Democrats got the Texas Senate race they wanted with James Talarico facing Attorney General Ken Paxton, but Republicans want to remind them of the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.”
The GOP has immediately and almost joyfully gone negative against Talarico, in an attempt to define him as someone culturally out of step with — and maybe a little too weird for — Texas.
A lot of this groundwork was laid before Paxton defeated four-term Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the runoff election last month, as Talarico secured the Democratic nomination in the first round of voting back in March.
Talarico, 37, is being portrayed as an effeminate, meat-skeptical progressive with radical, even bizarre, views on gender, race, and religion.
“He goes by a few names that you all may have heard of. Some people know him as tofu Talarico. Some people call him six-gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako,” Paxton told a cheering crowd. “And others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.”
“He’s clearly transitioning into a female,” deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, a longtime top adviser to President Donald Trump, said of Talarico. “When Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out. Soy milk comes out.”
Democrats have pushed back with an awkward photograph of Talarico chomping on a turkey leg, pointing out that he eats meat even if his girlfriend — yes, he has a girlfriend — doesn’t. The picture defied communications strategists’ advice that candidates should always use utensils on camera, but it got the point across.
The reason for these attacks is that a big part of Talarico’s appeal compared to a generic Democrat was that he didn’t seem like a wild-eyed liberal. He speaks in measured tones, he is a Presbyterian seminarian who goes to church and practices religion, and he is clean-cut.
Even New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a socialist with a well-established left-wing resume, always wore a suit and tie on the campaign trail and tried to be relatable.
But Democrats have presented candidates who “code” centrist or conservative before, while taking uniformly liberal policy positions. Thus, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was supposed to help former Vice President Kamala Harris appeal to men and working-class whites during the 2024 campaign because he liked football, the outdoors, and cars.
Walz is the precedent for what Republicans are attempting to do with their aggressive rebranding of Talarico: neither his policy platform nor his overall persona were as rugged, masculine, or culturally conservative as Democratic consultants initially imagined.
The Minnesota governor simply didn’t resonate with the types of voters to whom he was supposed to appeal and, by most accounts, lost the vice presidential debate to someone who did, despite a concerted Democratic campaign to brand that person as “weird.”
Talarico’s mainline Protestantism is quite different from the evangelical variety of many Texas voters. He is especially liberal on social issues.
There’s always the risk that this will backfire. The political climate is different in the midterm elections than it was two years ago. At the moment, overall conditions favor the Democrats more, and it is Republicans who control Congress and the White House who are on the hook for voters’ cost-of-living concerns.
What was funny in 2024 might not play as well in 2026.
Texas is a conservative state where Democrats have dumped a ton of money into races, sometimes coming tantalizingly close but almost always on the losing end. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) managed to be reelected during the last blue wave in 2018, in addition to 2024.
But Democrats think Paxton’s baggage and the ugly Republican primary (Cornyn compared the eventual nominee’s morals to those of a strip club owner) may give them an opening beyond the national environment. Leftward movement among Texas whites, plus a collapse in Hispanic support for Republicans relative to 2024, could make for a competitive race.
Talarico leads by 1.5 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, but a lot of the polls are old, and a single survey by the University of Texas could skew the sample. Paxton is coming off three statewide wins as attorney general.
Republicans are defending a bigger majority in the Senate than the House, but Democrats like the candidates they have in North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, and yes, Texas, all states Trump won, some of them by double digits.
It remains to be seen whether the Democrats’ faith in Talarico will pay off come November.