The Texas Senate Race Is Wildly Bigoted and Fully Insane
The battle between James Talarico and Ken Paxton has been overwhelmed by demagogic gender politics.
This piece originally appeared in The Nation.
As the 2026 election cycle unfolds, the Republican Party and its allies are honing strategies to malign their Democratic opponents. In Texas, this mission has taken on a pointedly homophobic and transphobic tone, meant to humiliate Democratic state Representative James Talarico in his campaign for the US Senate.
The attacks span from merely disturbing to fully deranged. We’ve had Stephen Miller calling Talarico the Democrats’ “first transgender Senate candidate who is clearly transitioning into a female.” A joke about Talarico needing to paint on his facial hair. An image of Talarico’s face superimposed on New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s head. An AI-generated deepfake video showing Talarico dressed as Maria from The Sound of Music, singing a transgender reassignment surgery–obsessed parody of “My Favorite Things.”
It’s all part of a familiar playbook for Republican men, denigrating an opponent by aligning his performance of masculinity with femininity and queerness, and plotting it outside this grid of gendered expectations in which he’s expected to perform.
