The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
A new Fox News poll finds James Talarico up seven points over Ken Paxton in Texas. It’s such a shocker that it induced Fox figures to panic right on the air. But what’s striking about this poll is what it says about Trump and Republicans, and how Texas captures what’s happening with the MAGA movement as Trump sunsets. Also telling is how this comes as Republicans are moving around their Senate spending in ways that reveal what they think of their own plight at this very moment.
We’re talking about all of it with political theorist Alan Elrod, who had a great piece for Liberal Currents on Texas Republicans as representative of the Trump-era GOP. Alan, great to have you on.
Alan Elrod: Good to be back.
Sargent: So the new Fox poll finds Talarico up by seven points among registered voters in Texas, 53 to 46, and up two points among likely voters, 51 to 49. I think his lead is probably somewhere in the middle there. But critically, the Fox poll finds Trump’s approval at 44 percent to 55 percent disapproving.
He’s eleven points underwater in a state he carried by 14 points only two years ago. Alan, you have some experience with Texas personally. How surprising is that Fox finding?
Elrod: Yeah, it’s true, my wife is a Texan. She’s from Fort Worth. You know, I think the interesting thing about the finding is that it points at a number of the groups that are frustrated with the second Trump administration, right? Texas does have a lot of Latinos who are jilted—some of them who voted for Trump, some of them who didn’t, but a lot of whom are very frustrated on immigration.
It has a lot of conservative Christians, but there’s also a lot of moderate and progressive Christians in Texas who are angry with Trump for different reasons. And then there’s just the, I think, broader problem of the Texas GOP and some of its candidate selection issues that gloms onto Texas politics in general at the moment.
Sargent: Well, those non-MAGA Christians are going to loom large in this discussion, so let’s put a pin in that. Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt was so shocked by these findings. Listen to this exchange between her and Fox contributor Clay Travis.
Ainsley Earhardt (voiceover): If you look at that Fox News poll, he’s ahead by seven points in the state of Texas. How is that possible?
Clay Travis (voiceover): Texans have to wake up. I think sometimes when you have seen Republicans win for generations, a lot of people out there just don’t think at all that Democrats are capable of winning in the state. Now, I watch a lot of football, I watch a lot of sports. Every single game that I am watching, I am seeing Republican ads dominating. I think that Republicans have held their proverbial, you know, cash until the last moment, and they now are delivering overwhelming amounts of dollars into the playing field.
Sargent: Alan, note how she says, how on earth can this be happening? And the answer she gets back is, don’t worry, Republican money will bail out Paxton. All that cash going to ads to reach the football demographic. Like, those are the people who should be there for Republicans, but really need to be re-energized behind Trump and today’s Texas GOP. I thought that was telling. What do you think?
Elrod: So I don’t want to pretend that I have no fear of big spending close to the election, but Travis is just avoiding the key problem, which is Paxton. The problem is Paxton. Paxton is a terrible candidate. He’s hated by a lot of people in his own party. I mean, 60 members of his own party voted to impeach him a few years ago. So we’re not talking about a guy that is beloved across the state.
And so, you know, when we look at this, I think one of the encouraging signs is, hey, actually, you can find candidates that are so bad, and on the other side you can find candidates that are so kind of perfectly built for the moment, that you can put those things together and get a potential big win in a state like Texas.
Now, we’re not there yet, right? Signs and polls don’t vote. But what we’re seeing is that candidates still do matter sometimes, and we’re getting good indicators that it is important that the Democrats nominated Talarico, and it is relevant that the Republicans nominated Paxton.
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, this race is on a knife’s edge, let’s face it. And the money is going to be a big deal. They’re going to put a lot of money in there. But let’s talk about Paxton and the Republican Party. He’s sort of like the perfect exemplar of the Texas GOP. And in order to set up the rest of this discussion, let’s talk about what the Texas Republican Party actually is.
You had a great piece on this stressing how the Texas GOP’s white male Christian supremacy and naked ethnonationalism are the future of the Republican Party now that Trump has reshaped it. Talk about that.
Elrod: The argument in this piece is that that’s something that we should both, I think, see a bit of a silver lining in, and also be very concerned about, because the politics are very nasty. They’re corrupt, they’re hateful. They’re very, very nasty.
On the other hand, I think what you’re seeing with the Talarico race is some of the consequences of those politics, right? Ken Paxton is a criminal. He has been under investigation for securities fraud. He is a philanderer who then turns around and tries to castigate Democrats on moral issues. He has waged a really aggressive campaign against trans kids in Texas, going so far as to try to level sort of legal intimidation at places like Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington, because he’s so determined to try to prevent any form of care for trans kids.
Abbott is running for an unprecedented fourth term. There’s been all the kind of stuff at the border with putting razor wire in the Rio Grande. I mean, these are people who I think have lost the plot.
And it is an example of both the dangers, I think, of our politics. We are headed in a direction where what comes after Trump, I think, is going to be a lot like what we’re seeing in Texas. It’s going to be even nastier, it’s going to be even more corrupt, it’s going to be even more hateful. At the same time, the window is there. You can lose people by behaving this way. And Texas GOP is showing that.
Sargent: And I want to pick up your point about how this kind of opens up a window for making a case to some of these voters that they should peel away from the Republican Party. And the Fox polling actually gets at this. Trump’s approval is underwater in Texas with working-class voters, who are supposedly his base, and even deeper underwater with Latinos, at 38 percent approval to 61 percent disapproval.
Alan, in the mythic version of Trumpism, which was supposed to be a multiracial working-class movement, Latinos were going to be permanently brought into the Trump coalition because they’re culturally conservative and they see the economy as being lifted by Trump.
But of course, what happened in the real world is what the Texas Republican Party has become. The ethnonationalism and the violence helped drive these people away. Doesn’t that sort of get at your thesis a little bit, those findings?
Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, I think what we’re seeing here is, from the racial hatred to the stupidity of things like the tariffs, if you hurt people enough, they will potentially eventually abandon you. You cannot just keep hurting them over and over again and expect loyalty. That does eventually matter.
Now, the people who will stick it out are the people who might feel like they’re getting something in return for that, or the people who feel like they’re the group that gets to hurt everybody else. But that’s a much smaller pool of people than everybody else in Texas. And Texas is a big state.
People don’t, I think, remember this all the time. They know it’s big physically. But Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the country. Texas itself is wildly economically, religiously, culturally diverse. So if you try to wage war on all these different subsets of America, that’s going to be felt in a place like Texas.
Sargent: Well, it gets even more striking with this data. In the Fox poll, Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA—non-MAGA Republicans—at 46 percent approval to 53 percent disapproval. Those are Republicans, Alan. And only 50 percent of that demographic, non-MAGA Republicans, are extremely interested in the election, and that’s lower than other groups—lower than Texas voters overall, lower than Democrats, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think there you see the dynamic that you were talking about, in which kind of non-MAGA Christians in Texas just aren’t willing to go along with what this movement has really become. I mean, they’re not interested in voting for who Trump is telling them to vote for.
Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, there are MAGA Christians all over America who simply come to whatever position or justification they have, even biblical ones, from the starting point of, I do what Trump says, I vote how Trump wants, I say what Trump says. But there are actually a lot of other Christians who are frustrated. And I see this in my own communities here in Arkansas, which is next door. It’s not like you can treat American Christians as this one giant lump, and plenty of them are quite worn out.
It is hard to get people to buy into constant displays of public cruelty, right? That is very different. When you’re trying to nibble around the edges on this stuff, and when you’re sort of being, I think, opaque about the really vicious parts of your policy, and you’re using more maybe sort of sleight-of-hand talking points about how we need border security, you might get people to go along.
But when they’re turning on the TV and seeing that people are being murdered by our own government, by DHS, and then that the Trump administration basically seems to take pleasure in that, that is going to turn off a big middle of Christians who may have otherwise not been activated. Now, we may have wished they would have been activated before this, but that is where we are now.
Sargent: Right. I think you’re putting your finger on something important here about MAGA, right? Which is that the violent ethnic purges, the violent ethnic cleansing, is a feature of the movement. It absolutely saturates official government propaganda about immigrants. It saturates ICE’s recruitment.
ICE’s recruitment is literally, you get to participate in a violent purge. That’s the selling point. If you become an ICE agent, you get to participate in this kind of violent cleansing of America. And it’s like, you will be part of something bigger and higher. That’s what MAGA is. And there just does seem to be a segment of conservative Christians that isn’t there. Is that overly optimistic, though?
Elrod: Well, I think my message in my piece is, you know, I said it’s a warning and it’s a silver lining, but the warning isn’t just to the country as a whole. It’s also, I think, to these sort of self-styled non-MAGA Republicans, which is to say, guys, this isn’t your party anymore. What does it even mean to say you’re a non-MAGA Republican? That’s not a thing anymore. You need to embrace, I think, supporting Democrats for the next few cycles at least. And I think we should just be comfortable trying to say that.
Sargent: I think there’s another development which actually underscores your point quite well, which is that the Senate Leadership Fund, which is a major GOP super PAC, just pulled its spending out of North Carolina, essentially ceding that Senate race, where Democrat Roy Cooper seems to be up. SLF is now putting more money into the Kansas Senate race, of all things. And I think this is really sort of indicative of the phenomenon that you’re identifying.
Adam Hamilton, the Democratic candidate in Kansas, is a pastor. He’s religious. He speaks about his faith. He’s written books about his faith. And so all of a sudden, there does seem to be an opening being created by MAGA extremism to try and appeal to some of these middle-of-the-road religious voters. That’s happening in Texas as well. James Talarico talks about his faith openly. Can you talk about these dynamics?
Elrod: I think at the core of this is, people want to connect with candidates that are coming from a place that they can relate to. And the reality is that a lot of Americans, whether it’s Protestant Christianity or some other affiliation, have some form of faith. And I think people hear candidates talking openly about their faith, and what they hear is, I know people like this. This person is someone I can relate to. This person is being honest, I think, about their own limitations.
And I don’t want to suggest that you can’t do those things and be an atheist candidate. You can. But I think when Democrats spent a little while running away from talking about faith, what they actually did was just make themselves seem sort of unrelatable, and maybe judgmental in a way that I don’t think they maybe meant to. I think some of it was rooted in, we don’t want to seem exclusionary by talking about things like Christian faith.
When in reality, I think what people are drawn to is not sort of one-to-one theological agreement, but a sense of honest and humble striving. Because that’s what a lot of people think about when they think about their faith. They think about their own imperfections. They think about the things in their life that their faith has gotten them through. They think about the things in their life that they’re grateful for.
And I think that’s what people really need to hear from candidates—candidates who feel like they are speaking to the totality of their life experience. And if it feels like you’re hiding some part of yourself away, or you’re unwilling to talk about some frankly huge chunk of what life is about to a lot of Americans because you’re worried about stepping on it the wrong way, then what you’re doing is losing out on a chance to connect with people.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s another dimension to this as well, which is that when James Talarico talks about his faith, or Adam Hamilton does, what they’re essentially saying is that there’s a place in this party for other people of faith.
And that’s an important message if you’re going to win in a place like Texas or a place like Kansas, right? I mean, these are red states. You are not going to win unless you’re able to win over a segment of Republican voters.
And I just wonder whether what we’re seeing here is the kind of development of a new kind of politics for Democrats, a politics that’s very well suited to the kind of moral collapse and moral depravity of what I keep calling Late-Stage Trumpism. Does that seem like it could be happening?
Elrod: Yes. And to that point, I would say people need to be watching very closely Andy Beshear. Andy Beshear from Kentucky is almost certainly going to be a candidate in the 2028 cycle. And his messaging around this stuff is exactly right.
What I love about Andy is that after he vetoed those anti-trans bills in Kentucky, his argument was faith-centric. He said, all children are children of God, and I don’t believe in bullying kids. And then he followed it up very, I think, effectively by saying, also, I don’t think government should be regulating local sports. That’s for communities and schools and families to decide.
But that key thing of, we are all children of God, and I don’t believe in demeaning or making any person who is a child of God feel attacked—that’s incredibly powerful. I think Beshear, even maybe more than Talarico, has just got it figured out on this stuff. And I think he’s going to be a very, very compelling person to watch.
Sargent: I’m glad you raised that message from Beshear, because I think what we’re now seeing is Democrats kind of returning a little bit to this idea of Christianity as equality before God. When James Talarico says that his faith requires him to treat the stranger well, or the neighbor well, he’s basically making a variation on the point that Beshear made about trans people.
Now, I know that people will get mad at this, and yes, I wish James Talarico would figure out where he stands on trans issues a little better. But generally speaking, he’s been very good on immigration. And I do think the through line to all this is this return to a kind of Christian message of equality before God.
Is that what we’re seeing here? And is there kind of an opening here for a broader values-based Democratic coalition that the kind of corruption and depravity and collapse of late-stage Trumpism has created?
Elrod: Absolutely. And I would say this. Christianity is just deeply interwoven into liberalism. And by that I mean, like, small-l liberal—it doesn’t have to be progressive or left—but the universal ideas of Christianity, especially things that come later, the Protestant Reformation, the idea of the priesthood of all believers, this idea that we have equality before God, that we are individuals with equal worth and merit and dignity striving together.
I mean, these are fundamentally Christian ideas that are also really, really rooted in the liberal revolution that comes in the early modern period and onward.
In fact, I think we should embrace the idea that Christianity does not have to be—and this is something that a lot of people on the left side of center make the mistake of doing, which is assuming Christianity has to be a kind of reactionary, regressive thing—when in fact it can be a powerfully liberating and leveling and unifying idea. And it comes in history in many cases, in many points in history, as a liberating and universalizing force and not an oppressive one.
Sargent: Where do you see the Republican Party going? Does the future essentially hold a Texified, if you will, Republican Party? And is that going to be something that’s, you know, a little bit more of a rump, potentially? Or are they going to be able to figure out how to get past Trump and Trumpism and kind of reconstitute something more like a previously existing Republican Party?
Elrod: No, the near-to-medium-term future is a Texified party. And as far as it being a rump, it’s up to us to make it a rump. It won’t be a rump unless we fight to make it one.
And it’s only once we do that, once the party is essentially razed to the ground through electoral defeat after electoral defeat, that there’s a chance you have something different and better on the other side.
Sargent: And James Talarico’s theory of the case, which is that you need this very broad coalition in order to defeat Republicans in Texas, is kind of a way of saying that we have to turn the Republican Party into a MAGA rump. That’s what he’s saying, isn’t he?
Elrod: Absolutely. And this is why I go back to some of the lessons I took from Hungary earlier in the year, with, you know, Péter Magyar basically said the same thing. You have to build a massive coalition against this stuff, and you have to deliver overwhelming defeat. And then you can start to build a program of reconstruction on top of it.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Alan, big things could be happening now. I guess we’ll know more in around a month. But man, Talarico and these other candidates really have to close this thing out, don’t they?
Elrod: They do. They do. Got to get across the finish line.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out Alan Elrod’s piece. It’s called “The Future of the Republican Party After Trump Is in Texas.” And it sure looks that way. Alan, a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Elrod: Thanks for having me.