GOP's anti-"woke" playbook confronts ultimate test in Texas
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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.
Key facts
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
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
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
Texas will be the ultimate test of whether the GOP's anti-"woke" strategy can survive the transition from insurgency to incumbency
Summary
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. 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. 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.