Fox News host Sean Hannity told viewers he didn't believe a Fox News poll showing a Democratic congressman ahead of Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race, a rare moment of a network star publicly rejecting his own outlet's data on air.
During a Tuesday night segment with former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, the 64-year-old primetime host waved off a July 30 Fox News survey that put Austin-area Congressman James Talarico, a 37-year-old Democrat, three points ahead of Paxton, the Republican attorney general who has held the office for a decade. Hannity said he didn't believe the result "for two seconds," the Daily Mail reported.
De Blasio, 65, pressed the issue. He asked Hannity directly whether he had read the poll his own network published.
"Did you read your own poll today where Talarico is beating Paxton?"
Hannity did not engage with the numbers. Instead, he pivoted to Talarico's record, rattling off a string of the Democrat's past statements on gender and religion.
Rather than defend or critique Fox News' polling methodology, Hannity went after the Democratic candidate's public statements. In 2021, during a Texas committee debate on a bill to ban transgender athletes from competing in women's sports, Talarico claimed "modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes, in fact, there are six." In the same speech, he declared "God is non-binary."
Hannity folded those remarks into a broader attack on the Democratic field.
"So, you think 'Six-Gender Talarico,' who believes God is non-binary, who believes biological men should play women's sports, and believes that biological men should have access to abortion..."
The host didn't finish the sentence before the exchange moved on, but the thrust was clear: Hannity sees Talarico's positions as too far outside mainstream Texas values to produce a genuine three-point lead over a sitting Republican attorney general.
Talarico has tried to put distance between himself and those 2021 comments. In a May interview with ABC Live, he called the "God is non-binary" line "meant to be deliberately provocative" and said "you can't use human categories to define God." He cast the Republican focus on his old remarks as a distraction tactic.
"Ken Paxton is clipping my past cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption."
Talarico also said Republicans were seizing on the comments "to try and distract from the corrupt system that Ken Paxton embodies."
De Blasio used the Fox News poll as a launching pad for a broader argument about Democratic electoral strategy. He contended that candidates like Talarico can win by focusing on bread-and-butter concerns rather than culture-war flash points.
"This is the worst nightmare for Republicans, if Democrats get their act together and talk about the kitchen table."
Hannity pushed back by pointing to prominent progressives who have publicly criticized their own party's direction. He cited James Carville, Bill Maher, and Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman as figures who have expressed frustration with the Democratic Party over what Hannity characterized as more radical candidates and policies. He called their pushback "a canary in the coal mine."
De Blasio wasn't buying it. He argued that generational change would override the internal grumbling Hannity highlighted.
"Nope. You're going to see whole generations of young voters. Young voters are gonna change these elections. You're gonna be surprised, and they're gonna be with the Democrats."
Both men repeatedly proposed making "a bet" on the outcome, though neither laid out specific terms.
During the segment, Hannity brought up Graham Platner, a Democrat who had been running for a Maine Senate seat. Platner, an oyster farmer, called off his campaign last month after a tattoo he carried was recognized earlier this year as a Nazi SS symbol. He also faced rape allegations, which he denies. The source explicitly notes that Platner, like Talarico, is not a Democratic socialist, a distinction that mattered because Hannity's broader argument lumped several Democratic candidates together as examples of a party drifting leftward.
Hannity, one of Fox News' original cohosts dating back to 1996, used the Platner case and Talarico's past statements to build a picture of a Democratic Party that keeps producing candidates with baggage too heavy for general elections, even in races where polls suggest an opening.
Ken Paxton's campaign website frames the Texas Senate contest as a high-stakes ideological fight. Language on his campaign site states the "election will determine whether Texas remains the conservative stronghold that leads America or becomes another state controlled by the radical left."
The Fox News poll published July 30, headlined around GOP divisions shaping the Texas Senate race, complicates that framing. A three-point Democratic lead in Texas, even within a margin of error, would represent a significant shift in a state Republicans have dominated at the statewide level for decades.
But Hannity's instinct to reject the number outright, rather than wrestle with what it might mean, reveals a tension that goes beyond one primetime segment. When a network's own polling unit produces data its biggest star won't accept on air, the question stops being about one Texas race and starts being about what polling data is for, and whether anyone trusts it anymore when the result is inconvenient.
Hannity may have the right read on the Texas electorate. A candidate who told a legislative committee there are six biological sexes and that God is non-binary faces a steep climb in a state where those positions land well outside the mainstream. But dismissing your own network's poll without engaging the numbers isn't confidence. It's avoidance, and voters in Texas deserve a sharper argument than that.
