At about 10:04 p.m. on Nov. 3, the Associated Press called the Texas Senate race for James Talarico. Roughly 16 minutes later, Ken Paxton conceded. The Republican attorney general had spent the better part of a year, in one of the most expensive Senate contests in American history, trying to hold a seat in a state that had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. He finished with about 43% of the vote to Talarico’s 55%. “We just took back Texas,” the Democrat told supporters in Austin.