Is Texas finally turning against Republicans?

It's time for Simon Marks. Stand by. He's here. He is live from Washington DC. I'll shut up for a while. I've got a sore throat. You fill your boots. Alright, I'll do it. It's all over bar the voting, almost. We're into the last full day of the midterm election campaign. The midterm elections wrap up tomorrow on election day, because remember that early voting and postal voting has been taking place all over the country, in some places, for a number of weeks now. And so we are eagerly poring over the final opinion polls and the last opinion poll of this cycle published in the New York Times. conducted by Siena College, James, is allowing Democrats this morning here in the United States to dare to dream that they are on the brink of a landslide because the numbers contained in this poll are staggering and we should slap a massive bucket of cold water and a public health warning over this because you and I have lived through numerous elections. Live by the polls, die by the polls. Precisely. On numerous occasions we have thought things were going to happen here that then did not happen here. But the data in this poll is eye-opening. It suggests that in Michigan, the Democrats are 11 points clear in the Senate race over their Republican rival there. In Texas, seven points ahead. In Maine, six points ahead. In Ohio, four points ahead. The same in Kansas. In Alaska, two points ahead. And in Iowa... One point ahead, clearly within the margin of error there. But what is so interesting about this poll is if you listen to the names of those states, Michigan, Texas, Maine, Ohio, Kansas, Alaska, and Ohio. Only three of those seven states are what we would traditionally consider battlegrounds here. Michigan, Ohio and Iowa, swing states, the ones that sometimes vote Democrat, sometimes vote Republican, always determine the outcome of the election. Democrats have dreamt. For decades of winning power in Texas, Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, has been a fixture on Capitol Hill since 1997. This poll suggests she is six points behind Troy Jackson. Kansas hasn't sent a Democrat to the United States Senate since 1932, almost 100 years. And this poll suggests they may be on the brink of doing that. Nonetheless, in one of his, in what was his final input, rally of this cycle. President Donald Trump traveled to Kansas over the weekend, was still exuding confidence, and as you'll hear and see in this, he had alongside him a guest star. Now we've campaigned and I've enjoyed it. This is actually, this is our last stop. We close it down tonight, but we've had a great time. The people, the love in this country is unbelievable. But all I'm asking you to do is one thing, get out and vote, because if you do, we're going to have a tremendous success. He works every single day to keep you and your families and our country safe. And because he's our president, America is stronger, you're safer, and our enemies are weaker all around the world. Thank you, Mr. President. Kind of interesting that Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, decided to attach himself to President Trump or perhaps was inveigled in to attaching himself to President Trump at that rally in Kansas last night, because the one thing we do know is that if indeed the Republicans go down to defeat on Tuesday night here. On Wednesday morning, the presidential race on the Republican side is going to begin. It's going to move beyond what have already been nebulous stages, with Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, the vice president, staking out their terrain. And, you know, images of Marco Rubio attaching himself to President Donald Trump may not look quite as rosy in 18 months' time as they do currently. Let me also bring you the anticipation. ...of possible defeat in Texas, which was voiced on Friday night by Senator Ted Cruz, reliable pro-Trump Republican down in Texas. He's not up for re-election in this race, but he clearly believes that Republicans in the Lone Star State are in serious trouble. And on his podcast, released on Friday, he attempted to urge people to get out the polls in a manner that really sounded... like he was sounding the alarm. Texas is excruciatingly close. Understand, we could lose Texas. Let me repeat that. We could lose Texas. And by the way, not just the Senate race, we could lose every single statewide race in Texas. That's how close these numbers are. Now, in fact, the numbers, according to this New York Times-Siena College poll, are not that close. They suggest that James Tallarico is seven points ahead in the Senate race of Ken Paxton, the state's attorney general, scandal-soaked a Donald Trump mini-me who may well go down to defeat on Tuesday night in Texas. And were that prognostication by Senator Cruz to come true? If the Democrats win every statewide office that is on the ballot in Texas tomorrow, they will argue that they have achieved their dream of turning Texas into a battleground state, into a classic swing state. In large measure, due to the demographic changes that have taken place there, a sizable Latino population furious about President Trump's mass deportations and also a sizable African-American community similarly furious with President Trump for all sorts of different reasons, including mass deportations, also, of course, the state of the economy. So this poll at least suggests it ain't even going to be close, but polls have been wrong here before. Polls have been wrong here before. When do we know? Well, I think throughout the evening. You know, When do we cash our chips in? When will it be clear? Well, I mean, that does hinge on how close it actually turns out to be in some of these states. Because remember, the Democrats in the Senate, for example, they've got to keep every seat that they currently have that is up for re-election. One third of the Senate up for re-election tomorrow. They've then got to win four more. This suggests they're absolutely going to do that in order to attain a one seat majority, and they may go further than that, but it depends how close these polls are. I suspect that by Wednesday morning, we're going to have a very, your time, we'll have a very, very good sense of what's going on. In the House of Representatives, the whole of the House is up for re-election. They've got to retain every seat they've got, and they've also got to win four more there to establish a majority. I think the real question in the House of Representatives is going to be, How sizable a majority do they get? Because if they end up, it seems highly likely that the Republicans are not going to retain control of the House. If they end up with a small majority, if they end up the Democrats with only a five or six seat majority in the House of Representatives, the new Speaker of the House, assuming Donald Trump doesn't create all sorts of difficulties and challenges the outcome and tries to stop the House from sitting, the new Speaker of the House, Hakeem Jeffries, will be hostage To left wing progressives within the Democratic caucus in exactly the way as successive Republican speakers of the House, Mike Johnson and before him, Kevin McCarthy, have turned out to be hostage to, you know, the far right fringe of the Republican Party in its caucus, MAGA and even, you know, beyond MAGA. Yeah. So, you know, they. So we've got to see where that ends up as those numbers come in. But I think throughout the night, Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. Live coverage on LBC, which you will no doubt be an absolutely intrinsic part of. I mean, I was going to make the observation that this is not really about Democrats winning. It's about Republicans losing.