Talarico must solve the progressive ‘buzzkill problem’ to beat Paxton | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Small donations to Talarico's cause have added up to tens of millions.
- Paxton’s runoff win energized Republicans but raised doubts about statewide appeal.
- Republican candidates start with about an 800,000-vote advantage statewide.
Karl Rove, the mastermind behind Texas’ shift to the Republican Party and George W. Bush’s ascension to the White House, once stood watching a Democratic parade. When supporters of angry progressive Howard Dean strolled by, Rove cheered and said, “Heh, heh, heh. Yeah, that’s the one we want.”
He didn’t get the former Vermont governor as Bush’s opponent in that 2004 campaign, but Rove understood then something that’s a key factor in this fall’s attention-grabbing Texas race for U.S. Senate: The best opponent is the one easiest to paint as extreme.
Democrat James Talarico’s team got the one they wanted Tuesday night, when GOP runoff voters overwhelmingly picked Ken Paxton over four-term incumbent John Cornyn. Paxton is scandal-ridden, attached to a president losing his grip on American politics and more beholden to the MAGA agenda than even many conservative Texans.
But make no mistake: Republicans and Paxton got the one they want, too, and they wasted no time launching an intense sprint to define Talarico, still little-known to most voters, as uber-progressive, soft and … maybe even vegan.
The size of Paxton’s runoff victory energizes Republicans and points to Talarico’s firm underdog status in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since Talarico was in elementary school. So, how good are his chances? These are some short-term factors to watch in hopes of answering that question.
Advantage Talarico: Buzz, money and national help
For Democrats to control the Senate, they must retain seats in states Trump won or battleground states, such as Georgia, Michigan and Maine, and pick off a few Republican states, such as Iowa, North Carolina, Alaska or Texas. If they’re close and Talarico is within striking distance, Democrats may pour resources into Texas in a way that they haven’t before.
Even without aid from the national party and its political committees, Talarico is poised to benefit from average Democrats’ enthusiasm. Like Beto O’Rourke and Colin Allred before him, he represents a lottery ticket for Democrats who see Texas as the ultimate jackpot in the parties’ quests to break out of our 50/50 divide and build a lasting majority. Average Democrats are sending him small donations as the admission price to a dream they love, and those contributions add up to tens of millions of dollars. Paxton has never shown that level of fundraising prowess.
Talarico also has the mien that progressives (especially elder white leftists) love. Many think his messaging style can break through to GOP-leaning voters. There’s also vibes. Since John F. Kennedy, Democrats have prized the idea of a young, handsome, articulate candidate who can alter political paradigms and realign the country toward a united progressive vision.
They saw it in Barack Obama. But they also saw it in Beto O’Rourke, and some even insist it lives in the wildly overrated Pete Buttigieg. Which category Talarico falls in remains to be determined, but at a time when Texas Democrats feel somewhat hopeful, there could be a snowball effect in Talarico’s favor.
Advantage Paxton: Texas fundamentals
We’re running out of ways to express how firm the Republican advantage is in statewide races. Even a candidate such as Paxton, with his controversies and a segment of his party stung over Cornyn’s loss, starts a race as a heavy favorite. Having an “R” by your name is good for roughly 800,000 more votes statewide. Factor in a Paxton discount if you like and call it half a million.
Many Democrats like to say that Texas is a nonvoting state rather than a red one, and if they can just get voters who truly, somewhere in their hearts, are secretly Democrats to the polls, they’ll win. It’s not true. It’s never been true. Counting on a sudden burst of enlightenment and action from the electorate is a sign that you’re taking your political cues from “The West Wing,” not actual political practice.
Filling the gap of at least 500,000 votes, let alone pulling ahead, will require the right combination of targeting, messaging and organizing — during which Talarico and his staff will have to resist the idea of some magical force propelling them and stay relentlessly focused on the hard work.
Advantage Talarico: Despite victories, Ken Paxton is untested
It’s odd to say this about a three-time statewide winner who just romped in a runoff, but we don’t really know if Paxton is a good politician.
He’s fine within the GOP; if you’re a baseball stats nerd, think of him as a replacement-level player. Paxton came along after others built the Texas Republican juggernaut. He’s never been at the top of a ticket. He’s gotten elected by being the most conservative candidate in his primaries and then by being the Republican in the general election. For his entire career, that’s all it has taken to win in Texas.
Two of Paxton’s three statewide victories came when voters could cast a straight-ticket ballot, no longer allowed in Texas. That means, a not-insignificant number of voters in 2014 and 2018 simply selected all the Republicans available on their ballots. Most probably didn’t know a thing about at least some of them.
Paxton is the ultimate generic Republican. Calling him an electoral powerhouse is like looking at a third-generation trust fund baby and declaring him a self-made billionaire.
Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, with their vast campaign funds and political operations, will drive GOP turnout. But if things are close and Paxton has to drive out voters and win over independents, that will require a skillset we have not yet seen from him.
Advantage Paxton: Talarico’s leftism — and not just on the issues
A strange thing happened in the Democratic primary for Senate. Talarico was portrayed as the more moderate choice over U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett. In truth, both hold run-of-the-mill progressive positions and, if anything, Crockett showed more willingness to bend on details in service of a larger agenda. But Talarico was less confrontational, delivered a smoother message and projected as more appealing to independent and conservative voters, so the vibes (those again) cast him as a centrist.
He’s not. His positions are close to Bernie Sanders. But more to the point, he sounds like a young progressive, albeit one who’s cautious not to overdo the hectoring that has gotten the left into its messes.
Democrats scoff at the way Republicans point to Talarico’s comments about running a meat-free campaign — whether or not he is personally vegan, Talarico proudly declared that one of his statehouse campaigns was operating that way, as if that matters one whit to anyone outside the Church of PETA.
Talarico’s comments about gender, too, will be a signal for many voters. It’s not that he defended trans kids or even declared that “God is nonbinary”; plenty of people will concede that the Lord is a mystery transcending gender and so many other human traits.
But normal people don’t talk this way. They don’t count up various genders, as Talarico famously has. They don’t obsess about their carbon emissions. It signals a progressive worldview, often smug and judgmental, that sounds weird and overly political. Comedian Marc Maron, no right-winger, summed it up perfectly: “Progressives have really got to figure out how to deal with this buzzkill problem. … You do realize that we annoyed the average American into fascism?”
Talarico would do well to find an issue on which he can explicitly reject the knee-jerk leftist position, perhaps the border or guns. He doesn’t have to go MAGA. He just has to go normal.
Advantage Talarico: The national environment
Nearly every president wears out his welcome, even do so among people who voted for them. Most hardcore Republicans still revere Trump, but plenty of other voters, even those who have cast GOP ballots in Texas for years, are fed up with gas prices, the Iran war and the exhaustion that comes with Trump dominating the news every day.
As a rule, midterms favor the party that doesn’t hold the White House. And as noted, Texas Democrats are fired up by their prospects and fueled by their anger over Trump. Talarico has winds at his back.
This should be particularly worrisome for Paxton. He is inexorably tied to Trump. He can’t even gently criticize the president on anything. In his victory speech Tuesday night, he expressed sympathy and concern for families struggling to afford fuel, groceries, housing and health insurance. But if those voters blame Trump — and the current president always gets a big share of the blame, fairly or not — Paxton will have little to say to them.
The best election year for Texas Democrats in the entire GOP reign was arguably 2018. O’Rourke nearly knocked off Ted Cruz, Patrick and Paxton eked out relatively narrow victories, and the party picked up seats in Congress and the Texas House.
The environment this year is closer to that than to the much better results Republicans lodged in, say, 2014 or 2022, with Democrats in the White House. Talarico’s task is to capitalize on that and find the 3 percentage points that kept O’Rourke out of the Senate.
