The Trafalgar Group released a run of Senate general election surveys over the past two weeks covering Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Alaska, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
This matters because of who Trafalgar is. This is the firm that called 2016 when almost nobody else did, that Real Clear Politics named the most accurate pollster of that cycle among firms polling multiple Senate and governor races, and that built its entire reputation on finding Republican voters the rest of the industry kept missing.
The best Republican pollster in the country just flashed a red alert for the GOP.
When Trafalgar shows our candidates trailing, it is not a media narrative and it is not a Democrat talking point. It is the house that specializes in locating our voters reporting that it cannot find enough of them.
Texas is a one-point race.
Conducted September 15 through 17, 1,079 likely voters, margin of error 2.9 percent.
James Talarico 46.4. Ken Paxton 45.2. Libertarian Ted Brown 2.5. Undecided 5.9.
That is a 1.2-point lead, statistically a tie. But the crosstabs are where the alarm lives.
Paxton is losing Hispanic voters 58.4 to 36.1.
Read that again, because it undoes a decade of Republican progress in this state. The party spent years building in the Rio Grande Valley and among working-class Hispanic Texans, and it worked. A 22-point deficit is not a normal Republican performance in Texas in 2026. It is a collapse back to where we were before the gains.
He is also losing voters under 40 by roughly 22 points in both brackets, and losing women 50.1 to 41.2. He holds white voters 52 to 37.8 and men 49.7 to 42.3, which is enough to keep the race close and not enough to win it.
And note Ted Brown at 2.5 percent in a race decided by 1.2. The Libertarian is bigger than the margin.
Iowa is inside the margin too.
Conducted September 16 through 18, 1,089 likely voters, same 2.9 percent margin.
Ashley Hinson 44.0. Josh Turek 42.1. Libertarian Thomas Laehn 3.4. Undecided 10.4.
Hinson leads by 1.9 points with more than ten percent of the electorate still undecided, which is a very large undecided pool this late.
Her crosstabs tell a cleaner story than Paxton's. She leads white voters 44.9 to 41.4 and men 49.9 to 38.9. She trails women 38.2 to 45.3 and loses voters 18 to 29 by 22 points.
The number that should concern Iowa Republicans is 22.1 percent among Hispanic voters. Turek takes 58.6. Iowa's Hispanic population is smaller than Texas's, but in a two-point race nothing is too small to matter.
And again, a Libertarian at 3.4 percent in a race with a 1.9-point margin.
The pattern across both states.
Three things repeat, and they are not coincidences.
Young voters are breaking hard against our candidates. Talarico takes 58 percent of Texans under 30 and Turek takes 52 percent of Iowans under 30. That is not a messaging gap. That is a generational problem arriving on schedule.
Women are breaking against our candidates in both states, by nine points in Texas and seven in Iowa.
And third-party candidates are polling larger than the margin in both races. Ted Brown and Thomas Laehn are currently holding more votes than the difference between winning and losing two United States Senate seats.
What to do about it, specifically.
The Hispanic number in Texas is the single most fixable problem on this list, and it is worth real money in the next thirty-four days. These are voters who moved toward Republicans on the economy, on the border, and on faith and family. They did not stop caring about those things. Something in the current campaign is not reaching them, and Paxton is publicly asking for financial backup, which suggests his own team knows it.
The Libertarian vote is the other actionable item. Those are not Democrats. In both states they are overwhelmingly voters who agree with us on taxes, spending and regulation and are registering a protest. Every one of them who comes home is worth twice what a persuasion voter is worth, because it adds one and subtracts one from the protest column.
The undecideds in Iowa, at 10.4 percent, are unusually high for late September and skew female. That is a turnout and contact problem more than a persuasion problem.
One honest caveat.
These are six polls from one firm. Trafalgar has an excellent record and it also has cycles where it has missed. Nobody should treat any single pollster as gospel, including a friendly one.
But when the pollster best known for finding hidden Republican support reports Texas at a one-point race and Iowa inside two, the correct response is not to argue with the numbers.
It is to go get the votes that are sitting right there in the crosstabs.
Thirty-four days. Ballots are already out in twenty states.
