Election Day | Dallas News Live

And now let's talk about some local races for perspective here in Texas. Joining me live, SMU professor and director of the McGuire Ethics Center, Rita Kirk. All right, Rita, we are finally here. It's been a lot of money spent. Texas is an expensive state. We already know that. What do you make of the nearly 8 million people that voted early in this election? I think it's one of the most exciting things I've heard about in years. You know, we always want people to get out and vote to tell us their stories and this time they did. So we're just waiting to see what their verdict is. It's kind of exciting. Rita, I did some digging. I saw your bio. You've done work on elections multiple years with CNN and some others surveying voters. Texas is unique, of course, as a huge state, but Democrats tend to vote early. Now more people on both parties have been voting early. Talk about the trends in Texas where it comes to that early number is going to drop and some people are going to be in support of Democrats and get excited seeing a big margin. But there's like a red wave that moves from west to east and then those margins start getting tighter and tighter, right? They do. They do indeed. You know, it's interesting because we're watching The polls today to see if a lot of Republican voters turn out, the numbers seem to be this morning that there are a lot of voters there. Now, we haven't been able to decipher that they're all Republicans, of course, but it does seem like it's going to be maybe a contested race. The Senate race is the biggest race on our ballot, everyone talking about James Tallarico and Ken Paxton. For Tallarico to pull off something that Democrats have not done in decades, does he have to win back the valley, the Hispanic votes, those counties that used to be sort of a blue wall for Democrats in Texas and have since gone for Trump? He does, but he also has to win back just the party staples of the Republican Party. And that seems to be one of those issues. There's been more ads about Republicans saying that they are going to vote against him than I've ever seen in a Texas election. That kind of wholesale distancing from Paxton is something that we should pay attention to. And you got Paxton at the top of the ticket where we've gone, said it on repeat, he was impeached by his own party in the House, he was acquitted in the Senate, he's been indicted. You have a candidate where the president and the vice president have come here multiple times. Does it, in your mind, does it really have to be so much of Republicans either leaving that race blank or coming over to Tallarico's side? Or could Tallarico just win based on high Democratic turnout? In all likelihood, Texas remains a red state. It may be inching away a little bit from its Republican roots, but it is still firmly a Republican state. I suspect that a lot of the races will go just as we had always expected them to be, with the exception of the Paxton race. I do think that there is some default on that, and people want to trust in their political officers, and he's lost the trust. What trends have you seen, at least now that we know the early voting total? Every cycle, we talk about young voters. Will young voters show up? And historically, they really haven't, depending on which election you're talking about. Or minority voters, Democrats trying to cater more to the Hispanic vote that they lost here in Texas and nationwide. And to the black voters, what trend lines have you seen so far? The most important trend line perhaps is watching what's happening in the Texas Valley. The Hispanic vote has always been important. And as you know, they really carried Trump over the top making this the brightest red state you could get. There seems to be some concern among Latino voters about his performance, some pushback Back against ICE. Some of his policies about gasoline and tariffs and the military. Among that population, I think we need to watch what happens along all of our border counties this election. Rita, I'll be transparent. In the last couple of years, I've gotten frustrated with polls. And I know if you talk to any pollster, they'll say, look, this is a snapshot in time. Does this not mean this is what will happen on election night when the results are tallied? Now, all of these polls, literally, sometimes there's confusion among polls, but Almost all of these polls have shown Talarico in the lead. If he were to lose tonight, do you think people are going to lose trust in polls? I mean, some have already lost trust, but do you think more people will lose trust in polls if you see a guy leading, albeit within the margin of error, but leading month after month after month? And if he loses tonight, do you think people will lose trust? I hope so. Our polling system is very difficult to understand right now. We do know that republicans are not answering polls with the same Enthusiasm that they have in past years. So we don't really know what they're thinking. Are they staying quiet because they're undecided? Are they staying quiet because they just don't wanna engage with pollsters that they don't trust them already? So we don't know the answers to all of those questions just yet. I don't know that that's information that voters really need. And besides, a lot of those polls still show that we're within the margin of error and we've forgotten what that looks like. Chances are it could go either way, and we should be prepared for that. And my last question to you, Rita. A lot of people, we've seen numbers of people who have not voted in the last midterm election, and this is their first time voting in some time. That's a lot of unknown too, right? Because I would imagine a big chunk of those people aren't being polled either. So we don't know which way those voters may go. Well, we've had a lot more information, excuse me, about those voters than others. People tend to show up to vote when they have something at stake. And it seems like between high gas prices and fear of what's going on in the world with foreign wars, some people are disaffected. Rita Kirk from SMU, thanks for your time. And we'll see what happens tonight. Okay, Stephen. Thank you.