Axios: Texas Senate Race Now An ‘Ultimate Test’ of GOP’s Anti-Woke Playbook

Is it? Or is it the ultimate test of Democrats’ continuing Beto strategy in Texas? Find a male candidate, freshen him up with an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot, make vague references to the Kennedy dynasty in a state that could care less about it, and pull tens of millions of dollars from closer races?

I know which way I’m betting on “tests.” Axios gives us the mainstream media bet:

The Texas Senate race has become a national laboratory for anti-“woke” politics, testing whether voters still recoil from the language of 2020 amid the economic pain of 2026.

Why it matters: Republicans came away from 2024 convinced they had won more than an election — they had broken through on culture, turning Democrats’ progressive language and identity politics into symbols of elite detachment.

The durability of that culture-war coup is now an open question, as the GOP tries to redeploy the same playbook in a far more hostile midterm environment.

First off, the durability of that coup is hardly in question at all. That’s true culturally and, more importantly, legally. The Supreme Court has finally followed through on at least two decades of warnings about the unconstitutionality of racial set-asides, in education and in redistricting. Colleges are not just having to comply with new standards from the Trump administration, but they are also bringing back standardized testing, a rollback of a key “diversity” initiative that ended up forcing universities to teach middle-school English and math. No one’s putting Dylan Mulvaney on beer cans or into sports bras anymore. Practitioners of pediatric sex changes are losing lawsuits, including a landmark settlement in this very state that forces Texas Children’s Hospital to open the first detransitioner clinic in the nation. 

Axios’ Zachary Basu seems to dismiss the evidentiary value of the 2024 election, but it’s a clear sign that “woke” has failed politically, too. Voters rejected the policies of the Biden administration on immigration and crime, two key issues that Trump put front and center in the campaign, both of which relate to “woke” progressive policy disasters at the federal, state, and local levels. Harris responded (as Biden had before her) by reminding voters of Trump’s unpopularity while offering the status quo of the woke Biden Regency. Voters responded by handing Trump the first national popular-vote win for the GOP in twenty years, and Harris lost every swing state in the election. 

Basu reminds us that Trump remains unpopular, which is true, and that the current political and economic environment has turned more difficult this year, which is also true. However, Basu fails to recognize one key missing element in this part of the analysis, relating to the “Harris is for they/them” ad in the 2024 election:

The ad worked because it converted one obscure policy position into a sweeping theory of Democratic “wokeness”: a party fluent in elite cultural language, but alien to voters’ daily lives.

• But it didn’t work in isolation: The Biden administration’s handling of inflation, immigration and affordability were already making Democrats look out of touch before “they/them” gave the GOP the perfect slogan.
• Today, those forces have flipped: Trump is now 52 points underwater on inflation, turning the economy from a tailwind into the central threat to his party’s midterm survival.

Perhaps. However, Democrats didn’t lose just because of the ad, either. Voters had been howling about the outcomes of the woke/DEI policies adopted and applied by the Biden Regency long before that ad ever appeared. Harris, and Biden before her, never made an argument in support of those policies except to call opponents bigots for raising objections to them. The new Texas franchise for woke used the same strategy in 2024 to claim that school choice was just a cover for “Christian nationalism,” rather than a response to the failing government-monopoly education system:

James Talarico says if you advocate for “private school vouchers,” you’re a Christian Nationalist pic.twitter.com/ayz40fyzUO

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 28, 2026

Talarico was speaking during the South by Southwest event in Austin, Texas, when he claimed, “Part of this Christian Nationalist movement is trying to pass these things called private school vouchers.”

“If you’re not an education policy person you may have never heard of this, but essentially it’s an effort to take tax dollars out of our public schools, which are underfunded as they are. Texas is 43rd in the nation in per-student education funding. So, it’s taking dollars out of the classroom and giving it to unaccountable private schools. Usually Christian private schools,” Talarico added.

“Again, part of this effort to blur the lines between church and state. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, made this his top legislative priority for the year last year,” he continued … Talarico also supports abortion, has claimed displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools is an act of “violence,” suggested God is “non-binary,” and has claimed “modern science” recognized there were “six” sexes.

School choice is very popular here in Texas. Why? Parents are sick of having their children stuck in failing schools, where progressive teachers unions and administrators spend more time indoctrinating students in wokery than in learning to read, write, and perform mathematics at age-appropriate levels. Talarico has staked out his turf with the unions and the education establishment that abhors competition and accountability. 

That brings us to the context that Basu overlooks: This is Texas. This isn’t a national election, or even a swing-state election. Trump won Texas in 2024 by over 15 points and 1.5 million votes. The last time a Democrat won a statewide election in the Lone Star State was in 1994; Texas Democrats have the longest streak of statewide futility in the nation. Part of the reason for that, especially of late, is that their party is filled with Talaricos and Jasmine Crocketts in safe congressional and legislative districts where woke sells, but have almost no moderates that might appeal to the larger statewide electorate.

That’s the real test here in Texas, and it’s already a failure. Talarico is off to the races talking about “tops versus bottoms” and expecting Texas voters to identify as “bottoms.” Paxton may hardly be a perfect candidate, but he’s won three statewide elections in a row, even with his current scandal baggage present in the 2022 cycle. 

Paxton isn’t the problem anyway. Democrats have spent the last four cycles attempting the Beto Strategy, first with Robert O’Rourke himself and then with Collin Allred, and now are trying it again with Temu Beto in this cycle. They aren’t listening to voters; they’re lecturing voters while trying to fake them out with Kennedy allusions and soft-focus photo spreads featuring radical Leftists pretending to be something they’re not. When Democrats start finding authentic moderates that might offer a real choice to flawed Republican candidates, Texas voters might give them a hearing. As long as Democrats keep lying to them, though, their streak in Texas statewide elections will remain intact. 

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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