This drew roars from the MAGA faithful at Paxton’s victory party, who were excited to see Trump’s endorsement of Paxton over establishment GOP incumbent John Cornyn triumph. But all Paxton’s sandbox barrage actually accomplished was to remind everyone that in this critical Senate race—one that could determine Senate control—Republicans have nominated someone who typifies everything normie voters hate about Trump and Trumpism.
This isn’t just due to the standard reasons we often hear: Trump is highly unpopular, Paxton is deeply compromised, and Talarico is a formidable fundraiser. It’s something more subtle: Paxton’s ugly MAGA credentials provide an unexpected opening for Talarico—a state legislator and seminarian—to play the foil to Trumpism with a new kind of politics rooted in a fresh understanding of our moment: It combines open professions of Christian faith and promises to transcend Trumpian acrimony with kindness and goodwill toward the opposition.
Talarico’s potential path to victory tells the story. Matt Angle, director of the pro-Talarico Lone Star Project, says that path requires three factors. Talarico must run up sizable majorities in the five big urban counties—the home of places like Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio—and get at least into the high 40s in adjoining suburban and exurban counties. He must win around 65 percent in the heavily Latino Texas counties along the border and in the Rio Grande valley. And he must limit GOP gains in all the other non-metro and rural counties, which constitute a truly huge expanse of territory.
To appreciate the challenge, consider that in the 2018 Texas Senate race, Beto O’Rourke fell short of ousting Senator Ted Cruz by fewer than 3 points. As Ron Brownstein details, O’Rourke won solid majorities in the urban counties and won around two-thirds of the vote in Latino-heavy ones. But O’Rourke still lost Brownstein notes, primarily because Cruz won nearly three quarters of the vote in all the other counties.
Here’s where Talarico’s challenge to MAGA comes in. O’Rourke was an electrifying candidate, and so is Talarico, as his massive fundraising hauls demonstrate. But Talarico has the added ingredients of his faith and the sincere offer of goodwill to the opposition. These might resonate amid bone-deep exhaustion with Trump plus Republicans nominating the most Trumpy candidate imaginable.
“These are country-club Republicans and independents who are really agitated by how Trump has handled the economy and the White House—whether it’s the ballroom or the billion-dollar slush fund for folks who tore down our Capitol,” Chuck Rocha, an adviser to Talarico’s campaign, told me. “He has to win some Republicans and a bunch of independents.”
“Paxton puts together Trump’s corruption with a David Duke-style white nationalist politics,” congressman Greg Casar, who represents a district in central Texas, told me. Casar added that Latino swing voters who temporarily believed Trump’s 2024 promise to control costs now find MAGA’s blend of corruption and racial nationalism “abhorrent.” Nate Cohn sees a similar path.
Yet Talarico knows how to electrify the national fundraising base and has the chops to go viral. Importantly, he gets that politics in the Trump era is an information war. He is focused on costs and offers an economic agenda that will be broadly popular with Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans, with closing tax loopholes on billionaires at its center. But he is not adopting a Democratic-consultant-approved “kitchen table” approach that avoids talking about Trump.
“Christ is the immigrant deported without due process,” Talarico says. He calls for stringent border security to distance himself from Joe Biden while simultaneously insisting on welcoming legal immigration and granting immigrants compassion and fair judicial treatment as a matter of faith. As Alan Elrod writes at Liberal Currents, Talarico is a walking Biblical challenge to the GOP embrace of militant right-wing Christianity. One might say that Talarico is willing to go theologically toe-to-toe with MAGA white Christian Nationalism in all its vicious glory.
Here’s how I’d put this: Talarico’s politics goes big. He treats it as fundamental to this moment that Trump and Trumpism are wrecking our common life at a very profound moral and spiritual level.
The nomination of Paxton—the Trumpiest of candidates—will place that brute fact front and center. That contrast may not be enough to win in Texas—only time will tell—but, prosecuted well, it will leave little doubt about the future that MAGA Christianity envisions for us, and why our liberal alternative would be a whole lot better.
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