Only moments after Ken Paxton clinched the GOP nomination in the Texas Senate race on Tuesday, he quickly signaled his intention to run a lofty, issue-focused campaign. By way of characterizing Democratic opponent James Talarico as woke, as a leftist, and—perhaps worst of all in Texas—as a vegan, Paxton derided his foe as “James Talafreako,” “tofu Talarico,” and “six-gender Jimmy.”
This drew roars from the MAGA faithful at Paxton’s victory party, who were excited to see Trump’s endorsement of Paxton over establishment GOP incumbent John Cornyn triumph. But all Paxton’s sandbox barrage actually accomplished was to remind everyone that in this critical Senate race—one that could determine Senate control—Republicans have nominated someone who typifies everything normie voters hate about Trump and Trumpism.
The MAGA rage, the hate, the juvenile name-calling, the bottomless corruption, the seething contempt for public service—Paxton has exhibited all of it as the attorney general of Texas. If there were ever a time that Democrats might pull off a Texas miracle—and make no mistake, it will be very hard—this may be it.
This isn’t just due to the standard reasons we often hear: Trump is highly unpopular, Paxton is deeply compromised, and Talarico is a formidable fundraiser. It’s something more subtle: Paxton’s ugly MAGA credentials provide an unexpected opening for Talarico—a state legislator and seminarian—to play the foil to Trumpism with a new kind of politics rooted in a fresh understanding of our moment: It combines open professions of Christian faith and promises to transcend Trumpian acrimony with kindness and goodwill toward the opposition.
“To Senator Cornyn’s supporters: You have a place in our campaign,” Talarico tweeted after Paxton’s victory, reaching out to Republicans and right-leaning independents across the state.
Talarico’s potential path to victory tells the story. Matt Angle, director of the pro-Talarico Lone Star Project, says that path requires three factors. Talarico must run up sizable majorities in the five big urban counties—the home of places like Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio—and get at least into the high 40s in adjoining suburban and exurban counties. He must win around 65 percent in the heavily Latino Texas counties along the border and in the Rio Grande valley. And he must limit GOP gains in all the other non-metro and rural counties, which constitute a truly huge expanse of territory.
“It’s straightforward—and really, really hard,” Angle told me. “You’ve got to dominate in the big five urban counties. You’ve got to compete in surrounding suburbs and exurbs. You’ve got to reclaim the border. And you can’t get blown away in small-town and rural Texas.”
To appreciate the challenge, consider that in the 2018 Texas Senate race, Beto O’Rourke fell short of ousting Senator Ted Cruz by fewer than three points. As Ron Brownstein details, O’Rourke won solid majorities in the urban counties and won around two-thirds of the vote in Latino-heavy ones. But O’Rourke still lost, Brownstein notes, primarily because Cruz won nearly three-quarters of the vote in all the other counties.
Since then, if anything, Democrats have lost ground in the state. In 2024, Trump did surprisingly well in the urban areas and, famously, made big inroads with Texas Latinos in border counties. So Talarico must win back majorities in the urban counties and get close to parity in the exurbs, climb back to Beto-like support in Latino-heavy counties, and limit Trump’s margins everywhere else.
Here’s where Talarico’s challenge to MAGA comes in. O’Rourke was an electrifying candidate, and so is Talarico, as his massive fundraising hauls demonstrate. But Talarico has the added ingredients of his faith and the sincere offer of goodwill to the opposition. These might resonate amid bone-deep exhaustion with Trump plus Republicans nominating the most Trumpy candidate imaginable.
So to run up totals in exurban and suburban areas, Democrats tell me they are eyeing educated but not-particularly-liberal white voters who might be unhappy with Trump yet would support Cornyn, but who will see Paxton as just too much. These voters might see in Paxton—a fanatical Trump loyalist who viciously smears opponents, had a messy divorce, and has been both impeached and indicted for securities fraud in office—as a standard-bearer for the economic carnage, corruption, megalomania, and degradation of our politics that Trump has wrought.
“These are country-club Republicans and independents who are really agitated by how Trump has handled the economy and the White House—whether it’s the ballroom or the billion-dollar slush fund for folks who tore down our Capitol,” Chuck Rocha, an adviser to Talarico’s campaign, told me. “He has to win some Republicans and a bunch of independents.”
Meanwhile, Trump is furiously bleeding Latino support by tanking the economy while embracing violent white nationalist immigration policies. Many Texas Latinos are culturally conservative but not necessarily Republican in orientation, potentially making them gettable by a Democrat of faith who embodies a lower-stakes, more conciliatory politics.
“Paxton puts together Trump’s corruption with a David Duke–style white nationalist politics,” congressman Greg Casar, who represents a district in central Texas, told me. Casar added that Latino swing voters who temporarily believed Trump’s 2024 promise to control costs now find MAGA’s blend of corruption and racial nationalism “abhorrent.” Nate Cohn sees a similar path.
If you want to understand why Republicans are casting Talarico as a leftist freak, his potential potency among these demographics is it. Some public and internal Democratic polls show Talarico leading Paxton by a few points, but the wave of outside money set to smear Talarico will be formidable.
Yet Talarico knows how to electrify the national fundraising base and has the chops to go viral. Importantly, he gets that politics in the Trump era is an information war. He is focused on costs and offers an economic agenda that will be broadly popular with Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans, with closing tax loopholes on billionaires at its center. But he is not adopting a Democratic-consultant-approved “kitchen table” approach that avoids talking about Trump.
Rather, Talarico speaks powerfully about the need for a fairer economy as the foundation for a more just society. He contrasts that with the society that Trump and MAGA crave—meaner, crueler, unrepentantly hierarchical, proudly anti-egalitarian, and wracked by violent ethnic purgings.
“Christ is the immigrant deported without due process,” Talarico says. He calls for stringent border security to distance himself from Joe Biden while simultaneously insisting on welcoming legal immigration and granting immigrants compassion and fair judicial treatment as a matter of faith. As Alan Elrod writes at Liberal Currents, Talarico is a walking biblical challenge to the GOP embrace of militant right-wing Christianity. One might say that Talarico is willing to go theologically toe-to-toe with MAGA white Christian nationalism in all its vicious glory.
It may be a sign of the times that Talarico’s faith-based campaigning is attracting prominent right-leaning Christians, who—one hopes, anyway—represent the views of many non-MAGA voters in Texas. David French, for instance, argues that Talarico is bringing real Christian virtues to public conduct in a way that challenges “MAGA Christianity,” which worships the false idols of corrupt self-enrichment, violent subjugation of the opposition, and of course, Trump.
Here’s how I’d put this: Talarico’s politics goes big. He treats it as fundamental to this moment that Trump and Trumpism are wrecking our common life at a very profound moral and spiritual level.
The nomination of Paxton—the Trumpiest of candidates—will place that brute fact front and center. That contrast may not be enough to win in Texas—only time will tell—but, prosecuted well, it will leave little doubt about the future that MAGA Christianity envisions for us, and why our liberal alternative would be a whole lot better.
