Everything is bigger in Texas, and so it makes sense that the Democrats’ midterm blue tsunami reached its height in the Lone Star state. James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton to become the first Dem senator from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in 1993.
Yes, the 37-year-old benefited from the unpopularity of the state’s attorney general. You could leave a million dollars outside the state capitol for anyone willing to identify themselves as a friend of Ken Paxton and you’d still have a million dollars a week later. But Talarico is not some blue-dog, conservative Democrat of yesteryear. He is a progressive – and then some. Republicans not only lost Texas, they lost it to a guy who once called God ‘non-binary’.
Talarico’s victory is towering in its own right, but set beside Gina Hinojosa’s win in the state’s gubernatorial race it borders on the dwarfish. Greg Abbott has been in the governor’s mansion since 2015. He is the longest-serving incumbent governor in the country today. He won re-election in 2022 with 55 per cent of the vote. As of Wednesday lunchtime, he is trailing Gina Hinojosa by seven points. The Dallas Morning News has called the upset ‘stunning’, and Hinojosa will become the first Hispanic woman to hold the state’s highest office.
Republicans messed with Texas, and Texas messed them up real bad
Texas Democrats are going to be on a high for some time, and with justification. They have worked long and hard for these victories, but a question arises: how do they sustain them? I’m aware that the winning candidates and their activists will still be rubbing their sleepless, bleary eyes in equal parts disbelief and jubilation. Even so, it’s never too early to think long-term.
Turning Texas blue is an awesome feat after decades of GOP monopoly, but keeping it blue is how history is made. Without recovering Talarico’s seat, the Republicans will struggle to regain the Senate majority. Without the 40 electoral college votes allocated to Texas, no Republican will see the inside of the Oval Office for a generation. These are the stakes. Tuesday was a beatdown, but if their opponents repay and retain the voters’ trust, the Republicans are at risk of a burial.
The humiliations meted out to Paxton and Abbott will psychologically wound the GOP at a state and federal level. They had come to think of Texas as theirs by right. You don’t end up with Ken Paxton as your senatorial candidate unless you’re very complacent or just hold the voters in open contempt. And because they are Republicans, the GOP will spend the coming months, and possibly years, fighting one another. That is no reason for the Democrats to become complacent themselves. They should take Tuesday to heart as a triumph and a cautionary tale. If they don’t want the Paxton and Abbott treatment, they must not repeat the Paxton and Abbott errors.
Leftist Dems will try to seize this opportunity to push the party even further in their direction; moderates and liberals will urge a more considered approach. Texas has voted progressive but it remains, for now, a conservative state. Ideology matters less than competence and delivery, and in this Democrats ought to do something that will horrify most of them: look to Ron DeSantis. Progressives consider the Florida governor a fascist, a transphobe, a Zionist, but he is the very model of a political transformer.
DeSantis took the swingiest state in the union and remade it as a deep red redoubt. He did it by putting himself where the voters were on most of the key issues – pro tax cuts and death penalty, anti waste and illegal immigration – while nudging the state rightwards on marginal but symbolic matters which put Democrats on the wrong side of public opinion, such as the teaching of critical race theory and gender ideology in schools. Highly motivated partisans in the two main parties devoted so much of their attention to these skirmishes – Disney and ‘Don’t Say Gay’ and the rest – that they came to see DeSantis only through an anti-woke lens. The rest of the electorate, meanwhile, focused on the fiscal, enterprise, and public safety policies which have actually dominated his tenure, and they saw robust but mainstream conservatism.
Texas Democrats could learn from the DeSantis strategy. Invest time and resources in the material improvements voters care most about – more jobs, better services, lower taxes – and toss progressives tasty but modestly portioned treats. Absorb the lessons doled out to Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott and always remain mindful of the snares into which the GOP stumbled. Republicans messed with Texas, and Texas messed them up real bad. Take the win, Democrats, but take the warning too.
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