Has Texas gone woke?

Turns out, pigs can fly. On Wednesday 4 November 2026, a new dawn broke in American politics. Texas, of all places, seems to have gone woke.

Democrat James Talarico has defeated state attorney general Ken Paxton in a closely watched Senate race that many sceptics (myself included) thought could never be won by a man who claimed that God is nonbinary and used the Book of Genesis as his evidence.

And yet here we are. Now senator-elect James Talarico will head to Washington, DC in January, having won just over five million votes – nearly a million more than Paxton. He is the first Democrat to win a statewide race in Texas since 1994, and the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat for the Lone Star State since 1988. This was the highest-profile of all the Texan statewide races – and they all went to Democrats, turning the most iconic red state in the union a bright, bright blue.

So, what gives? How did the most rugged, capitalism-loving, football-crazy, fossil-fuel-burning, cattle-ranching state in the union vote for a vegan-friendly seminary student with nary a hint of stubble on his baby face?

Some will say that it was Trump’s mean tweets. Or the war in Iran, or Israel. It was gas prices, others will say. And when we are talking about millions of ballots cast, I’m sure all of those things made a difference.

But allow me to offer my humble take, as an observer of life in the trenches of the culture war. Texas went blue because its local Republican oligarchy let it happen. They decided that backing a party that supports transing children, vilifies the oil and gas industry, and has a communist-Islamist insurgency on its hands is all worth it, just to stick it to Trump. Call it revenge of the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).

Let’s not forget the humiliating beat-down Trump delivered to the entitled scion of the Bush dynasty, Jeb, during the Republican primary debates of 2015. Trump built his political success on repudiating the Bush wing of the party. Well, those well-heeled chickens have come home to roost. Neil Bush, brother of Jeb and former president George W Bush, announced on Facebook in October that he voted for Talarico, citing his ‘genuine admiration for [his] character and principles’. George Dubya’s daughter, Barbara Bush, donated $2,500 to a Talarico-supporting PAC, the BBC reported last month.

I wonder which of Talarico’s principles Neil Bush found so appealing? Was it the one about capitalism being an ‘oppressive system’ that must be dismantled? Or the one about how the oil and gas industry is ‘not gonna last’? Perhaps the Bush brother was referencing Talarico’s 2020 tweet, in which the now senator wrote at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement: ‘White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go – through our words, our actions and our systems.’

I’m not blaming the entirety of this disaster on Texan rich kids who got their lunch money stolen by bully Trump. Trump’s policies like tariffs and attacking Iran were counterproductive in the most important electoral issue for many people: bringing down the cost of living.

There is also a broad consensus that Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton, was a poor candidate. He has been fighting ethics and corruption charges for over a decade. He was indicted for securities fraud in 2015 – a case that dragged on until 2024, when he reached an agreement that led to the charges being dismissed. He has also been a consistent enemy of his own state’s party – he was impeached by the Republican Texas House of Representatives in 2023.

More important still, however, may have been Paxton’s positioning within the Republicans. ‘Paxton’s fate is in the hands of those moderate Republicans, who he and many of his colleagues have long vilified’, a Rice University political scientist told the Dallas Morning News in late October. These are the ‘moderate’, country-club Republicans, who have been set against Trump’s populist agenda since day one. They are determined to wrest their party back from blue-collar America.

When Texas begins to suffer under the rule of an increasingly extreme Democratic Party, Trump and his MAGA renegades might not seem so bad after all. Even to the country club types.