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

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...

Original source: Axios