Who’s the real favorite in the Texas Senate primary?
Nonpartisan polls give Crockett the edge. So why are prediction markets so bullish on Talarico?
Before we begin, one more pitch for our Comedy Cellar (NYC) event at 6 p.m. next Wednesday, March 4, with Galen Druke and Clare Malone (+ guest appearance by Eli!). We’ll draft Republican presidential primary candidates, as we did for Democrats last time. But this will also be the night after the Texas primaries, the subject of today's newsletter, so I’m sure we’ll have a lot to say about those. There are still some tickets left, and we hope to see you there! UPDATE: The show is now sold out.
⏱️ UPDATE (Feb. 26, 6:45 PM): A new poll was released a couple of hours after we published this story, which showed Talarico leading. We definitely don’t want to get into the habit of updating any polling-related story every time a new poll is published or we’d never get anything done, and we also don’t want to do any stealth edits. So the text of the story is unchanged from this afternoon1, but I added a few comments at the very end.
Nate Silver: Let’s try something a little different today. Eli’s going to be the play-by-play guy. But as someone with strong feelings about the whole polls-versus-prediction markets thing, I’ll jump in with some color commentary. Eli, take it away! And yes, this is going to get wonky, so let’s bring that Model Talk banner out of storage.
Eli McKown-Dawson: Earlier this week, we wrote about whether Texas Republicans are about to repeat the classic GOP mistake of nominating a subpar, scandal-plagued Senate candidate (spoiler alert: probably yes). But Tuesday’s big-ticket event is the Texas Democratic Senate primary. U.S. House Member Jasmine Crockett of “bleach blonde bad built butch body2” fame is running against Texas House Member James Talarico. Former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred — who ran for the Senate against Ted Cruz in 2024 — was in the race, but he dropped out when Crockett jumped in.
With only two major candidates running, we’re unlikely to see a runoff in May (unlike on the other side of the aisle), so next week’s contest is especially meaningful.
Nate: Did you say “unlikely,” Eli? That’s the bat-signal for Nitpicky Nate. 🦇 There is an obscure third candidate, Ahmad Hassan, in the race. In past U.S. Senate primaries, Hassan has gotten between 1.5 and 3.5 of the vote. Presumably, he’ll get less this time with two such high-profile frontrunners. But I’d ballpark perhaps a 15 percent chance of a runoff. Because this could easily come down to just a point or two.
Eli: How competitive is this race? The number of early votes cast in the Democratic primary is already 139 percent of the final early vote total in the 2022 primary.
It’s also been a contentious contest, above and beyond the usual attack ads. Here’s an example: earlier this month, an influencer alleged that Talarico said he had “signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable, intelligent Black woman,” with the Black man in question being Allred. Talarico said his remark was mischaracterized, but not before Allred released a heated response video and endorsed Crockett. Crockett also disputed that Talarico’s comment was mischaracterized: “Oh, you said it. Right? Because, now, it’s ‘Oh, she misinterpreted.’ Because of course the Black woman would misinterpret, right?”
Nate: I hate this kind of stuff, but my opinion has approximately zero correlation with the typical Democratic primary voter. Just to benchmark, the Democratic electorate in the 2020 presidential primary in Texas was 44 percent white, 32 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Black, 58 percent without college degrees (lower than typical for a Democratic primary), and only 25 percent age 65+ (unusually young for a primary). It’s not a “very online” cohort of voters. But young-ish, predominantly non-college Black and Hispanic voters are also a hard group to reach in polls. (You know who really likes answering polls? Old white people.)
So maybe Crockett ought to get a little credit for knowing her audience. Although overall, this tends to default me toward “nobody knows anything”. I don’t think most of the people making confident claims about this race have a good mental model of the Texas Democratic primary electorate, and I don’t either, which is why it’s probably best to start with the more objective indicators.
Eli: This is Silver Bulletin, so our first stop, as usual, is the polls. We have ten polls of the race comparing Crockett and Talarico, and the individual results range from Crockett +18 to Talarico +9.3 But only three of those were conducted in February: one showed Crockett leading by 12 points and the other two (both affiliated with Talarico’s campaign) had Talarico up by 4 points and 6 points.
Nate: Not the best set of polling. Almost everything is either candidate-sponsored or out of date, or both. The rule of thumb is that candidates exaggerate their standing by 3-5 points in internal polls they share with the public. So if Talarico’s leaking numbers showing himself up 4-6 points, that implies more of a toss-up than a Talarico lead.
Thus, I’d characterize “the polls” as showing a Crockett lead. If we put this into our polling average algorithm, it would adjust and discount those internals, and note that Crockett actually had bigger leads in the last two nonpartisan polls (12 points and 8 points) than Talarico showed in his internals anyway. I’m also not particularly impressed that Talarico is releasing multiple internals instead of just one. If anything, it comes across as a little insecure.4
Eli: So, you’d rather be Crockett, right?
Wrong, at least according to prediction markets, which have had Talarico as the strong favorite since December. His win probability on Polymarket dipped to just 66 percent after the most recent nonpartisan poll showing Crockett leading was released, but it’s back up to 72 percent today. That’s a departure from the GOP Senate race, where the markets are tracking the polls pretty closely.
Clearly, there’s something else pulling bettors not just toward the middle, but strongly in favor of Talarico. What is it?