Media personality Jimmy Kimmel was unable to air his interview last week with the Democratic Senate candidate for Texas, James Talarico, due to what he denounced as “threats” from the Donald Trump Administration. The 20-minute interview was finally published on YouTube and is already the second most viewed video on the late night channel in 2026: double the live and delayed audience of the president’s speech at the Republican convention in Dallas. This is the second time the Federal Communications Commission has intervened to prevent the airing of a program with Talarico, something that also happened – with counterproductive results – in March with Stephen Colbert’s late night.
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A fear, disguised as an obsession, corrodes the Republican Party, whose most recognized figures keep mentioning Talarico’s surname in every intervention. For the first time after 38 years of Republican dominance in Texas, one of the most conservative states and the second largest in the U.S., a Democratic candidate could snatch the prized southern state Senate seat on November 3. That explains why most of the more than 100 speeches heard at the Trumpist gathering in Dallas mentioned Talarico, including those of President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, state Governor Greg Abbott, and his primary rival, the controversial Ken Paxton.
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“This race is too close to predict a winner,” says James Henson, founder of the Texas Politics Project, a public opinion research center at the University of Texas, whose latest poll places Talarico three points ahead of Paxton (42 to 39%) and trending upward. “On one hand, we have a very solid Democrat, better than average; on the other, a weak Republican, who has suffered public damage due to his legal, personal, and ethical scandals, and who had very competitive, negative, and prolonged primaries.”
Talarico, a 36-year-old Presbyterian seminarian, has managed to penetrate a sector of the electorate that in recent decades seemed lost to the Democrats. In just a few months, he has gone from being an unknown state congressman to the new national sensation of his party. Progressive with a moderate style, with religion as a banner, although of secular conviction, his viral campaign shows an alternative path to defeat Trumpism in its own strongholds.
Invoking Christian morality, “love thy neighbor,” and biblical social justice, he won the Democratic Senate primaries in March against progressive Jasmine Crockett, a popular congresswoman and scourge of President Trump in the Capitol. He will face Paxton, the current Texas Attorney General, in November, who enters the race cornered by a large volume of controversies.
In 2024, the Republican reached an out-of-court settlement to close a securities fraud charge, an alleged crime he committed in 2015 shortly after being elected to the state’s highest judicial office. In 2023, the Texas House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, subjected him to an impeachment trial for 20 corruption charges after several of his collaborators accused him of using his office to favor real estate developer Nate Paul, his friend and donor. Additionally, that case also revealed an extramarital relationship of Paxton with a woman who worked for Paul, which led his wife to file for divorce citing “biblical reasons.”
Trump, who has already nicknamed the Democrat ‘Talafreako,’ goes to Texas to save the seat of a weak Ken Paxton
Despite his record, Paxton has high chances of winning in Texas, just as Trump won the 2024 presidential election after being convicted of sexual abuse, defamation, and document forgery, as well as being charged with encouraging the Capitol assault or retaining classified documents after leaving the White House, among other crimes.
To save the ballot, Republicans came to his rescue last week during the Republican convention in Dallas. Trump, who has already nicknamed him Talafreako, said the seminarian “described himself as a person who hates Christianity,” citing a 2020 interview of the Democrat in which he referred to the political interference of Christian nationalism.
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“He said there are six genders, this radical left lunatic,” he added, in one of the most repeated argument lines against Talarico. It is another half-truth, referring to a 2021 statement by the Democrat, in which he never said there were six genders, although he did reject the strict sexual binary.
“I wouldn’t want to see the record of a guy his age who defends trans people,” Vance said in a somewhat perverted tone, resorting to transphobia to mock Talarico. “He is the most radical Democrat in Texas history,” his opponent Paxton declared: “If we lose Texas, we lose the common sense revolution. If we lose the common sense revolution, we lose the U.S.”
While his opponents put him in the spotlight, Talarico organized an alternative rally in Dallas with victims of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who accused the Trump government of protecting his abuse network.
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Republicans, who hold a narrow majority of 53 senators to 47 Democrats, fear losing this margin in November, when one-third of the Senate will be renewed, including 20 seats defended by the right, such as Texas. In this context, and given his weakness, Paxton has sought Trump’s protection, something many Republicans have avoided to not be harmed by the president’s unpopularity, whom only one in three Americans supports, according to the latest polls.
“I have my doubts that this strategy will work,” reflects pollster Henson in an interview with La Vanguardia. “Trump has a great ability to mobilize Republicans when he is on the ballot, but right now it could be the opposite,” he points out. Like other Democrats nationally, Talarico has focused his campaign on the economy, the need to curb the cost of living, and to reverse inequalities between the richest 1% and the rest of the population.
According to the latest Texas Politics Project poll, the percentage of citizens in the southern state who consider the economy the most important problem has grown in the last year from 8% to 39%, a trend also occurring in other U.S. states. Paxton bets his success on Trump’s political capital, but precisely that could decimate his chances, now that the price of a gallon of gasoline and diesel is hitting historic records due to the consequences of the Iran war.
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