Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re talking about all of it with political theorist Alan Elrod, who had a great piece for Liberal Currents on Texas Republicans as representative of the Trump-era GOP. Alan, great to have you on.
Sargent: So the new Fox poll finds Talarico up by seven points among registered voters in Texas, 53 to 46, and up two points among likely voters, 51 to 49. I think his lead is probably somewhere in the middle there. But critically, the Fox poll finds Trump’s approval at 44 percent to 55 percent disapproving.
Elrod: Yeah, it’s true, my wife is a Texan. She’s from Fort Worth. You know, I think the interesting thing about the finding is that it points at a number of the groups that are frustrated with the second Trump administration, right? Texas does have a lot of Latinos who are jilted—some of them who voted for Trump, some of them who didn’t, but a lot of whom are very frustrated on immigration.
Sargent: Well, those non-MAGA Christians are going to loom large in this discussion, so let’s put a pin in that. Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt was so shocked by these findings. Listen to this exchange between her and Fox contributor Clay Travis.
Clay Travis (voiceover): Texans have to wake up. I think sometimes when you have seen Republicans win for generations, a lot of people out there just don’t think at all that Democrats are capable of winning in the state. Now, I watch a lot of football, I watch a lot of sports. Every single game that I am watching, I am seeing Republican ads dominating. I think that Republicans have held their proverbial, you know, cash until the last moment, and they now are delivering overwhelming amounts of dollars into the playing field.
Elrod: So I don’t want to pretend that I have no fear of big spending close to the election, but Travis is just avoiding the key problem, which is Paxton. The problem is Paxton. Paxton is a terrible candidate. He’s hated by a lot of people in his own party. I mean, 60 members of his own party voted to impeach him a few years ago. So we’re not talking about a guy that is beloved across the state.
Now, we’re not there yet, right? Signs and polls don’t vote. But what we’re seeing is that candidates still do matter sometimes, and we’re getting good indicators that it is important that the Democrats nominated Talarico, and it is relevant that the Republicans nominated Paxton.
You had a great piece on this stressing how the Texas GOP’s white male Christian supremacy and naked ethnonationalism are the future of the Republican Party now that Trump has reshaped it. Talk about that.
On the other hand, I think what you’re seeing with the Talarico race is some of the consequences of those politics, right? Ken Paxton is a criminal. He has been under investigation for securities fraud. He is a philanderer who then turns around and tries to castigate Democrats on moral issues. He has waged a really aggressive campaign against trans kids in Texas, going so far as to try to level sort of legal intimidation at places like Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington, because he’s so determined to try to prevent any form of care for trans kids.
And it is an example of both the dangers, I think, of our politics. We are headed in a direction where what comes after Trump, I think, is going to be a lot like what we’re seeing in Texas. It’s going to be even nastier, it’s going to be even more corrupt, it’s going to be even more hateful. At the same time, the window is there. You can lose people by behaving this way. And Texas GOP is showing that.
Alan, in the mythic version of Trumpism, which was supposed to be a multiracial working-class movement, Latinos were going to be permanently brought into the Trump coalition because they’re culturally conservative and they see the economy as being lifted by Trump.
Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, I think what we’re seeing here is, from the racial hatred to the stupidity of things like the tariffs, if you hurt people enough, they will potentially eventually abandon you. You cannot just keep hurting them over and over again and expect loyalty. That does eventually matter.
People don’t, I think, remember this all the time. They know it’s big physically. But Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the country. Texas itself is wildly economically, religiously, culturally diverse. So if you try to wage war on all these different subsets of America, that’s going to be felt in a place like Texas.
So I think there you see the dynamic that you were talking about, in which kind of non-MAGA Christians in Texas just aren’t willing to go along with what this movement has really become. I mean, they’re not interested in voting for who Trump is telling them to vote for.
It is hard to get people to buy into constant displays of public cruelty, right? That is very different. When you’re trying to nibble around the edges on this stuff, and when you’re sort of being, I think, opaque about the really vicious parts of your policy, and you’re using more maybe sort of sleight-of-hand talking points about how we need border security, you might get people to go along.
Sargent: Right. I think you’re putting your finger on something important here about MAGA, right? Which is that the violent ethnic purges, the violent ethnic cleansing, is a feature of the movement. It absolutely saturates official government propaganda about immigrants. It saturates ICE’s recruitment.
Elrod: Well, I think my message in my piece is, you know, I said it’s a warning and it’s a silver lining, but the warning isn’t just to the country as a whole. It’s also, I think, to these sort of self-styled non-MAGA Republicans, which is to say, guys, this isn’t your party anymore. What does it even mean to say you’re a non-MAGA Republican? That’s not a thing anymore. You need to embrace, I think, supporting Democrats for the next few cycles at least. And I think we should just be comfortable trying to say that.
Adam Hamilton, the Democratic candidate in Kansas, is a pastor. He’s religious. He speaks about his faith. He’s written books about his faith. And so all of a sudden, there does seem to be an opening being created by MAGA extremism to try and appeal to some of these middle-of-the-road religious voters. That’s happening in Texas as well. James Talarico talks about his faith openly. Can you talk about these dynamics?
And I don’t want to suggest that you can’t do those things and be an atheist candidate. You can. But I think when Democrats spent a little while running away from talking about faith, what they actually did was just make themselves seem sort of unrelatable, and maybe judgmental in a way that I don’t think they maybe meant to. I think some of it was rooted in, we don’t want to seem exclusionary by talking about things like Christian faith.
And I think that’s what people really need to hear from candidates—candidates who feel like they are speaking to the totality of their life experience. And if it feels like you’re hiding some part of yourself away, or you’re unwilling to talk about some frankly huge chunk of what life is about to a lot of Americans because you’re worried about stepping on it the wrong way, then what you’re doing is losing out on a chance to connect with people.
And that’s an important message if you’re going to win in a place like Texas or a place like Kansas, right? I mean, these are red states. You are not going to win unless you’re able to win over a segment of Republican voters.
Elrod: Yes. And to that point, I would say people need to be watching very closely Andy Beshear. Andy Beshear from Kentucky is almost certainly going to be a candidate in the 2028 cycle. And his messaging around this stuff is exactly right.
But that key thing of, we are all children of God, and I don’t believe in demeaning or making any person who is a child of God feel attacked—that’s incredibly powerful. I think Beshear, even maybe more than Talarico, has just got it figured out on this stuff. And I think he’s going to be a very, very compelling person to watch.
Now, I know that people will get mad at this, and yes, I wish James Talarico would figure out where he stands on trans issues a little better. But generally speaking, he’s been very good on immigration. And I do think the through line to all this is this return to a kind of Christian message of equality before God.
Elrod: Absolutely. And I would say this. Christianity is just deeply interwoven into liberalism. And by that I mean, like, small-l liberal—it doesn’t have to be progressive or left—but the universal ideas of Christianity, especially things that come later, the Protestant Reformation, the idea of the priesthood of all believers, this idea that we have equality before God, that we are individuals with equal worth and merit and dignity striving together.
In fact, I think we should embrace the idea that Christianity does not have to be—and this is something that a lot of people on the left side of center make the mistake of doing, which is assuming Christianity has to be a kind of reactionary, regressive thing—when in fact it can be a powerfully liberating and leveling and unifying idea. And it comes in history in many cases, in many points in history, as a liberating and universalizing force and not an oppressive one.
Elrod: No, the near-to-medium-term future is a Texified party. And as far as it being a rump, it’s up to us to make it a rump. It won’t be a rump unless we fight to make it one.
Sargent: And James Talarico’s theory of the case, which is that you need this very broad coalition in order to defeat Republicans in Texas, is kind of a way of saying that we have to turn the Republican Party into a MAGA rump. That’s what he’s saying, isn’t he?
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Alan, big things could be happening now. I guess we’ll know more in around a month. But man, Talarico and these other candidates really have to close this thing out, don’t they?
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out Alan Elrod’s piece. It’s called “The Future of the Republican Party After Trump Is in Texas.” And it sure looks that way. Alan, a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Elrod: Thanks for having me.
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