Better than Beto?
Photo: Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg/Getty Images
For people of a certain vintage, or students of history, the idea of Texas being an absolute wasteland for Democrats seems a bit strange. From Reconstruction until the 1950s, the Lone Star State was part of the Solid Democratic South. The state gave us all sorts of colorful Democratic political icons such as Ma and Pa Ferguson (Ma was elected governor of Texas after Pa was impeached and removed from office); W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” O’Daniel, a flour huckster; and the man O’Daniel beat in a red-hot 1941 U.S. Senate race, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Gradually, the civil-rights movement, the ideological polarization of the major parties, urbanization and suburbanization, and the politics of the oil business broke the Democratic hegemony over Texas and then reversed it. The last Democrat to carry the state in a presidential election was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Twelve years later, Lloyd Bentsen, who had defeated future president George H.W. Bush in a 1970 Senate race, reached the national ticket as Michael Dukakis’s running mate; the two men then lost Texas in a landslide to Bush. The last time any Democrat won a statewide race in Texas was in 1994, the same year Poppy Bush’s son, George W. Bush, defeated incumbent Democratic governor Ann Richards and began his own climb to the White House.
Despite the long GOP winning streak in Texas, Democrats have been showing signs of revival, partly thanks to demographic changes in this rapidly growing state (which surpassed New York to become the nation’s second-largest population-wise in 1994) and partly due to growing Republican extremism. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Texas’s urban areas were a source of GOP strength; now most of them are trending strongly Democratic. Texas Latino voters, especially in the Rio Grande Valley, trended sharply Republican in 2024, but that hugely important shift is now looking to be temporary. And now Texas Republicans have given their opponents the inestimable gift of defenestrating their four-term champion-fundraising senior U.S. senator John Cornyn in favor of state attorney general Ken Paxton, a MAGA extremist with tons of ethics baggage. Might Democratic nominee James Talarico have a real shot of winning in November?
In both good and bad ways, Talarico, a state legislator and (in his spare time) seminary student, is reminding a lot of Democrats of their onetime Great White Hope, Beto O’Rourke. In 2018, the fresh-faced El Paso congressman threw a scare into Cornyn’s colleague Ted Cruz, at the time a symbol of GOP extremism. He drew huge crowds. He raised unfathomable amounts of money, much of it national grassroots dollars. And he benefited from a midterm pro-Democratic “wave” election. To be sure, Cruz still won, but only by 2.6 percent of the vote.
At the time, Beto O’Rourke’s future looked very bright, as did that of the Texas Democratic Party. But the dream of his Lone Star apotheosis turned out to be an illusion. After a desultory presidential run in 2020 that oozed hubris, O’Rourke challenged two-term Republican governor Greg Abbott in 2022 and, to be blunt about it, got his ass handed to him. He lost by over ten points, which, technically speaking, made it a landslide. And it was a token of how far Democrats had fallen that O’Rourke’s performance was the best Democratic Party gubernatorial showing since the losing Richards campaign 28 years earlier.
So like Charlie Brown with the football, Texas Democrats are torn between hope and experience in looking forward to November with Talarico heading up their ticket. Like O’Rourke eight years ago, he’s got money, charisma, a united party, and a vulnerable opponent in what should be a good year for his party. But is he the candidate to break the losing streak? And if not, can anybody do it?
It’s definitely going to be a grueling, nasty campaign. Republicans are semi-open about their inability (or unwillingness) to raise enough money to make Ken Paxton a palatable, voter-friendly candidate to anyone other than those already in the MAGA base. So the Paxton campaign is going to be 99 percent negative and aimed at convincing both conventional Republicans with low regard for their candidate and swing voters that Talarico is a fake Texan, a fake Christian, and a fake moderate. Even before Paxton became the official GOP nominee, Paxton’s PAC started running ads cherry-picking “weird” quotes from Talarico:
The religious slurs against the Bible-quoting Democrat are based on the bet that Talarico’s brand of liberal, mainline Protestant Christianity will seem alien to the conservative Evangelicals who dominate the Sunday landscape of much of Texas, along with non-churchgoing cultural conservatives who just assume Jesus is a symbol of “family values” and patriotism. However much time persuadable voters spend wondering about exactly how “weird” James Talarico is time they won’t spend dwelling on Paxton’s dubious marital history and his many bouts with fraud and corruption allegations — or, for that matter, his ultra-MAGA ideology, which makes Ted Cruz look like a RINO. I recall a pundit summing up a close election in another state as “stupid versus mean, and nine times out of ten, stupid beats mean.” Does “weird” beat “cruel and corrupt”? Early Paxton-Talarico polls show a very close race, and after Paxton’s nomination, the authoritative Cook Political Report moved its ever-cautious rating from Likely Republican to Lean Republican. The national breeze is going to matter regardless of how stormy this contest becomes.
In the end, this Senate race may just come down to which party Texans want to support in Congress in 2027 and what sort of message they choose to send to Washington. Paxton’s buddy and benefactor Donald Trump won Texas by 13 points in 2024, but some polls show Texans giving his current job performance as president a net negative assessment. In particular, Trump’s striking loss of support from the Latino voters who swung toward him two years ago puts Texas in reach for Democrats.
If Talarico wins, his party has a good chance of flipping control of the Senate. But more than that, it will indicate that the complexion of deep-red Texas truly is changing, and Republicans can’t just assume they can run any old lunatic and still win.
