Texas Democrat James Talarico's U.S. Senate campaign announced Thursday that it raised $64 million in the third quarter of 2026, a sum his team says is the largest quarterly haul ever reported by a Senate candidate for the July-to-September stretch of an election year — eclipsing the previous record of $57 million set by South Carolina's Jaime Harrison in 2020.

The state representative from Austin has now raised more than $134 million since launching his bid, according to the Texas Tribune, with his campaign saying 97% of the latest quarter's donations came in under $100. His Republican opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, raised $18 million over the same three months across his campaign and affiliated committees — his best quarter of the race, but less than a third of Talarico's total.

"Grassroots contributors from across Texas are coming together to end billionaire control over our politics," Talarico's campaign said in announcing the numbers, framing the haul as a mandate to lower costs for working families.

A seat Democrats haven't won since 1994

The figures, which NBC News reported it could not independently verify ahead of Thursday night's Federal Election Commission filing deadline, land in a race Democrats see as central to retaking the Senate majority in November. Talarico is trying to become the first Democrat to win a statewide race in Texas since 1994, and recent polling shows him with a narrow lead over Paxton, mostly within the margin of error.

Money has poured into the contest from both directions. Republican outside groups have spent more than $175 million since September 1 attacking Talarico and boosting Paxton, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact, as the GOP works to unify a party still bruised from a bitter primary. Talarico's own campaign spent over $20 million on ads in the past month alone, per AdImpact data cited by NBC.

The fundraising gap echoes a pattern from past marquee Texas Senate races: Beto O'Rourke raised $38 million in the equivalent quarter of his 2018 run against Ted Cruz, and Colin Allred raised $30 million in the same quarter of the 2024 cycle — both short of Talarico's 2026 number, which has consistently outpaced Paxton's since the race began.

Neither campaign disclosed cash-on-hand totals ahead of the FEC deadline; those figures, along with a fuller account of spending, are expected in the filings due by midnight Thursday. Paxton's campaign has pointed to the $18 million sum as proof of growing momentum, having more than doubled his second-quarter total of roughly $9 million.

With three weeks until the November 3 election, the financial disparity is likely to fuel Democratic arguments that Talarico has real momentum in a race once considered a long shot, while Republicans counter that outside spending and late advertising — not quarterly fundraising totals — will decide a contest in a state Trump carried twice.