Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate primary runoff Tuesday night by sixteen points, a Texas-sized message to Washington, as he put it, that the establishment wing of his party no longer commands the votes it once did. The celebration lasted about an hour. The hard math began at sunrise.
Paxton’s general election opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, raised more than $27 million in the first three months of 2026. Paxton raised $2.2 million in the same window. Talarico already leads Paxton by seven to eight points in head-to-head polling conducted by the University of Texas and the Texas Politics Project. Among Black voters, Talarico’s margin against Paxton sits at 56 points. Among Latino voters, 27. Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, but for the first time in three decades, the party believes the door is cracked open.
The race will not be decided by Paxton’s record, which is formidable, or by the impeachment circus of 2023, which Texans already rejected. It will be decided by whether Paxton can fill in the blanks on his opponent before Talarico’s donor army does it for him.
Most Texans have not met James Talarico yet. They will meet him on television in July, August, September, and October, on someone’s terms. Paxton’s only job between now and Labor Day is to make sure the Talarico voters see is the real one.
- Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn by sixteen points in Tuesday’s Texas GOP Senate primary runoff after a late endorsement from President Trump.
- Democratic nominee James Talarico raised $27 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone; Paxton raised $2.2 million in the same period.
- April polling from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project shows Talarico leading Paxton 42 to 34, with double-digit margins among Hispanic and Black voters.
- Talarico has declared on record that “God is non-binary,” that “creation has to be done with consent” while using the Virgin Mary’s Annunciation to justify abortion, and that other religions point to “the same truth” as Christianity.
- His political record includes headlining a Stop ICE Rally in January 2026, calling ICE a “secret police force,” and writing in 2020 that “radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.”
- Talarico is now repackaging himself as a moderate, describing the southern border as a “front porch” with a “giant welcome mat.”
- The Paxton path forward requires uniting the GOP immediately, building small-dollar fundraising, dominating long-form earned media, organizing through Hispanic and Black congregations, and confronting the 2023 impeachment directly.
- Texas has not elected a Democrat statewide since 1994, but Cook Political Report has moved the seat from Solid R to Likely R.
- The U.S. Senate majority for the next two years may turn on whether Paxton can define Talarico before $27 million defines Paxton.
The Manufactured Image
Talarico is, on paper, the most dangerous candidate Texas Democrats could have nominated. He is 36, telegenic, soft-spoken, a former public school teacher, the grandson of a South Texas Baptist preacher, and currently a student at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. His campaign hands out the word “seminarian” like a press pass. He preaches occasionally at his home congregation. He talks about Jesus on Joe Rogan. He went viral on Stephen Colbert. He brands his movement “The People vs. Ken Paxton” and frames himself as the reluctant pastor called away from the pulpit to challenge a corrupt system.
It is a beautifully constructed image, and it is largely synthetic. The seminary in question, Austin Presbyterian, is a mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) institution whose course catalog features classes such as “Womanist and Feminist Readings of the New Testament,” “Theatre of the Oppressed,” and “Theological Ethics of Martin Luther King Jr.” Talarico’s personal pastor, Jim Rigby, was tried by the PCUSA in the 1990s for ordaining lesbian and gay clergy. The theology Talarico is being trained in is not eccentric. It is the standard product of liberal Protestant academia circa 1985, repackaged for TikTok and shipped in 2026.
What Talarico Actually Believes
The receipts are not buried. They are on tape, in his own voice, on platforms with millions of listeners.
On the floor of the Texas House in 2021, opposing a bill that protected girls’ sports, Talarico declared that “God is non-binary,” explaining that the Almighty is “both masculine and feminine and everything in between.” On Joe Rogan in July 2025, he argued the Bible is pro-abortion, citing the Annunciation as evidence that “God asks for Mary’s consent” before the Incarnation and concluding that “creation has to be done with consent.” Anyone with a King James Bible and three minutes can verify what the angel Gabriel actually said to Mary, which was not a question.
In an interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, Talarico said, “I believe Christianity points to the truth. I also think other religions of love point to the same truth.” He compared world religions to different languages “circling the same truth,” and approvingly cited his boyhood pastor’s teaching that “religious symbols are like aspirin: in order to work, they have to dissolve.” That is not a footnote. That is a confession of pluralism, dressed in seminary tweed.
His political record matches the theology. In a 2020 social media post, Talarico wrote that “radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.” He described racism as a “virus” spread by all white people regardless of whether they exhibit “symptoms.” In a 2023 sermon he insisted that “our trans community needs abortion care too.” In January 2026 he headlined a Stop ICE Rally in Texas, calling ICE a “secret police force” and demanding its leadership be impeached. He supports packing the Supreme Court. He opposes the Ten Commandments display law. And then in March, after winning the Democratic primary, he told voters with a straight face that “our southern border should be like our front porch,” with “a giant welcome mat out front and a lock on the front door.”
Scripture is plain about the gap between a religious profession and a person’s actual works. “They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.” Talarico’s voting record and Talarico’s sermons cannot both be right. One of them is performance.
The Voters Talarico Cannot Hold
His polling lead is concentrated among three groups Democrats have been hemorrhaging for a decade, namely Hispanic voters, Black Protestants, and college-educated independents. The lead is wide today because Talarico’s identity in voters’ minds is still “young pastor running on the Sermon on the Mount.” Once Texans hear the rest of the sermon, the math gets harder.
Hispanic Catholics are not theologically liberal. The Virgin Mary, in their tradition, is not a stand-in for bodily autonomy. Telling Hispanic Catholics that Mary’s fiat is biblical evidence for abortion is a campaign liability of a kind most Austin Democrats do not appreciate until they see the numbers in November. Black Protestant churches, similarly, have not embraced religious pluralism, transgender abortion access, or “God is non-binary” as core doctrines. And college-educated independents who care about the rule of law may pause at the sight of a candidate who one month wants ICE abolished and the next month likens the southern border to a welcome mat.
The Paxton campaign does not have to convert any of these voters. It only has to put Talarico’s own words in front of them, in their own languages, and let Talarico’s seminary education do the rest.
The Paxton Path
Five priorities, in order.
First, unite the GOP immediately. The primary was bitter. Cornyn voters are real people with real grievances. Paxton needs Cornyn, Sen. Ted Cruz, Gov. Greg Abbott, and President Trump on the same stage within fourteen days, projecting that the family fight is over and the general election is one fight. Wesley Hunt should be deployed in Houston. The window for healing is narrow, and Talarico’s $27 million does not wait politely for it to close.
Second, build the small-dollar machine. Talarico has bragged that 98 percent of his donations are $100 or less and that he refuses corporate PAC money. That is a populist narrative Paxton can match and exceed. MAGA donors do not need to be persuaded that this seat matters. They need a clear, repeated ask and a list that lives outside the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s bureaucracy. Trump’s small-dollar infrastructure is the template, and Paxton’s MAGA-warrior brand is the natural sales pitch.
Third, dominate earned media on long-form platforms. Talarico’s rise was built on Rogan, Colbert, and Ezra Klein. Paxton should not cede that terrain. He has a 100-lawsuit record against the Biden administration with an 80 percent win rate, a record of defending the Heartbeat Act and the Human Life Protection Act, a record of fighting to keep concertina wire on the Rio Grande, a record of busting illegal ballot-harvesting schemes, a record of forcing border wall construction to resume. None of that translates through a thirty-second cable buy. It translates through two hours with a serious host, where Paxton can also let Talarico’s own words be played back unedited.
Fourth, organize church to church. Texas has more evangelical and Hispanic Catholic congregations than any state in the union. A field operation that puts Talarico’s sermons and floor speeches in front of pastors and lay leaders, in English and Spanish, is worth more than a hundred million dollars of network television. The receipts do the work. No one needs to be told what to think after watching the Joe Rogan clip on the Annunciation.
Fifth, address the impeachment directly and bury it. The Texas Senate acquitted Paxton on every count in 2023. The case was driven by disgruntled former staff and partisan legislators, and Texas Republican voters punished the impeachers in subsequent primaries. Paxton should say it once, clearly, with the receipts, and pivot every subsequent attempt to relitigate it back to the question Texans care about in 2026, which is who will fight for the border, the unborn, and the Constitution. The Democrats will run the impeachment ads anyway. The only choice is whether voters first hear about it from Paxton, on his terms, or from a $27 million stranger.
The Stakes
Senate maps are not built on hope. They are built on seats that hold. Texas was assumed safe until last night, and the Cook Political Report has now nudged the race from Solid R to Likely R. National Democrats have not believed in a Texas pickup since the Lloyd Bentsen era. They believe in this one. If Paxton wins, the Senate majority is secure for two more years and Talarico becomes a cautionary tale about progressive overreach in a state Trump just carried by fourteen points. If Paxton loses, the consequences will be measured not in caucus seats but in confirmations, judicial appointments, treaties, and a body of legislation that flows through the upper chamber for the next six years.
James Talarico is a gifted politician. He is also a counterfeit on the most important question he has chosen to make central to his campaign. Texans are not gullible, and Hispanic and Black Texans of faith are particularly hard to deceive on doctrine. Paxton’s path to November runs straight through the gap between Talarico’s pulpit and Talarico’s record, and the next one hundred sixty-one days are the time to walk it.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
