In the Texas Primaries, a Good Night for James Talarico, and a Bad One for John Cornyn
The goal of the midterm elections is to redress old grievances and introduce new characters. In Texas’ two U.S. Senate primaries Tuesday night that opened the 2026 midterm elections, each party was navigating between its current iteration and what might replace it — in one case, delicately, and in the other, not so much.
The Republican primary burned the earth. He featured the unusual characteristic of an outsider incumbent president: Sen. John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell’s four-term Senate stalwart, who always supported Trump’s agenda but who had annoyed the White House with persistent stylistic defections, among them generally refusing to say the 2020 election was stolen. His opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, had no qualms about doing so; he pursued four states that went blue in 2020. The Trump-era GOP axiom is that candidate Trumpier is the favorite, and so, for much of the year, the presumption was that it was Paxton’s race to lose.
But as the primaries approached, Trump’s grip on politics seemed weaker than usual and, for one of the leading candidates for the U.S. Senate, Paxton was unusually scandal-plagued. He had suffered a high-profile divorce, the result of an ongoing affair; an action for disbarment, which was dismissed; and a public whistleblower allegation by seven of his aides who accused him of corruption, among other transgressions, four of which the state was ordered to pay a $6.6 million settlement after Paxton fired them. (Trump has not endorsed either candidate.)
Everything is bigger in Texas, even attack ads. Cornyn, ever the establishment conservative, raised about sixty-nine million dollars; Paxton only four million. In the final stages of the primary, the incumbent president, still trailing in the polls, issued a message for eternity, which opened with: “It’s time to vote, so let’s put an end to the bullshit. Crooked Ken Paxton cheated on his wife. She’s divorcing on biblical grounds.” Paxton’s camp deployed the candidate’s daughter in a last-minute ad and called Cornyn a “desperate shell of a man clinging to power.” But as of Tuesday evening, neither candidate managed to secure fifty percent of the vote, meaning they will face off again in a runoff in May. In theory, Republican voters might have been ready to reject the last vestiges of the pre-Trump party. But not for Ken Paxton. At least not yet.
Democrats haven’t won an electoral victory in Texas since 1994. But last fall they seemed to have found an interesting prospect in thirty-six-year-old state Rep. and seminarian James Talarico, a religious progressive who emphasized the decency of ordinary conservatives and who seemed determined to elevate political discourse to a slightly spectral level. Tad Friend, describing Talarico in this magazine, quoted one of the candidate’s advisers: “All the DC consultants in the world can tell James, ‘Just say, ‘Grocery, grocery, grocery,’ and he’ll say, ‘No, it’s ‘Healing, healing, healing.’ ‘” Talarico has proven to be exceptionally eloquent, impressing figures as diverse as podcaster Joe Rogan and former President Barack Obama. “A truly talented young man,” Obama said. “Now more than ever, what people want is a certain basic integrity. »
Do they do it? Talarico is a vision of a democratic future that recalls the strong moments of the Party’s recent past: rhetorical precision, hopes, dreams. But he had to endure a tense primary, after Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas congresswoman, and a more pugnacious partisan figure entered the race. (She had cruelly, if memorably, referred to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as Governor Hot Wheels.) Crockett’s challenge to Talarico had less to do with an ideological difference than with style – a somewhat repetitive debate between the two candidates in January came down not to policy but to whether it was best to establish common ground with some conservatives in the hope of winning their votes (the position of Talarico) or simply to rally your side by clearly explaining what you were opposed to. (Crockett). Crockett seemed to see enemies everywhere and closed his campaign by attacking some political consultants and journalists. The MP’s team expelled Elaine Godfrey, who published a critical profile of the candidate in The Atlanticof an event for being a “hater of the first order”. The resulting exchanges on social media, between the campaign and its liberal critics, occupied much of the final days of the race.
