DALLAS — Few things transcend partisanship quite like a bathroom break and a deep-fried Twinkie. And a Buc-ee’s rest stop, equipped with famously clean restrooms, on my way to the State Fair of Texas produced the perfect cross-section of voters to ask whether the Lone Star State is really going blue.
Democratic hopes in Texas have been high before, especially when Beto O’Rourke ran and lost a close race against Sen. Ted Cruz (R) in 2018. But this year’s abysmal midterm environment for Republicans across the country is giving Democrats renewed hope for state Rep. James Talarico’s Senate matchup with Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“Are we staying red or we going blue, y’all?” Sam Blair, a 53-year-old from Hutto who owns a mobile home transportation company, asked the group she was traveling with in the parking lot. I had just rolled into a Buc-ee’s somewhere between Austin and the fairgrounds in Dallas. “We’re keeping it red, 100 percent,” Blair said.
Around the corner, Cindy Clark was taking her dog out for some air. “I have no doubt Talarico will win,” said Clark, a retired 67-year-old from Lake Hills. “He has no scandals in his background. Paxton is as corrupt as they come.”
If the polls are any indication, Clark is onto something. Talarico is consistently polling ahead of Paxton. A potential blue wave could even engulf the Texas governor’s race, where Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa has found herself within striking distance of Republican incumbent Greg Abbott.
But for voters such as Blair, Texas’s red identity eclipses bad fundamentals or a scandal-scarred Senate nominee. It doesn’t hurt that Republicans are spending tens of millions of dollars to cast Talarico as a threat to the Lone Star way of life.
That means that Democrats would at a minimum need a combination of luck and lack of discipline from Republicans. This year, they might finally have an intoxicating brew of both.
President Donald Trump’s net approval is negative in a state he won by nearly 14 points in 2024. And Texans are frustrated with an Iran war that’s spiking fuel prices. Talarico took advantage of that fact on a recent Saturday at a gas station outside of Dallas. With prices hovering just under $4 a gallon on the pumps behind him, Talarico called for suspending the federal diesel and gas tax.
“This is the kind of immediate action we need to provide Texans some relief at the pump in the middle of this affordability crisis,” he told supporters. “Ken Paxton supports this disastrous war in Iran.”
In the governor’s race, issues such as data centers and high property taxes have given Hinojosa the chance to deploy populist attacks against the state’s red status quo.
In a building at the fair showcasing Texas cuisine, Hinojosa told me that data centers have become the “flash point” of the race because they directly impact voters’ homes and lives.
I asked Hinojosa if she had done anything to address data centers in the state legislature. “I have admittedly not because it wasn’t something that we started hearing about until the end of last year,” she said.
Abbott, who’s running for a fourth term, is making the case that Hinojosa is an undercover radical on social issues who won’t actually address the concerns she’s raising. His campaign, for example, aired an ad accusing Hinojosa of voting “more than 40 times for higher property taxes.”
While most of the Democratic voters I met felt confident about flipping the Senate seat, they were more circumspect about the governor’s race. Incumbency and a deep war chest are playing to Abbott’s advantage.
“I really want Gina to win,” Kelsey Nicols, a 34-year-old urban planner, told me at the fair. “But unfortunately, I think that Abbott, he’s what people know.”
In late September, Hinojosa reported a significant fundraising bump from just over $6 million in July to $20 million. But as of July, Abbott had raised $67 million, spending more than $50 million on ads over the summer.
Money is even more important for Republicans in the Senate race, where candidate quality certainly won’t make up for the GOP’s kitchen-table weaknesses such as gas prices and inflation. Paxton was nominated with Trump’s blessing over the decidedly decent Sen. John Cornyn.
And unlike Abbott, who has been a prodigious fundraiser, Paxton has largely relied on outside groups: Of the $122 million Republicans spent on the Paxton race in September alone, Paxton’s campaign spending accounted for about 1 percent. The attorney general is stepping up this month with a $20 million ad buy.
Republicans’ best bet for dragging Paxton over the finish line is by distracting voters from his own weaknesses by convincing them of Talarico’s. It’s impossible to turn on the TV or open social media without seeing a deluge of ads branding Talarico as a communist sympathizer, an enemy of White men and a gender ideologue. One ad uses audio of Talarico saying that “God is nonbinary” to make the case that the candidate is a “liberal weirdo.”
Talarico has tried to neutralize those attacks by walking back some of his most progressive takes on gender. He branded himself a capitalist at the recent Texas Tribune Festival in Austin. But outside the liberal city, the message of woke weirdness resonates with some conservative voters.
In front of a beekeeping booth at the fair, Peggy Wyda, a 63-year-old from Royse City, told me Talarico risks putting Texas on the path toward a “socialist society.”
“I am not interested in that,” she said.
Just around the corner, Justin Bell, a 42-year-old in hospitality management from Arlington, was enjoying some ice cream as he told me that “just from the surface level and the things you know that you hear every day” he doesn’t think enough Texans could vote for Talarico. “I believe that it will probably be Ken Paxton just because I have enough faith in humanity that we’re not going to go the other way,” he said.
According to a Fox News poll, 32 percent of Republicans view Paxton unfavorably; 5 percent of Democrats view Talarico unfavorably. Still, even disappointed Republicans believe that Talarico is enough of a threat to justify voting red.
That includes Paxton’s estranged wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton. Though she filed for divorce last year on “biblical grounds” amid cheating allegations against her husband, she recently told a group of conservative women to vote for the ticket “even if we’re mad at them.”
John LeBlanc, a 31-year-old from San Antonio, seemed to share the same sentiment next to the Buc-ee’s entrance. He told me that he doesn’t like either nominee, calling Paxton a “shady” candidate. He said that the attorney general’s past record isn’t “promising enough for me to feel like he should be promoted by any means.”
But for LeBlanc, both options are flawed. “[Talarico] seems very fake, especially particularly for me, the faith side of things,” he said. Talarico — who often reminds voters that his grandfather was a Baptist preacher — has justified policy positions ranging from abortion to free health care using the Bible.
Talking about faith is part of Talarico’s strategy to win over Republican voters. But it’s backfiring with some conservatives. “He talks on [faith] very heavily,” LeBlanc said, “and then when he talks about his positions related to that, it’s like, ‘I don’t think you’ve actually read that book, but thank you, sir.’” LeBlanc said he’s going to hold his nose and vote Paxton on Election Day.
Paxton’s only chance is that other Republicans can also stand the stench.
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