The campaign bus rolls through North Texas under a cloudless sky. Inside, James Talarico, the 37-year-old Democratic nominee for the United States Senate, speaks in the measured cadence of a man who once taught middle-school English and now studies to become a Presbyterian minister. He quotes Scripture. He talks about working families and the cost of groceries. He presents himself as the candidate who can appeal across the old red-blue lines. Outside, the race against Republican nominee Ken Paxton sits within a few points in multiple polls.
Texas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. The fact that Talarico remains competitive is less a testament to the power of his message than to the accumulated liabilities of his opponent and the selective memory of a national media that has treated Talarico’s most radical statements as youthful indiscretions rather than as his actual worldview.
We know very well by now about the risks posed by progressives, but Talarico is no ordinary progressive. His record and public statements place him at the far edge of the cultural left on race, sex, and the nature of God itself. Those positions are not ancient history. They are documented in legislative hearings, floor speeches, and social-media posts that remain online. They reveal a politician who has applied the language of critical race theory and gender ideology to the most basic categories of American life, then wrapped the result in the vocabulary of Christian love.
For a state that still votes Republican by double-digit margins in most statewide contests, the prospect of such a figure holding a Senate seat is not merely a local concern. It is a national one. If Talarico wins, we’ll have a situation in which what happens in Texas will most certainly not stay in Texas.
The ‘virus’ of whiteness
On May 8, 2020, days after the killing of Ahmaud Arbery and weeks before the death of George Floyd, Talarico posted a thread on what was then Twitter. He described racism as a virus with which white people are infected.
“White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus,” he wrote. “But we spread it wherever we go — through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms — like a white hood or a Confederate flag — to be contagious. The only cure is diagnosing the virus within ourselves and taking dramatic actions to contain the spread.”
He followed with a call to proclaim that “#BlackLivesMatter.”
Talarico’s use of the virus metaphor is as insidious as it gets. It treated ordinary white Americans as asymptomatic carriers of a social pathogen whose primary vector was their skin color and the institutions they inhabited. Talarico has since said he would choose different words today.
At a South by Southwest panel in March 2026, he told an audience that he has not veered away from his underlying point — that racism is wrong and that people have a responsibility to combat it. Sure, this is something that we can all agree on. But Talarico’s original framing of this point remains extremely troubling. The claim that white skin confers immunity while simultaneously making its bearer contagious is the logic of racial essentialism dressed as anti-racism. It is the same logic that underwrote corporate and academic diversity statements and the horrors of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the years that followed. (Speaking of horrors, the claim that a certain skin color makes its bearer the transporter of a virus sounds like a pretty awful progressive-themed horror movie, for a not-so-very-happy Halloween.) Talarico did not invent this bizarre logic, but he did apply it publicly as an elected official.
That application has not remained confined to social media. In the Texas House, Talarico has opposed measures that treat sex as binary for the purposes of school sports and medical practice. He has described the refusal of parents to affirm a child’s stated gender identity as abusive. In a 2019 committee hearing on legislation that would have prevented courts from treating non-affirmation, standing alone, as evidence of abuse or neglect, Talarico said: “I think there are some folks that would think that if you deny your child’s gender identity that that’s incredibly harmful. And whether or not we label it with the term abuse, it’s abusive for sure.” He added that excluding such conduct from the definition of abuse was “dangerous.” The bill did not become law that session. In 2025, he voted against a later measure that codified the same parental protection.
God, sex, and the redefinition of the ordinary
Talarico’s theological statements have drawn particular attention because he is a seminarian. In October 2021, during floor debate on a bill requiring students to compete on sports teams consistent with their biological sex, he argued from the first two lines of Genesis.
“The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis, use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine Hebrew noun for spirit,” Talarico said. “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.” He posted a shortened version the next day.
In recent months, he has described the phrasing as provocative and has said that the deeper point — that God cannot be reduced to human categories — is shared by other Christians, including the late Charlie Kirk. The clarification does not erase the original claim or the context in which it was made: opposition to a sex-based sports rule. (It also doesn’t erase the shoddy hermeneutics of Talarico’s original claim. There have been many theologies that have been advanced over the years — most prominently several mystical theologies — that maintain that God has both masculine and feminine aspects. But if you’re going to be basing your theology on the Book of Genesis, and on the Bible more generally, you can’t get away from the fact that in the original biblical Hebrew in which Genesis and the Old Testament are written, God is always written with masculine verb conjugations.)
On the same subject of biological sex, Talarico told colleagues in a 2021 Public Education Committee hearing that “modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.” He listed chromosome combinations beyond XX and XY. In September 2026, he walked the statement back in an interview with Fox News, saying he had “missed the mark” and that “there are two sexes, and then there’s a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities.” The original assertion, delivered as settled science while opposing restrictions on male participation in female sports, remains part of the record.
Talarico has also adopted language that treats the category of “woman” as contingent. In sermons and public remarks after the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Clinic decision, he repeatedly referred to “neighbors with a uterus.” In one post he wrote that “every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the State.” In another recorded exchange, he began to say “women,” then corrected himself to the same phrase. The formulation is not unique to him; it belongs to a bizarre broader effort to decouple the word “woman” from adult human females so that the category can include biological males. When applied to abortion policy, it has the additional effect of centering the procedure on body parts rather than on the women who possess them.
These statements sit alongside a consistent legislative record. Talarico opposed the 2023 bill that prohibited puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for minors. He opposed earlier measures restricting transgender participation in girls’ sports. He has framed such restrictions as bullying and as un-Christian. At the same time, his campaign has stated that he would support a national ban on gender-transition surgeries for minors. The distinction between surgical and nonsurgical interventions has become a standard hedge for Democrats who face voter resistance to the broader policy suite. It does not alter his earlier votes or the earlier language.
Why the race is competitive
None of this would matter as much if Talarico were facing a conventional Republican nominee. He is not.
Ken Paxton’s tenure as Texas attorney general has been defined by a series of legal and ethical controversies that a majority of state House Republicans judged serious enough to impeach him in 2023. The articles of impeachment included allegations that Paxton used his office to benefit a campaign donor, Nate Paul, in exchange for renovations to Paxton’s home and employment for a woman with whom Paxton was having an affair. The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him after a two-week trial. The underlying securities-fraud indictment from 2015, which charged Paxton with soliciting investors without disclosing his own compensation, ended in a 2024 pretrial diversion agreement that required restitution and community service but no admission of guilt.
Paxton’s personal life has supplied additional material for opponents. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce in 2025, citing adultery. Reports have detailed an earlier affair that allegedly involved the same donor. More recent reporting has placed Ken Paxton at a 2024 New Year’s Eve party in Dubai with a woman described as his girlfriend and two men under federal indictment for healthcare fraud. These facts do not prove every allegation made against him, but they do explain why a significant share of general election voters remain unenthusiastic about Paxton’s candidacy. In a state that President Donald Trump carried by 14 percentage points in 2024, those liabilities have narrowed the margin enough for Talarico’s fundraising advantage and media attention to keep the race close.
Talarico’s recent absence from the trail does not alter the race’s underlying dynamic either. He disclosed a flu diagnosis on Sept. 30 after an urgent-care visit in Dallas and canceled several events. He returned to public appearances the following weekend, including the Austin City Limits festival. Speculation about other causes circulated online; both his campaign and the mental-health facilities named in some claims denied them. The episode was brief and medically explicable. It has not prevented either campaign from continuing its final push.
What a Senate seat would mean
A Talarico victory would place in the Senate a lawmaker whose public record includes the claim that white Americans spread racism by virtue of their skin color, that God is nonbinary, that there are six biological sexes, that women are best described as neighbors with a uterus, and that parents who decline to affirm a child’s gender identity are engaged in abusive behavior. Those positions are not moderate by any conventional measure of American public opinion, and especially not in Texas. They are extreme even within the contemporary Democratic Party, which has begun to soften its language on some of these questions after successive electoral losses.
TALARICO SAYS HE WOULDN’T CHANGE HOW HE HANDLED HIS NINE-DAY FLU ABSENCE
The national implications follow from the institutional power of a single Senate seat. A Democrat who holds such views would vote on judicial nominations, on legislation affecting Title IX and medical practice, and on the confirmation of officials who administer federal civil-rights statutes. He would do so while presenting himself as the Christian alternative to the politics of grievance. This is the same combination we’ve seen for some time now that has produced, in other states, school policies that withhold information from parents and corporate statements that treat race as the central organizing principle of institutional life. Texas has so far resisted the most aggressive versions of those policies. A Senate seat would give their advocate a platform and a vote far beyond the Texas House.
Paxton’s flaws are real and have been adjudicated, in part, by his own party. They explain the narrowness of the present contest. They do not erase the content of Talarico’s record. Voters in Texas, and observers elsewhere, are entitled to weigh both. The candidate who once wrote that white skin makes its bearer contagious, who has described ordinary parental judgment as abusive, and who has applied the categories of contemporary gender ideology to the nature of God is asking for a national office. The request is extreme. The fact that it remains plausible is the product of the alternative on offer, not of any moderation in the request itself.
Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.