I wouldn't worry too much about who's ahead or behind after Day 5 of early voting in Texas, because the reality is that *we still know nothing about who these voters are actually voting for* The early voting data is certainly useful to estimate the final *electorate*, and @Thorongil16 and @theoelections are doing excellent work analyzing it. So far, the composition of the electorate looks consistent with a narrow Talarico victory if the polls are exactly right. But the polls are rarely "exactly" right, that's a huge ask, especially because we don't have any information about how late deciders will break. To put this in perspective, imagine flipping a 60–40 coin (basically this election) and a 50–50 coin (true tossup) ten times each (which is basically running this election every cycle until 2040). Even if you guessed which coin was biased based on which landed heads more often, you'd only identify the right one about 67% of the time. That's how difficult it is to distinguish a 60% chance from a true toss-up! A two-point polling error in Paxton's favor would be entirely normal (that's actually smaller than the average polling error, last year the RCP average literally missed by 10.5 in NJ and 5 in VA). If Paxton ultimately won by one point, that would still represent a smaller-than-average polling error! The bottom line is that this remains an extremely competitive race (the reason everyone cares so much about it is because it's a highly competitive race, unlike 80% of races on the ballot in 10 days)--there's a lot of uncertainty here, and the early voting data doesn't and won't come close to resolving it.