During this year’s Republican Senate primary campaign in Texas, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign distributed one of the most devastating campaign advertisements ever made. This video wasn’t an artificial intelligence slop insult fest or a Nixonian ratf**k. It was a recitation of one candidate’s long list of crimes, corruption and scandals since 2015 — six long minutes of one shocking incident after another, all taking place in plain sight, well known to state officials and voters alike.
The ad wasn’t about a Democrat or a run-of-the-mill crooked businessman. It was about the state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who would go on to win the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate over the powerful incumbent Sen. John Cornyn on May 26. And Paxton was helped across the finish line by none other than Donald Trump, his spiritual soul brother who offered an enthusiastic endorsement. (The ad has now been “unlisted” on YouTube, but it is still available on X and other social media platforms.)
The age of Trump is rife with corruption and degeneracy, and it’s tempting to assume it will come to a close when he finally passes from the scene. But Paxton’s primary victory proves that the rot in Republican politics runs much deeper than Trump. That Paxton, with the president’s help, could take down someone with the stature of Cornyn, who had once himself served as Texas attorney general, as well as a state Supreme Court justice, shows where the party is headed.
None of this came out of the blue. After all, Ted Cruz, Cornyn’s fellow Texan in the Senate, is not exactly what you would call a gentleman statesman. After his election in 2012, Cruz quickly became one of the avatars of the new GOP — brash, aggressive, intensely ideological and politically extreme. At the time, he was perceived as occupying the party’s far-right fringe. Today Cruz is considered the old guard. The new guard is Paxton, a man without ideology, principles or conscience, solely motivated by a will to power. He is the new Republican Party.
Paxton is running against a Democrat whose character is his exact opposite. State Rep. James Talarico is a young political leader with a sterling reputation for honesty and integrity, a Bible-believing Christian whose campaign is a test of whether voters still care about those values.
I wrote about Talarico last September right after he announced he was running, never dreaming at the time that he’d end up facing off against Paxton, whose only interesting personality trait is his propensity for criminal behavior. Talarico’s personality is something very different, a smiling appeal to the better angels of the electorate’s nature, and seemingly imperviousness to insults and attacks.
The bet Talarico is making is that people are so tired of the acrimony and negativity that they will gratefully turn to someone with qualities they haven’t seen in politics for a while: decency and strength of character.
The bet Talarico is making is that people are so tired of the acrimony and negativity that they will gratefully turn to someone with qualities they haven’t seen in politics for a while: decency and strength of character. None other than Joe Rogan told Talarico when he appeared on Rogan’s podcast that he needed to run for president because we need “a good person” in office, so maybe that’s a bet worth taking.
To Republicans, a “good person” automatically means weak, which is why they are pulling out all the stops against Talarico right out of the gate. We are seeing one of the most vicious political assaults on a candidate in American political history, rooted in transphobia, homophobia and TK.
Paxton, predictably, led the charge in his primary victory speech, saying that Talarico “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, and others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.” (The Talarico campaign immediately began selling T-shirts that read “Talafreako.”)
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, never one to pass up an opportunity to lob attacks, went all the way, saying on Fox News that Talarico is the “first transgender Senate candidate . . . He’s clearly transitioning into a female.” Miller’s boss, the president of the United States, quickly echoed the lie in an interview.
Since Talarico once ordered breakfast tacos with eggs and cheese, Republicans have accused him of being a vegan, which betrayed their own stupidity; strict vegans don’t eat cheese or eggs. But the episode also points to their ecosphere. As WIRED pointed out, the accusation emerged from “the manosphere and incel culture, overlapping internet communities obsessed with their own unscientific theories of gender, sex, hormones, and diet.” The excitement and arousal you hear in the voices of prominent Trump insiders when they talk about Talarico being trans betrays their preoccupation with the subject for reasons only they can explain.
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For his part, Talarico seems unruffled by all this, good naturedly explaining that he’s not a vegan by posting a picture of himself eating a huge beef rib and admitting that he’s said some things in the past that are “cringey.” He doesn’t seem upset that anyone’s calling him transgender, simply reiterating that he thinks all people deserve dignity and respect. And it remains to be seen if these attacks — and saying the word “transgender” over and over again — will have the same salience it has had in the past. There’s something stale about it all now, a bit of a clue that Republicans are fighting the last war.
Meanwhile, Talarico is raising massive amounts of money — a necessity in the massive Lone Star State, where ad buys are notoriously expensive — and the conventional wisdom is that the GOP having to match it will hobble them in other states. But I think that assumption has been overstated. Elon Musk could root around in his couch cushions and come up with a hundred million before breakfast, and he’s already indicated his willingness this cycle to write checks for Republicans. Besides, it’s not as if Republicans care about campaign finance laws anymore, and there is nobody to prosecute them anyway.
The GOP’s real problem is Texas’ changing demographics — and an albatross by the name of Donald Trump. As Axios reported, “Texas has gained more than 2.5 million new residents since 2020 — roughly the entire population of New Mexico,” and nobody knows how they will vote. On top of that, Latino voters are moving away from Trump, which could mean they will be likely to turn away from Paxton. Whether that means they vote for Talarico or simply stay home, it’s not a good sign for the GOP.
But Texas has broken progressive hearts for a while now, so the party is trying to not get overconfident. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost his race against Ted Cruz by just 2.6 points. But as New York Times data analyst Nate Cohn pointed out in an unexpectedly positive analysis, while the polls in 2018 were close throughout the race, O’Rourke was never ahead. The same holds true in this race between Paxton and Talarico, but this time it’s Paxton who has never held the lead. That could change, of course. But as of this week, Talarico still holds the pole position.
The whole country is closely watching this race, and not just because the fate of the Senate majority is at stake. Paxton and Talarico represent such opposite visions of the political moment. The former has the cynical decadence of the MAGA man, and the latter is a wholesome seminarian with a spine of steel.
No one will be surprised if the corrupt Republican wins in the end. What else is new? But the fact that there is a chance someone like Talarico could prevail is giving the anti-Trump majority reason to hope at a time when that’s a commodity in very short supply.
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