Get ready to hear a lot more about James Talarico. The Texas state representative won the Democratic US Senate primary on Tuesday, defeating Jasmine Crockett—a high-profile member of Congress representing Dallas—in a race that pitted two candidates with a knack for garnering attention and diverging theories of the electorate.
Talarico, who I recently profiled, is a former public school teacher and current seminary student who has built a following among Democrats inside and outside the state for his sermons and floor exchanges challenging Christian nationalism. Talarico will be an underdog heading into the general election. The race will be a reach, even if he ends up facing Republican Attorney General Paxton—who has, after all, been elected in a cloud of scandal three times before. It will also be absurdly expensive; the tab for a competitive general election will easily exceed nine figures.
I wrote nine years ago that Beto O’Rourke could run the best campaign in Texas in decades and still lose by 5 percentage points. In 2018, he did—and lost by 2.6 points. But Trump is underwater and just blew up the life boat, and the situation for Democrats in the state is not as dire as it seemed a year ago. A state Senate candidate recently flipped a ruby-red district in a bellwether county, and he did it not just through a fluke of special-election turnout, but by peeling off Republican voters. In Talarico, Democrats have landed a well-funded candidate unsullied by doings in Washington—someone whose faith-based populism impressed Joe Rogan and Barack Obama and showed strength in the places the party has been hemorrhaging support. It may not be the situation Democrats need, but it is a situation Republicans absolutely didn’t want.
The semi-regular return of Lone Star Democratic optimism was only one part of the story last night—and maybe not even the most important one. Republicans are the ones who actually run the state, after all, and they are not okay. Fourth-term Sen. John Cornyn is hovering at about 42 percent in his primary, and will face Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general, in a May runoff. That Paxton—who had to take remedial ethics classes after being indicted for securities fraud, and was impeached by the Republican-dominated state House—is not just still in office but actively seeking a promotion is a testament to the power of the party’s Christian nationalist faction, and to the broader conservative movement’s principled rejection of consequences and shame. His attempt to overturn the 2020 election through a patently frivolous lawsuit (he spoke on the Mall on January 6) led to a state bar investigation. It’s worked out wonderfully for him.
You don’t dominate a state as Texas Republicans have without a keen, if cynical, understanding of the median voter. But further downballot, the results showed a party increasingly captured by a radical fringe. Take the race to replace Paxton as attorney general, which US Rep. Chip Roy entered with more name recognition than anyone else. Roy, a former Ted Cruz chief of staff, is a hard-right zealot (I do not think he would even consider that an insult), but also a kind of irascible figure in DC with a real and confounding code—he voted to certify the 2020 election results on January 6, for example. You could expect him to take on many of the same fights as Paxton, but without all the scuzziness. He faces a runoff after finishing 8 points behind state Sen. Mayes Middleton, who told voters that he had “defeated the atheists” and was “fighting Sharia law” while accusing Roy—Chip Roy!—of helping “illegals avoid deportation.”
Roy’s colleague in the US House, Rep. Tony Gonzales, is also facing a runoff in a rematch with Brandon Herrera, a gun influencer known as the “the AK guy.” Gonzales has called Herrera a “known neo-Nazi,” in reference to his opponent’s history of posting Nazi memes and Holocaust jokes. (Herrera has said he is not a neo-Nazi and that he simply has an “edgy” sense of humor.) Herrera has accused Gonzales of the far more serious offense of supporting modest gun-control legislation after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, which is in the district. But Gonzales may be on the ropes this time; he is now facing a congressional ethics inquiry over allegations he had an inappropriate relationship with a staffer, who later died by suicide. Another Republican incumbent, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, lost his race outright. Crenshaw was once a rising star, but drew opposition on the right for voting to certify the 2020 election, and working with Democrats on a failed border-security bill in 2024.
And then there’s Bo French, an oilman who until recently chaired the Republican party in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, and who advanced to the runoff in the race for railroad commissioner—a powerful statewide office that regulates the energy industry. French ran just 4,000 votes short of the leader, Jim Wright, pulling nearly a third of the vote. French is a gleeful racist who has said that “we are all Rhodesians now” and called for Trump to “remove Third World subtards from America.” Last year he posted a poll on X that asked: “Who is a bigger threat to America?” The poll offered two choices: Jews or Muslims.
That’s the dynamic in the nation’s largest red state heading into the midterms. It is not ideal, for a pluralistic society, but it feels appropriate for 2026: a Democratic Party with maybe a puncher’s chance if its candidates do everything right—and a Republican base testing just how far gone it can go, before it ever pays a price for anything.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.