Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas, a 16,000-member congregation, stepped to the microphone at the Republican Party’s midterm convention last month and issued what sounded like a declaration of a religious cold war:
“The beliefs of James Talarico are certainly wrong. But they’re more than wrong. The beliefs of James Talarico are blasphemous. They are evil, and they are not beliefs that any true Christian could support. Ever.”
Talarico is running for Senate in Texas, and he has a chance to be the first Democrat to win a Senate election in the state since Lloyd Bentsen defeated a Republican congressman named Beau Boulter in 1988. Republicans are worried, and as a consequence their rhetoric is getting wilder and wilder.
According to Talarico’s critics, he’s a heretic. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing who will lead God’s people astray. President Trump calls him “Talafreako,” and he’s apparently so dangerous to Republicans that, as The Wall Street Journal reported last month, right-wing podcasts are mentioning Trump less and less while attacking Talarico more and more.
He’s young, he’s polished and he is, heaven forbid, a seminarian (on leave from his studies at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary). Talarico is running one of the most faith-forward campaigns in the country, along with other Democratic candidates like Adam Hamilton in Kansas (a pastor running for senator) and Rob Sand in Iowa (running for governor).
Democrats have run a version of this playbook before. The Rev. Raphael Warnock has prevailed in two Senate elections in Georgia, winning a partial term in a 2021 runoff against Kelly Loeffler and then a full term in 2022, against a MAGA favorite, Herschel Walker. Democrats nationwide are trying to close the “God gap” that has been the Republican Party’s not-so-secret weapon since the 1970s and the advent of Ronald Reagan.
Talarico’s Christian faith, though, is more liberal than the Christian faith of many Republicans. It’s more liberal than mine (which isn’t hard). But for many fundamentalists, Talarico’s theology makes him the wrong kind of Christian. And to some, no Christian at all.
His opponent is Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, whose wife is divorcing him for infidelity and who was impeached by the Republican-led Texas House of Representatives for misconduct that included bribery, obstruction of justice and disregard of official duties. (The Texas Senate acquitted him.)
Trump calls him “the greatest attorney general in the United States of America.”
This frontal assault on Talarico’s faith comes after much of the right has spent more than a decade telling voters that they’re electing a president and not a pastor, that they should pay no attention to the religious beliefs (much less the personal conduct) of the Republican president they love. But now the message has changed. In Texas, one of the candidates — Talarico — is treated more like a pastor than a potential senator, and his theology is treated as the true threat to our Republic, and to our souls.
Paxton? He gets a pass. Just like Trump.
The race between Paxton and Talarico could be the most consequential in the country. If Democrats win in Georgia and North Carolina, that’s to be expected, this time around anyway. If they win in Ohio and Maine, it’s troubling for Republicans, but hardly catastrophic — Maine leans blue, after all, and Ohio was a swing state until recently.
But Texas? A Democratic win there would be monumental. It’s not just that Texas is red — Trump won by more than 13 points in 2024, and he won convincingly in 2016 and 2020 as well. It’s not just that no Democrat has won statewide office in more than three decades. It’s that Texas is arguably the cornerstone of both Republican and evangelical political power in the United States.
Its 40 Electoral College votes are indispensable to the party. Were Texas to go or even trend blue, G.O.P. presidential victories would become far more difficult.
It’s the Republican state with the largest economy, and it’s arguably the most important culturally (though Tennessee would like a word). It has long been a magnet for internal migration. The South tends to dominate the G.O.P., but it’s a Texas-flavored version of the South. To quote the country singer Ella Langley, when it comes to finding a home in Red America, an extraordinary number of Americans are “Choosin’ Texas.”
But Texas isn’t just a symbol of Republican power; it’s also a symbol of Democratic defeat. Democrats used to run the state, and the story of Democratic decline in Texas is also a story about religion. When the religious right emerged as one of the most potent voting blocs in the nation, it ultimately routed Democrats in the South.
And yet, as of Friday, a key polling average has Talarico leading Paxton by three points. And he’s leading in poll after poll. Beto O’Rourke — the last great blue hope — never achieved such lofty polling heights in his Senate race against Ted Cruz. Is the era of Democratic decline at an end?
But there’s a question that’s even more important: Will Talarico’s religious faith help put him — and his party — over the top?
To try to answer that question, I went on a reporting trip that became a journey — from Zoom calls in my home office to meetings in coffee shops in Austin to walking the streets of Beaumont, which is where I met Brady, a shirtless Marxist-Leninist in a kilt.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the religious dynamics of the Texas race, it’s important to absorb the true depths of the “God gap” in American politics. That gap isn’t just about white evangelicals (although it certainly is partly about them), and it’s one of the Democrats’ chief obstacles to obtaining a durable political majority.
Any discussion of the God gap does have to begin with white evangelicals. Their numbers are vast (far more than twice as large as Black Protestants, the most loyal religious Democratic voters), and they vote in lock step.
In 2024, white evangelicals voted for Trump by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. Trump lost all other voters by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent.
Lost, however, in that top-line number is an additional fact that should disturb Democrats: In 2024, virtually every Christian denomination — evangelical, mainline and Catholic — shifted to the right.
Last year, Ryan Burge, a political scientist who is one of the nation’s foremost statisticians of religion, published an analysis of 22 Protestant denominations, and he found that all but four shifted to the right from 2020 to 2024, and some of them shifted rather significantly.
The predominantly Black National Baptist Convention had an immense rightward shift. In 2020, 10 percent of its members voted for Trump. By 2024, that percentage almost tripled, to 29 percent.
And what about the Catholic vote? In Texas, 22 percent of the adult population is Catholic, the only religious group that comes close to evangelicals, who represent 27 percent of Texas adults. Nationally there was a 13-point Catholic swing toward Trump.
There are two ways of looking at this data. One is deeply depressing for Democrats: The religious vote is sliding away, and in a country as religious as the United States still is, despite recent declines in religious faith and practice, losing the religious vote means losing elections time and time again.
The other is a bit more hopeful. The religious vote is sliding, but that’s recent — and reversible. Joe Biden, though well past his prime in 2020, did substantially better than Kamala Harris. People of faith may not be lost to Democrats forever so much as they’re punishing Democrats — warning with their votes against the secularization and social radicalization of the far left.
As I talked to Paxton supporters, angry anti-Paxton Republicans and wary but hopeful Democrats, a picture began to emerge. Talarico can win his race, but it will take MAGA pushing Christians out and Talarico pulling Christians in. Anger at Paxton alone won’t be enough for Talarico to prevail.
My first conversation was with Robert Jeffress. I reached out by email, and he graciously agreed to chat, even though we’ve been on opposite sides of the conservative civil war for a very long time. He’s been one of Trump’s most prominent evangelical supporters since 2016; I — to put it mildly — have not.
When we connected via Zoom, he was a bit less fiery than he was on that stage in Dallas, but he still made his beliefs crystal clear. First, he emphasized that “I don’t endorse and haven’t endorsed anybody in this race. I don’t endorse, except for president.”
So, if he’s not endorsing, why did Jeffress speak to the Republican convention in Dallas? “Because of some of the erroneous things Talarico said that I don’t reconcile with the New Testament,” Jeffress said. “And I was criticizing him not for his political beliefs, but his religious beliefs.”
“His religious beliefs certainly don’t disqualify him from being a senator,” Jeffress continued. “They do disqualify him from being a follower of Christ.”
I asked Jeffress to specify his religious objections to Talarico, and he named three key issues — that Talarico had “said that he believes there’s a spectrum of genders,” that Talarico’s spiritual mentor had said that he’s uncomfortable using words like God and Father, and that Talarico had “very recently indicated that all religions were basically different paths that led to the same truth.”
If that seems like thin gruel to you to condemn someone to hell, you’re not alone, but that’s not the central flaw in Jeffress’s analysis.
If conservative Christians are supposed to reject Talarico’s religious views, what are they supposed to make of Paxton’s conduct, and isn’t his conduct both in and out of office more relevant to voters than Talarico’s theology?
Paxton has reportedly cheated on his wife more than once, and his wife, a Texas state senator named Angela Paxton, has filed for divorce, citing “biblical grounds.” (Even the divorce filings in Texas invoke the Bible.) He was recently spotted overseas, during the thick of the campaign, with a woman who appears to be his current girlfriend.
And his misconduct isn’t just private. Paxton was impeached after seven of his top deputies at the attorney general’s office blew the whistle on him, claiming that he’d engaged in bribery and abuse of office to provide favors for an investor named Nate Paul.
Paxton was accused of providing favors to Paul, including providing him with “highly sensitive information” about an F.B.I. raid on Paul’s home. In exchange, Paul reportedly helped Paxton remodel his home, and Paul employed a woman who was Paxton’s mistress at the time.
But Paxton isn’t just corrupt. As The Associated Press detailed in a report last week, he lives a “jet-setting lifestyle” that takes him across the country (and the world) and leaves immense blank spaces in his official calendar.
Earlier in his tenure as attorney general, The A.P. reported, Paxton’s “official calendars were packed with job-related duties. In 2021, more than 90 workdays were blank — a number that reached 112 in 2024, the last full year The A.P. had records for.”
“Over a two-year period ending in 2024,” The A.P. noted, “Paxton flew to the Caribbean, Israel, India, Taiwan, South Africa; made three trips to Europe; and hit five different ski towns in the Rockies, including numerous visits to Park City, Utah, among other destinations, records show.”
Here’s one way to think of Paxton — he possesses all of Donald Trump’s corruption and none of Trump’s charisma.
These details are supposed to matter to Southern Baptists. In 1998, at the height of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution on the moral character of public officials, and a key clause said, “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
I asked Jeffress about that resolution and its impact on Southern Baptists today, and his response confirmed the views of skeptics who believed that Baptists cared more that Clinton was a Democrat than they cared that he had cheated on his wife.
“What was going on in 1998?” he asked, and then answered his own question: “Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, and that was an emphasis on that, and I think it could have been partisan, very much a partisan reaction to that.”
And what is his own view? The Book of Romans, he notes, “teaches that God has given government the role of protecting society.”
“And I’ve said before,” he continued, “when I look for somebody who does that, I don’t want somebody with a demeanor of Jesus necessarily — be nice if they did — but I want the meanest, toughest S.O.B. I can find.”
Raise the subject of Ken Paxton to a conservative supporter of Senator John Cornyn, the incumbent Paxton defeated in the Republican primary, however, and you’re very likely to get a much different reaction.
Trump endorsed Paxton late in the primary race, and Paxton won by a stunning 28-point margin.
Many Cornyn supporters are still furious. Why mount a primary challenge to a man who almost always voted with Trump? Why risk a Senate seat to put a corrupt man in Washington?
The answer, it seems, is a version of a MAGA purity test. Cornyn has been with Trump almost all the time, but it’s the “almost” that counts. Cornyn, for example, supported a modest gun control compromise after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Perhaps most important — to Trump at least — is that Cornyn voted to certify Biden’s election.
Paxton, on the other hand, abused the power of the attorney general’s office to file one of the most specious and frivolous lawsuits I’ve ever read.
In December 2020, he sued Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to try to block them from voting in the Electoral College. The suit was so frivolous that Texas’ respected solicitor general, Kyle Hawkins — who was appointed to the post by Paxton — refused to add his name to the complaint. The Supreme Court dismissed the case without even granting it a hearing.
The Texas Republicans I talked to were divided on whether Trump’s endorsement was fatal to Cornyn, or if Cornyn was going to lose no matter what Trump said. Karl Rove seems to think Trump made a difference. During a conversation at the Texas Tribune festival in Austin, Rove not only attacked Paxton for his record of corruption but also said that tracking polls showed Texas Republicans breaking toward Cornyn before Trump’s endorsement, a trend that decisively reversed itself when Trump weighed in.
As Matt Mackowiak, a former senior Cornyn campaign official, told me, Paxton’s supporters were “trying to exterminate RINOs” — referring to the ultimate Republican insult, “Republican in name only” — “but they’ll turn the state blue.” Though Cornyn, he hastened to add, was no RINO: “Cornyn cannot be a RINO if he voted 99 percent with Trump.”
I asked Mackowiak about the idea I mentioned before, that anger at Paxton alone won’t do the trick for Talarico. It’s not enough for Paxton to merely push voters out; Talarico has to pull them in.
His answer focused on “permission structures.” By emphasizing his own faith and — perhaps more important — by trying to explicitly welcome disgruntled Christians into his coalition, Talarico was creating a permission structure for Republicans to support his candidacy.
The more I talked to Cornyn Republicans and dissenting evangelicals, the more I realized that Jeffress’s theological attack was missing the mark. The permission structure that Talarico was creating had little to do with theology and everything to do with decency. Voters were less interested in what Talarico believed (they weren’t seeking to join his church) than how he behaved.
It’s almost as if they’d listened to the words of Jesus Christ in Matthew 7: “By their fruit you will recognize them.”
As the head of an Austin-area evangelical nonprofit who insisted on anonymity for fear of retaliation told me, “I’ll bank on basic character, and the ability to actually listen and respond.” Talarico, he said, “seems like a genuinely good guy.” In a Christian version of the beer test, he said, “I’d like to have a coffee with him.” Or as a former Republican and former Texas public official told me, “I would want him as my neighbor.”
It was difficult to find any conservative evangelical leaders who were willing to go on the record with their support for Talarico. As that same former Republican told me, “there is a massive social barrier” to saying that you’d vote for a Democrat.
Evangelical cancel culture is real, and there are few better ways to land in its cross hairs than saying nice things about James Talarico.
I wasn’t content, however, with talking only to pastors, consultants and public officials in the Texas political elite. I wanted to see the race at the grass roots. So I got in my rental car and drove down to a neighborhood in Beaumont, in southeastern Texas, to walk along and listen as Talarico volunteers and local Democratic Party candidates and officials went door to door trying to turn out the vote for Democrats.
(I contacted the Paxton campaign also, but my messages went unanswered. Neither candidate would speak to me about the issue of faith — or any other issue.)
I met the Talarico crew in the parking lot of a local seafood joint. The day was hot, but not too hot, and the volunteers who’d gathered there were excited about Talarico. They were also nervous, maybe very nervous.
They’d been through 2018, when they thought Beto O’Rourke might win. And they’d been through many more drubbings when the Democrat never had a ghost of a chance. As Samantha Bartley, a member of the Hardin County Democratic Party, told me: “I’m praying we aren’t like the Dallas Cowboys, OK? We can beat some booty until the fourth quarter, we got two minutes left, and we can drop the ball and lose every time.”
But they still had hope. Shannon Heath, a precinct chair in Hardin County, said that membership in the local party had doubled, and that while she wasn’t seeing any movement in what she called “Mega MAGA,” the core of Trump’s base, Democrats were focusing on “Republicans who are still Republicans, and a lot of them have changed their minds.”
I walked with Bartley and Heath through a working-class neighborhood in Beaumont. They both said they were still at least a tiny bit nervous. It’s socially awkward to knock on a person’s door.
But there was no cause for concern. Real-life contact with these ordinary Texans was as different from online political conversations as Venus is from Mars.
Everyone was unfailingly polite and gracious, but in one key way my (admittedly anecdotal) grass-roots experience was identical to my conversations at the grass tips. Republicans were everywhere, but actual Ken Paxton supporters — people willing to say nice things about him — were hard to find.
The neighborhood was surprisingly ideologically diverse. We encountered roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, and most of the time that was the extent of the conversation — a person pleasantly identified as being Republican or Democratic and that was that.
But two voters stood out — Sharon and Brady (I agreed not to use the voters’ last names). Sharon was an older woman who said she leaned Republican. She listened patiently to the Talarico volunteers but interrupted them to say that she’d supported Trump. He’s “rude and crude,” she said, “but things had to change.”
She paused for a moment, however, and blurted out, unprovoked, “I hate Ken Paxton.” She didn’t commit to Talarico by any means, but she had no affection for Paxton at all, and in the intensity of her feelings you could see the difference in at least some Republican perceptions of the two men.
Trump was “rude and crude” but had his uses. Paxton? There was nothing good to say about him.
Brady was the shirtless man in the kilt I mentioned earlier. He was the last house of the day, and he was delighted to talk to the Talarico volunteers — and to me. Before our brief interview he dashed inside to put on a shirt. He identified himself as a “Marxist-Leninist” who “chronically doomscrolls” on social media and votes Democratic.
He was unconvinced, however, that people were changing their stance. “Everyone’s kind of dug in,” he said. “Everyone’s doing what they’ve been doing.”
In 15 minutes I felt like I’d met the two farthest poles in the Talarico tent. To win, his campaign had to capture all the Sharons, all the Bradys, and everyone in between.
That sounds like a daunting task, and it is. I can see the polls showing Talarico in the lead, but I keep hearing a voice whispering in my head, “This is still Texas.”
At the same time, something is stirring. It’s hard to take evangelical attacks on Talarico’s theology seriously when evangelicals have flooded the polls to support Trump, a man without a visible theology other than the worship of the self, and whatever else we say about him, Donald Trump is no god.
It’s also hard to take seriously the attacks on Talarico’s pastor for his supposed heresy when Trump’s most prominent faith adviser, Paula White-Cain, is also a person whom many Southern Baptist and other evangelical supporters of Trump would consider a heretic. She preaches a form of the prosperity gospel — the belief that if you have the right kind of faith (and donate to her ministry) that health and wealth await you.
But there is something else in play — something that was a common theme in every conversation I had with a disgruntled Republican. They’re not just tired of Paxton, and they’re not just growing tired of Trump. They’re especially tired of Trump’s most zealous supporters, the people who are happy to blow up the Republican Party to make sure that MAGA stays in charge.
Some of these disgruntled Republicans could swallow Trump, but not the mini-Trumps. Amid all the arguments about policy and ideology, some religious voters are willing to try decency for a change. As one evangelical told me about supporting Talarico, a man he admired but disagreed with on some important things: “It’s an experiment. Let’s see what happens.”
There was one more thing that caught my attention — a surprising hint of grace from all sides. And I wonder if that hint of grace might doom Paxton more than any policy or scandal. His movement feeds off the fear and fury of its members. That’s what causes them to overlook — or perhaps even cheer — his cruelty and corruption. There are no lines he won’t cross to take on the people he hates. He is indeed a mean S.O.B.
But what if hatred starts to fade?
One of the Talarico supporters who showed up at the seafood place in Beaumont was Julie Stephenson, a pastor at First Christian Church in Beaumont. Her church is part of the Disciples of Christ, a mainline denomination, and like most mainline congregations, hers has red and blue members. But “there’s no animosity,” she said. “It’s not red against blue in our congregation.”
Nor did I hear an insulting word from any Talarico volunteer I spoke to. I asked Heath, the Democratic precinct chair, if she was angry at MAGA supporters, or if she had any serious conflicts with people on the other side, and she looked at me with a hint of incredulity.
“They are our neighbors,” she said.
There was even a glimmer of hope and reconciliation from Pastor Jeffress. Throughout my conversation with him, he was certainly unsparing in his criticism of Talarico’s religious beliefs, but he also repeatedly said that Christians should vote their conscience.
“What if a parishioner comes to you and says, ‘My conscience is telling me Talarico’?” I asked.
“Follow what you feel like God’s leading you to do,” he responded. “Period. I wouldn’t hesitate to tell them why I’m not voting that way and made sure they were aware of some of the statements he had made about Jesus and the Bible, but if they say, you know, ‘I just can’t overlook the other. This is the way I’m going’?
“I’d say, ‘Fine, I’ll see you in church next Sunday.’”
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