72% of election fraud cases brought by the state between 2015, when Paxton became attorney general, and 2021 targeted Black and Latino people, and 45% of the prosecutions targeted Black and Latino women. That analysis is based on prosecutions by Paxton and his office, which would not include the case against Mason.

The final week

Talarico has responded to the culture war attacks with an unorthodox blend of economic populism, progressive politics and an unapologetically Christian message that challenges the religious right on its own turf. Paxton leans on his record as attorney general and on the backing of national Republicans.

The race has narrowed to a question of who voters believe when the stories conflict. The candidates know each other’s histories, but voters are being asked to sort through a competing set of narratives about votes, about personal life, about who is credible and who is exaggerating.

On Tuesday, Texas will decide whether the narrow polling lead holds, and whether a former teacher and grandson of a preacher can break a three-decade Republican hold on a Senate seat. The fight over facts will continue after the votes are counted, because the rumors that powered the campaign are already part of the story the state will tell about itself.