Ed wrote a couple of posts about the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas, James Talarico. I can’t add much to his reporting, but I thought I would throw in my 2 cents regarding the Democrats’ miscalculations in choosing their candidates for seats they hope to pick up this year.
You can read Ed’s posts here and here. The first goes through Talarico’s desperate attempts to cover up his “progressive” image, and the second shows the peril of not being “progressive” enough to satisfy the even more whacko leftists out there, who want to focus on racial politics. What plays in Austin plays nowhere else in Texas.
Democrats believe that they have just the man to run for Senate in Texas, and money has been flowing into the state at a rate that makes a Texas gusher look like a trickle. The numbers are truly staggering, and I have to say that is good for Republicans. The more they plow into Texas, the less they have elsewhere.
🔊 TALARICO in 2021: “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.https://t.co/3GvilbUfbL
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 23, 2026
Their confidence rests on the belief that they see Ken Paxton, the Republican, as fatally flawed and that Republican primary voters gave them a gift they can’t pass up. Now I don’t know what the average Texan thinks about Paxton beyond the fact that he keeps getting elected despite the “scandals” attributed to him. For all I know, he is an unsavory guy, or, for that matter, he could be pure as the driven snow. I neither know nor care, since he isn’t talking about torturing his political opponents’ wives or children, and certainly isn’t a crypto-Nazi.
No wonder he isn’t a Democrat.
But even a blind man could see that Talarico is a horrible candidate for Texas, and that the least of his problems is that he called himself a “progressive.” Progressive is a code word for nutty leftist, for sure, but what matters is that the guy holds social views so far to the left that he and Scott Weiner could have a long discussion about just who is more radical.
Texans may be to the right of your average economic liberals—most Texans kind of like the idea of economic success—but they might vote for an economic liberal if they hated the Republican enough.
But Talarico radiates something that is completely alien and unacceptable to even moderate Texans: he revels in queerness. He “loves trans kids,” has supported sterilizing and mutilating them, preaches about drag queens, asserts that there are 6 sexes, has to prove he can choke down meat due to his advocacy of veganism, and has said that he “hates Christianity,” despite claiming to preach it.
He’s a character straight out of the Babylon Bee’s “Californians Move to Texas” series, playing the Californian.
He seriously could play the Californian, he’s such a parody of them.
Talarico’s big problem is not that he is too liberal for Texas. Experience shows that in the right circumstances—high enough disgust for the party in power—even candidates who normally could not win can squeak in.
It’s that Talarico is repulsive to ordinary people. He is exactly the archetype of what liberals love, and what everyone else hates. He even hates the American flag, fitting the stereotypes we have for crazy lefties to a T.
Talarico’s success as a Democratic candidate running for a seat Democrats genuinely believe they can win shows how far they are from understanding ordinary Americans. Even Graham Platner’s troubles could prove to be less damaging than Talarico’s. Platner, at least, looks like a Mainer. If you attribute all his evil behavior to PTSD, maybe a Democrat could swallow all the rest.
But Talarico? He’s running in the wrong state, and there is no way to brush away his negatives.
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