A real shift among the chatbots
Chatbots answering as a voter in Texas still pick Democrat James Talarico most often in the U.S. Senate race, but his share of those answers fell this week, dropping from about 50 percent to 43 percent over the past seven days.
The movement shows up almost entirely in the chatbot answers. Libertarian Ted Brown picked up about 5 points there, while Republican Ken Paxton held roughly steady. Markets and polls barely moved over the same stretch.
This is a change in how often chatbots name each candidate when asked, not a shift in votes. The primary ended in August, and with the race now in the general election phase, chatbots are being compared with the current general election contest.
Where the chatbots split
The panel's top pick is Talarico, but the eight chatbots sampled spread out widely. Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Claude Haiku 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 5 all put Talarico at 50 percent or higher. GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.5 put him lowest, near 33 percent, with GPT-5.5 instead giving Ted Brown its largest share of any chatbot, at about 43 percent.
Grok 4.5 is the outlier, picking Paxton over Talarico by 22.5 points, the widest gap from the panel's top choice. Grok 4.3 also leans toward Paxton, though less heavily.
The split often tracks the question asked. Chatbots citing immigration and healthcare records tend to name Talarico, while those weighing border enforcement or federal tax cuts tend to name Paxton, and on tax questions specifically, several chatbots instead point to Ted Brown's platform of abolishing the federal income tax and the IRS.
Markets see a bigger lead than the chatbots do
Prediction markets give Talarico a far stronger position than the chatbots do, a gap of about 25 points, with Talarico priced near 69 percent against the chatbots' 43 percent. For Paxton the gap runs the other way by about 7 points, with chatbots naming him more often than markets price him to win.
Polls, last updated by Rasmussen Reports on October 21, put Talarico at 48 percent and Paxton at 46 percent, a close race that sits between the chatbot and market pictures. Ted Brown polls at just 3 percent, well below the roughly 19 percent share he gets in chatbot answers, a gap of about 15 points.
None of these three signals is the right answer. They are measuring different things, a probability of winning, a poll share and a share of chatbot answers, and this week they present Talarico's position differently.
What to watch
Watch whether Talarico's chatbot share keeps drifting down or stabilizes, since this week marked the first real move since markets shifted toward him last week. Also watch Ted Brown's chatbot numbers, which rose enough this week to count as a real change and now sit well above his standing in the polls.