In the Texas Primaries, a Good Night for James Talarico, and a Bad One for John Cornyn
The business of the midterms is the redress of old grievances and the introduction of new characters. In Tuesday night’s twin primaries for the U.S. Senate in Texas, which opened the 2026 midterms, each party was navigating a balance between its current iteration and what may replace it—in one case, delicately, and in the other, not so much.
The Republican primary scorched the earth. It had the unusual feature of an underdog incumbent: Senator John Cornyn, the four-term stalwart of Mitch McConnell’s Senate, who consistently backed Trump’s agenda but had annoyed the White House through persistent stylistic defections, among them generally refusing to say that the 2020 election had been stolen. His opponent, the Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, had no such compunction; he sued four states that went blue in 2020. The axiom of the Trump-era G.O.P. is that the Trumpier candidate is the favorite, and so, for much of the year, the presumption was that it was Paxton’s race to lose.
But, as primary day approached, Trump’s grip on politics appeared weaker than usual and, for a leading U.S. Senate candidate, Paxton was unusually scandal-plagued. He had endured a high-profile divorce, the result of an ongoing affair; a disbarment action, which was dismissed; and a public whistle-blower allegation by seven of his aides who accused him of bribery, among other transgressions, four of whom the state was ordered to pay a $6.6-million settlement after Paxton fired them. (Trump didn’t endorse either candidate.)
Everything is bigger in Texas, even the attack ads. Cornyn, still the establishment conservative, raised roughly sixty-nine million dollars; Paxton just four million. In the final stages of the primary, the incumbent, still trailing in the polls, released a spot for the ages, which opened: “It’s voting time, so let’s cut through the bullshit. Crooked Ken Paxton cheated on his wife. She’s divorcing him on Biblical grounds.” Paxton’s camp deployed the candidate’s daughter in a last-minute response ad, and called Cornyn “a desperate shell of a man clinging to power.” But, on Tuesday night, neither candidate managed to get fifty per cent of the vote, which means they’ll face off again in a runoff, in May. In theory, Republican voters might have been ready to throw out the last vestiges of the pre-Trump party. But not for Ken Paxton. At least not yet.
Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. But, last fall, they seemed to have found an interesting prospect in the thirty-six-year-old state representative and seminarian James Talarico, a religious progressive who emphasized the decency of ordinary conservatives and who seemed intent on elevating political discourse to a slightly spectral plane. Tad Friend, profiling Talarico in this magazine, quoted one of the candidate’s advisers: “All the D.C. consultants in the world can tell James, ‘Just say, “Groceries, groceries, groceries,” and he’ll say, ‘No, it’s “Healing, healing, healing.” ’ ” Talarico proved unusually eloquent, impressing figures as diverse as the podcaster Joe Rogan and the former President Barack Obama. “Really talented young man,” Obama said. “Now more than ever, what people long for is some core integrity.”
Do they? Talarico is a vision of a Democratic future reminiscent of high points from the Party’s recent past—rhetorical precision, hopes, dreams. But he had to endure a tense primary, after Jasmine Crockett, a House member from Dallas, and a more pugnaciously partisan figure entered the race. (She had cruelly, if memorably, referred to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as Governor Hot Wheels.) Crockett’s challenge to Talarico had less to do with ideological difference than with style—a somewhat repetitive January debate between the two candidates kept returning not to policy but to the question of whether it was better to establish common ground with some conservatives in the hope of winning their votes (Talarico’s position) or simply to rally your side by making clear what you opposed (Crockett’s). Crockett seemed to see enemies everywhere, and closed her campaign lashing out at certain political consultants and reporters. The congresswoman’s team expelled Elaine Godfrey, who’d published a critical profile of the candidate in The Atlantic, from an event for being a “top-notch hater.” The resulting back and forth on social media, between the campaign and its liberal critics, consumed much of the race’s final days.
By 10 P.M., no major news outlet had called the race, but Talarico was up by about five percentage points—less than a thematic mandate but enough to become the nominee. The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, a highly respected election analyst, had “seen enough,” predicting that Talarico was the winner. In a defiant address, Crockett, pointing to a chaotic situation at polling places in Dallas, her electoral stronghold, said, “I can tell you now that people have been disenfranchised.” The Associated Press declared Talarico the victor overnight.
He will now have to wait for the results of the Republican runoff to know who his Republican opponent will be; in either case, he will start as the underdog. But this was a good night for him and his party. According to NBC’s estimates, a hundred thousand more voters cast ballots in the Democratic primary than in the Republican contest. Cornyn and Paxton will now spend the next three months in what may be a brutal fight while Talarico consolidates his resources. As the votes were being counted, senators in Washington were warning of a spreading war, despite general public disapproval, and the Times reported “a frantic effort to evacuate” across the Middle East; a portal to a post-Trump political future opened, just a crack. In national politics, the parties’ fortunes have each bent around the singular figure of Trump. In the Texas primaries, each party wanted to get to a future a little beyond its candidates’ reach—in which political destiny was tempered and interrupted by the particularity of its characters. ♦