When Vice President JD Vance told the midterm convention audience that he had absolutely no desire to see James Talarico’s browser history, it got a good laugh. Talarico has that weird, smarmy creepiness thing going on, combined with casual blasphemy, a hatred of capitalism, and the sensibilities of a white-wine woman who works in HR and celebrates Kwanzaa. He’s a terrible fit for America, and an unimaginable fit for Texas.
But people are imagining it. They’re imagining it hard, especially people outside Texas. If you listen to the pollsters- and you should never listen to the pollsters- he’s either neck-and-neck with Ken Paxton or beating the TX AG handily. The smart set contends that Texas is about to tumble into the blue chasm at the hands of a guy who’s less Beto’s heir than Pete Buttigieg’s grinning Mini-Me. So, I decided, now that I’m back at my Texas house for the fall, to see for myself what’s really going on. Here’s what I found.
Not much. I am not seeing the Talaricomania.
I was here in Texas during Betomania, and the big difference is that Betomania existed. He excited people. He was young and cute, and they were willing to overlook his communism and his furry dalliance to surf his sporty vibe. You saw Beto signs everywhere, and you could also feel that people were interested in the guy. In the end, he came pretty close to beating Sen. Ted Cruz (T-TX). But close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and #MeToo allegations, which Talarico’s allies seem to have planted about him as part of a strategy of deception.
I drove about 1,000 miles through Texas on my trek from Los Angeles because Barkey and Bitey don’t fly, and the first Talarico sign I saw was in my left-leaning Houston neighborhood. Eight years ago, I would’ve seen a ton of Beto signs. They would’ve been everywhere. Is that proof of anything? After all, I didn’t see any Paxton signs either, but Paxton seems to have adopted a different strategy, one that doesn’t count on sending his party’s base into a frenzy of excitement. But Talarico desperately needs to generate a frenzy of excitement to win. So, where is it?
In my neighborhood, Talarico signs are out in front of a few houses, probably one or two per block, and they are on exactly the houses you would expect — the ones with the rainbow flags, the ones with the Ukrainian flags, the ones with the Priuses, the ones with the many, many cats. If you’re conservative around here, the way you show it is to hang a big American flag out front. That’s the first thing I do when I arrive in Texas after I slide a loaded 9mm into my belt. Every few houses has a big American flag out front, but none of them — zero, nil, the number of real girlfriends I believe Talarico ever had — has a Talarico sign. Of course, Talarico considers our flag a “complicated symbol.”
The houses that do have Talarico signs often also have signs for other Democrats, indicating that it’s an activist who always posts a sign for whatever communist retread the Democrats want to sacrifice on the altar of turning Texas blue that cycle. In other words, Talaricomania hasn’t spread to the mainstream. It’s a bespoke pathology for the kind of activist-class malcontent who has time to go to No Kings rallies.
Campaign signs aren’t determinative, but they’re not nothing. They are simply part of the body of evidence that I’m seeing here on the ground in the Lone Star State that this whole Talarico groundswell is a Potemkin campaign.
There are other indicators as well. There are a good number of Talarico media ads here in Houston, most accusing Ken Paxton of being super-corrupt. However, it’s not clear exactly what his alleged corruption actually is. I’m not sure that’s a great strategy to peel off queasy Republicans in an environment of super-partisanship where the Democrats want to take your guns, have perverts leer at your daughter in her locker room, and cut off your son’s penis if he glances in the direction of a Barbie doll. This is especially true when everybody thinks all politicians are corrupt anyway. The response of a rational voter (and I talked to a number of them) is, “Sure, he’s a crook, but he’s a crook who’s going to seal the borders, cut my taxes, and put criminals in jail.”
Talking to normal people about this race has been interesting; most reporters can’t be bothered to do it, or don’t want to, because they don’t want to report what they find. Here’s a lawyer's secret from a guy who has probably done a couple thousand depositions. When you talk to people to find out what they think, the key is not talking. Shut up and listen to them. So I did. These are regular folks, not activists. They’re not thrilled with Ken Paxton, but they find Talarico kind of weird. With a little bit of gentle probing, it’s clear most of them don’t know the full range of this guy’s bizarre woke beliefs, casual heresies, and general freakishness. They’re just not impressed by him or his ads, certainly not enough to reject their default GOP tendencies. But they will learn more, now that Ken Paxton is getting some money in — the Con Inc establishment hates that he dared to pick off Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and would’ve let him starve for money if it hadn’t been shamed into helping — and he’s going to be able to highlight all that glorious oppo.
That will be a real problem for Talarico. The Republicans have vaults of video clips of this guy saying the remarkably obnoxious things, and the worst of them are related to his much-vaunted pseudo-Christianity. Leftists have no understanding of Christianity. They think that they can pull the string on their little Charlie Anti-McCarthy and have their dummy babble about sandals-n’-socialism Jesus to fool the religious rubes. But southern Christians are actual Christians, and they are well aware of the false-prophet problem in Protestantism. They hear this guy babbling about how Jesus isn’t the only way to salvation; Allah is too, and that ain’t going to play.
Talarico already has a lot of problems among blacks, which his blasphemy is not going to help. He beat Jasmine Crockett, but she and her supporters think he stole the primary. The Texas Democrats are divided between affluent whites and traditional black voters, many of whom are going to take one look at this guy and shake their heads. They may not vote for Paxton, but they may just stay home and not vote for Satan’s little demon. Same with Latinos — the dude gives off vibes that are no bueno to these traditional, family-oriented, hard-working patriots.
I expect Jasmine Crockett to be paid off somehow and give him her tepid endorsement before this ends. I expect his campaign to invite Kamala Harris to town as well, and I’m eager for them to do so. On our side, I think John Cornyn will be browbeaten into endorsing Ken Paxton (after earning the contempt of so many Republicans, I reject the popular fantasy that Cornyn would be a shoo-in to win the general election), but that doesn’t really matter. This election isn’t about voting for Ken Paxton. The Republican is always the default choice for the majority of Texas voters, no matter how many allegedly Republican nobodies who haven’t voted for a Republican this century Talarico lists in his press releases. It’s about disqualifying Talarico, and it looks to me like he’s well on the way to disqualifying himself.
It also looks like that to conservative Texas observers. I talked to a lot of them, including Hot Air’s own Ed Morrissey (he’s been doing great work on this race), and none of them think Talarico is going to win — none of them. I don’t mean a few of them. I mean zero. My pal Jim Pikl, Texas superlawyer and GOP activist, points out that Paxton is popular among Republicans and has accomplished a lot for the cause. He expects GOP voters to do what GOP voters do – show up and vote GOP. But the conservative observers all concede that it’s not impossible for the imp to win. It’s just improbable. It’s going to take work, and it’s going to take money (and the big money is finally flowing in), but it always does. Yet the consensus among the people in the know is that this little homunculus won't pull off the Democrat dream of turning Texas blue in 2026.
With the regime media‘s help, though, his campaign is fronting as if everything is going great. But it seems like Talarico isn’t even trying to make a play outside of the blue metro areas. Morrissey pointed out that he hasn’t seen a Talarico ad in a long time.
Now, he doesn’t live in Houston; he’s out in the country with the longhorns, armadillos, and the folks who work in the energy industry that Talarico wants to eliminate because it’s a capitalist tool of white supremacy. Talarico has a ton of money, but he’s also spending a ton of money to make more money. Fundraising costs a lot, and so do ads. Maybe that’s why he’s focusing his ads on the big cities. But Texas is a lot more than the big cities, as Democrats keep finding out.
Outside observers agree with me, too. Columnist David Marcus has done great reporting here in Texas and elsewhere on these midterms, and he’s just not feeling it either. He told me he went to Talarico’s counterprogramming to the convention, which was a phony food drive, and there were about 19 people there with the candidate. Texas normals just aren’t buying what he’s selling.
Now, let’s talk about the pink elephant (donkey?) in the room. There are a lot of rumors out there that Talarico, a 37-year-old bachelor who still lives with his mom, likes men. I don’t know if he is or he isn’t gay. He hasn’t said, and the regime media certainly won’t ask him. Obviously, his campaign wants everyone to think he’s straight — that’s why we get the cringe girlfriend stories, including about the one who patronizes a gay bar. But if he isn’t straight, then he’s lying to the people of Texas by not telling them who he really is. Maybe he’s afraid his preference would lose him votes, though conservatives will crawl over broken glass to vote for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions Ric Grenell for anything from dog catcher to president. Frankly, it’s his preference for communism, wokeism, and heresy that’s much more relevant to most Texans. If he is hiding in the closet, he’s insulting the voters. He doesn’t trust them, and he doesn’t respect them, and you have to ask what else he’s lying about. That is, if he’s gay. According to his campaign, he’s had many, many girlfriends, which is ironically something he keeps giving Ken Paxton grief about.
In any case, we’re going to have to put a lot of effort into Texas, and we’re going to have to spend a lot of money, but there is no cause to panic. The fundamentals in Texas favor Republicans holding the seat. This whole race strikes me as one of those future morning-after moments where Democrats wake up hungover after a night in which the networks call it for Ken Paxton early and ask themselves, “We nominated a vegan, gun-grabbing, woke, anti-capitalist who wants to shut down the fossil-fuel industry and who talks about how God loves abortion and is non-binary, and we did it in Texas, and what the hell were we thinking?”
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