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