Voters Pick James Talarico To Mess With Texas—and The U.s. Senate

The outcome of the Texas U.S. Senate race was always going to be disturbing given the low quality of the two leading candidates. It's not that there was no good option in the race; Ted Brown is a staunch supporter of free markets, civil liberties, small government, and a humane immigration policy. But Brown ran as a Libertarian in a country that treats a decrepit two-party system as an immutable natural feature. Even if given a choice between Hitler and Mao as major-party candidates and saints running on third-party or independent tickets, voters will almost always confine their votes to one or the other incarnation of evil. That electoral history pretty much guaranteed that the winner would be either Republican Ken Paxton or Democrat James Talarico.

Sure enough, Talarico walked away as the winner.

Bad Candidates With Ideas and Behavior To Match

For sure, Paxton and Talarico aren't Hitler and Mao. They're garden variety terrible politicians who believe in bad things and behave even more questionably.

In 2020, as a state lawmaker, Talarico described the free-market capitalism that made the world prosperous as an "oppressive system" that he linked to "white supremacy" in a discussion with Sierra Club activists. He also was hostile to oil and gas as energy sources (in Texas!) and fudged important details of his history as a teacher.

The Democrat has since disavowed some of his earlier radicalism, including uberwoke posturing, and now calls himself a "proud capitalist." Political candidates certainly have the right to change their minds, but it's unusual to see such an extreme ideological evolution in a 30-something adult who held elected office throughout the alleged transformation. An explanation more convincing than "I want to hold statewide office in Texas" would have been appropriate for the sudden flip.

Talarico also continued to bash "billionaires" in his campaign in language closely aligned with the Democratic Party's very not-market-oriented progressive wing. Ironically, he took gobs of cash from very wealthy donors including $10 million to a Talarico-supporting Super-PAC by billionaire Reid Hoffman.

Maybe billionaires are OK so long as they support the correct brand of politics.

Ken Paxton's most serious woes are of the personal ethics variety. Basically, it's not clear that he has any.

In 2024, Paxton agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution to end criminal securities fraud charges that dated from 2015 and his time as a state legislator. The settlement came just weeks before he was scheduled to stand trial on felony charges.

That conclusion followed an extended battle against state legislators from his own party who impeached him for misconduct, bribery, and corruption. His acquittal by the Texas Senate allowed him to resume his role as state attorney general. With the impeachment case resolved, the federal government dropped related criminal charges against Paxton in 2025 based on information his own staff brought to the FBI.

The loose ends were wrapped up in time to clear the way for Paxton's U.S. Senate run, but they hung over his campaign, as did his participation in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Why Look for Good Options When You Can Choose Your Doom?

Fundamentally, if you were looking for well-adjusted, trustworthy standard-bearers who offer constructive platforms for preserving a free-market society of limited government and personal liberty and building on its best qualities, these are not two individuals you would pick. If, instead, you sought cartoonish embodiments of stereotypes about the major political parties to dare the voters to cast ballots for them anyway, Paxton and Talarico certainly fit the bill. And one of them is going to Washington, D.C.

There really were other options. In addition to Talarico, Paxton, and the above-mentioned Brown, Ballotpedia lists four recognized write-in independent hopefuls for the office. There's also the option of skipping the Senate line on the ballot or ignoring Election Day entirely, so you can spend it doing something more productive like changing oil in the car or going on a drinking binge. Voting, after all, isn't mandatory.

In fact, there's absolutely no obligation whatsoever to stare at a ballot contemplating the grim choice between an obvious crook on the "R" line and a disingenuous loon with a "D" next to his name. There's little reason to anticipate any sort of good to come from sending one of them off to collect a salary at taxpayer expense ($174,000 at the moment, plus perks), and to enjoy a shockingly high likelihood of becoming much wealthier in office.

To my taste, if you were going to cast a vote in the Texas Senate race, Brown was a much more attractive candidate. The retired insurance adjuster offered a platform of resisting government surveillance, implementing an "Ellis Island"-style immigration system, free trade, lower taxes, overall civil liberties including self-defense rights, and non-intervention overseas.

"You need someone who is independent, who is going to defend the people of Texas as long as what they want is constitutional, and defend the U.S. Constitution, and most of what they do in Washington is unconstitutional. So, I'd be like a thorn in the side of everybody there and you need somebody like that," Brown told Reason's Nick Gillespie last month.

Talarico Is the Lone Star State's Next Senator

That would have been a welcome change from political business as usual. But Americans seem committed to turning every Election Day into a choose-your-doom scenario, and that looks to be what Texans opted for with their Senate votes this year as they confined themselves to the unsavory either/or of Paxton and Talarico.

By popular acclaim, the unsavory candidate Texans chose was James Talarico. If we're lucky, in office we'll see the somewhat moderated Talarico of recent years rather than the wacky anti-capitalist radical of the past.

Don't mess with Texas has become an unofficial slogan for the Lone Star State. But there's nothing to stop Texans from messing with themselves. And the messy choice they've made may mess with the rest of us after Talarico takes his seat in the U.S. Senate.

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