Democrats, who haven’t won a Senate race in Texas since 1988 and haven’t won one without the power of incumbency since 1970, think they have a shot this year. If they blow it, it will be because of a perennial progressive mistake: supposing that they don’t have to moderate on issues in places where progressives make up a minority of the electorate.
That Democrats have a chance at all is because their primary voters have made the most sensible choice available to them while Republicans may not be following suit. State Rep. James Talarico, the standard-bearer for team blue, has the distinct advantage over the candidate he defeated in the Democratic primary, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, of not having advertised a lack of interest in winning over Texans who have previously supported President Donald Trump.
Asked whether she could “convert” such voters in December, Crockett said she would not need to win “all” of them — nobody thought she would — and immediately turned to the possibility of getting previously disengaged non-White voters to cast ballots for her. That strategy was highly unlikely to be successful in a state Trump won by nearly 14 points. Her suggestion that some Latinos who support Trump have a “slave mentality” wouldn’t have helped either.
Republicans, meanwhile, may nominate someone who repels a portion of the voters who have sustained their previous winning coalition. Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is headed to a runoff with incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn, has been impeached by the lower house of the state legislature over allegations of corruption. His wife is divorcing him, alluding to adultery.
Talarico has a very different image. He is a Presbyterian seminarian who regularly speaks about his religious views and how they inform his politics. As a progressive journalist put it, “Talarico has honed an ability to use religious language to defend liberal policies.” The nominee says that he can counter the perception “that the Democratic Party, in recent years, has been hostile to people of faith.”
Democrats have, however, often come to grief by supposing that a candidate with traits associated with conservatism doesn’t need to moderate on issues. Whenever the party nominates military veterans, strategists suggest that their service will insulate them from charges of progressive extremism. Often, it doesn’t. John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran and the Democrats’ losing presidential nominee in 2004, is one example. Amy McGrath, a fighter pilot who took on Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell in Kentucky in 2020, is another: Her biography helped her raise more than $90 million from Democrats nationwide, but she lost by nearly 20 points.
It was partly for similar demographic reasons that Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in 2024: She thought he had a special appeal to rural White voters. It didn’t show in the results.
Christian preachers — at least ones who are, like Talarico, White — have for some time been associated with conservatism. The problem is that many moderate or conservative voters are looking for candidates who share their views on moral and cultural issues, not merely some of their traits.
These voters will discover that Talarico believes there are six sexes, not two, basing his view on rare chromosomal abnormalities. This is both dubious science and irrelevant to the political debate that led him to bring it up — one that mostly concerned whether some people with the standard male chromosomes should be able to compete in women’s sports.
Talarico’s main tack is to argue that voters who disagree with him are wrong to care about what they care about. He notes that the Bible doesn’t mention abortion but does insist on “feeding the hungry and healing the sick.” (One could as accurately note that the Bible dwells on the sanctity of life but doesn’t mention Medicaid.) More provocatively, he says that just as the Gospels say that Mary consented to being the mother of Jesus, women should have abortion as a choice. Are conservative Christians, whom Talarico typically calls “Christian nationalists,” eager to be told that they have misunderstood their own faith?
Or that they have been duped? Talarico takes the classic left-wing view that cultural issues are a distraction used by the powerful to protect their interests: “Trans people aren’t taking away our healthcare. Muslims aren’t defunding our schools,” he says, adding, “The culture wars are a smokescreen.”
A lot of voters, however, find the issues he dismisses important in themselves and signs of whether a candidate shares their worldview. That’s true on Talarico’s side, too, by the way: If these issues didn’t matter at all, presumably he would embrace the opinions a majority of Texans hold about them.
Texas Republicans have given the Democrats an opening. Their refusal to moderate on issues might close it.
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