2026 Election: Discussion on extreme campaign ad blitz

Welcome back. You're watching Fox 7 Austin News at 5 30. The last major poll before the end of early voting is now out. The survey from Texas Southern University comes as the vice president returns to Texas because of this tight Senate race. Fox 7 Austin's chief political reporter Rudy Kosky joining us in the newsroom with the details. Rudy. Hi, Alec. Yeah, that poll was dropped by the TSU Barbara Jordan Public Policy Research and Survey Center. It shows that the Senate race remains very close and is the only race where a Democrat is in the lead. Now, that face-off between James Tallarico and Ken Paxton brought J.D. Vance back to Texas today. Speaking at a rally just outside of Fort Worth, Vance pulled no punches when describing Tallarico. What am I to do? But to talk about a man who was handpicked, handpicked by Democrat donors in Washington, DC, because they thought that he looked electable. And I wonder if any of those donors got their money back. When all the videos came out of him talking about his favorite drag queens, or how there are six genders, or about how whiteness is a disease. I'm a Republican. I'm a Republican. The Puerto Rico campaign has pushed back, including a new ad showing former Texas Republican. Politicians saying that they will not vote for Ken Paxton. Some of the other campaign ads that are recently popped up got a little cartoonish. Gina Hinojosa repurposed the old duck hunt video game to literally blast Greg Abbott's early support of flock cameras. And the other, the one that you're looking at right now from Beau French, where he is trying to rally together some young men and Lampoon Democrats. Now, our battleground show today discussed the extreme campaign ad blitz and the TSU polling. And Republicans are really gonna be banking on having higher turnout than we've seen thus far during early voting among Republican voters today and tomorrow, and especially on election day. Democrats, they had a surge in the first week of early voting. Now we're in the last few days, it's a matter of how big that gap or how close that gap would have tightened since. The Democratic surge, and so that's what I'm going to be looking for, and we won't know that until Monday. What stuck out to me was the seven-point favorability gap between Tallarico and Paxton with the AG on the hard downside. That was an interesting number, but that TSU poll shows that Tallarico is also underwater on the favorability rating. 51% of those who responded saying that they have an unfavorable opinion about him, and that, Alec, is keeping this Senate race pretty close. Rudy, another surprise in the poll is the comptroller's race. Former Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt, six points behind Republican Don Huffines in that survey. Did that poll provide any insight into that gap, and did you find it surprising? Yeah, I did find it surprising, and the poll did give us a little insight, you know, a bulk, a big bulk of those who took part in this survey, 67% said that they know a lot about Don Huffines, you know, he ran for governor, and he's in the office right now, issuing a lot of orders, making a lot of news headlines, but only 38% said that they knew anything about Sarah Eckhardt, now she's got a great resume, but she doesn't have a lot of money, and didn't have a lot of money to get her message out early, And pretty much only had the campaign on social media, Alec. Rudy Kowski, thank you.