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GOP's anti-"woke" playbook faces ultimate test in Texas

Zachary Basu

Democratic nominee James Talarico. Photo: F. Carter Smith/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Texas Senate race has become a national laboratory for anti-"woke" politics, testing whether voters still recoil from the language of 2020 amid the economic pain of 2026.

Why it matters: Republicans came away from 2024 convinced they had won more than an election — they had broken through on culture, turning Democrats' progressive language and identity politics into symbols of elite detachment.

The durability of that culture-war coup is now an open question, as the GOP tries to redeploy the same playbook in a far more hostile midterm environment.

Zoom in: Texas has produced a Senate race in which both parties see the other nominee as the perfect caricature of everything voters hate about the opposition.

For Republicans: Texas state Rep. James Talarico offers the dream target — a young, viral progressive whose old comments can be stripped of context and turned into a one-man museum of "woke" Democratic excess.

Republicans have seized on Talarico's 2021 floor speech declaring that "God is nonbinary," along with past comments on racism, whiteness and trans children, to cast him as a radical disguised as a Texas preacher.
The attacks already are veering into sexuality- and masculinity-coded territory: Talarico's opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has mocked him as "Low-T," while White House adviser Stephen Miller falsely labeled him as Democrats' "first transgender Senate candidate."
Talarico has conceded that he "missed the mark" on some "cringey comments," while insisting his underlying principles — that "racism is immoral and wrong" and that "trans people deserve dignity and equality" — flow from his Christian faith.

For Democrats: Paxton is a scandal-scarred Trump ally whose legal and ethical baggage could turn even a red-state Senate race into a referendum on Republican corruption.

Paxton was impeached by the GOP-led Texas House in 2023 — then acquitted by the Texas Senate — over allegations that he abused his office to benefit a donor.
He spent nearly a decade under indictment on fraud charges before reaching a pretrial deal in 2024, and has been plagued by whistleblower claims, a now-closed federal corruption probe and a very public divorce tied to allegations of adultery.
Talarico's campaign wants to make Paxton the face of Republican impunity — arguing that his scandals are not distractions from the race, but the clearest evidence of what the GOP has become.

Between the lines: Republicans believe Texas will prove the anti-"woke" playbook still works. Democrats believe prices, Paxton and two years of Trump have changed the terms of the fight.

An influx of new residents — plus signs of buyer's remorse among Latinos who backed Trump — has cracked open a once-unthinkable Democratic scenario: Texas as the path to a Senate majority.

Flashback: The Trump campaign's most memorable 2024 attack ad turned trans rights into a broad indictment of Democratic priorities, ending with the now-famous tagline: "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you."

Testing by Harris' top super PAC found the ad — which highlighted her 2019 support for taxpayer-funded gender-transition surgeries for prisoners and detained immigrants — moved viewers 2.7 points toward Trump.

The big picture: The ad worked because it converted one obscure policy position into a sweeping theory of Democratic "wokeness": a party fluent in elite cultural language, but alien to voters' daily lives.

But it didn't work in isolation: The Biden administration's handling of inflation, immigration and affordability were already making Democrats look out of touch before "they/them" gave the GOP the perfect slogan.
Today, those forces have flipped: Trump is now 52 points underwater on inflation, turning the economy from a tailwind into the central threat to his party's midterm survival.

The bottom line: Texas will be the ultimate test of whether the GOP's anti-"woke" strategy can survive the transition from insurgency to incumbency.