James Talarico gave conservatives more material this weekend, invoking Christ's miracles to argue for government-run healthcare. Conservative outlets seized on it, as they have seized on nearly everything he has said about religion since March.
The catalog is genuinely remarkable. He told a Texas House committee that God is nonbinary. He has described Jesus as a feminist. In resurfaced audio from 2021 he called himself a Christian who hates Christianity and described Jesus as a socialist. In January he said atheists are more Christ-like than some of his Christian colleagues in the Legislature. He called a Ten Commandments bill idolatrous, exclusionary and arrogant. He argued on a podcast that the Annunciation supports a pro-consent framework for abortion rights.
He is a Presbyterian seminarian who made faith the centerpiece of his campaign. Republicans have spent seven months making him regret it.
And it is not working the way our side thinks it is.
Look at the Fox News numbers.
Among white evangelicals, Paxton leads 78 to 22. That is the number everyone quotes, and it looks like a rout.
Now look at the second number in that same poll.
Among Texans who actually attend worship services regularly, Paxton's support drops to 57 percent.
Read that twice. The more frequently a Texan goes to church, the less sold he is on the theology argument. Paxton runs twenty-one points worse among people in the pews than among people who check the evangelical box.
Meanwhile, the same poll found 51 percent of registered Texas voters preferring Talarico, and 63 percent of self-described moderates.
Why this is happening.
Regular churchgoers have sat through more sermons than the rest of us. They have a working sense of how theological disagreement sounds, and they have opinions about who gets to referee it.
When Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick says he will take a poorly dressed conservative Republican over a crazy, insane, blasphemous, fake Christian, that lands hard with a partisan audience. With a woman who teaches Sunday school in Plano, it may land differently, because she has been taught her whole life that judging the state of another person's soul is above her pay grade and above Dan Patrick's.
We are not saying Talarico's theology is sound. Much of it is not, and conservatives are entitled to say so. God is nonbinary is a statement about God that most Texans reject, and a Christian who hates Christianity is a sentence a man running in this state should have to explain.
We are saying that calling a seminarian a fake Christian invites voters to become the judge of that question, and the people most qualified to judge it are the ones least comfortable with the whole exercise.
There is a better line of attack sitting right there.
Talarico's actual policy positions are the vulnerability, and they are not close calls in Texas.
He supports abortion rights. He has backed transgender policy positions that are underwater statewide. He favors an immigration approach out of step with a state that shares 1,254 miles of border with Mexico. And this weekend he argued that the Gospels justify government-run healthcare, which is a policy claim before it is a theological one.
Notice that every one of those can be argued without any reference to the condition of his soul.
Ask a Texas voter whether the federal government should run his health insurance. Ask whether Texas should follow Austin's approach to the border. Those arguments win, they win with moderates, and they do not require the candidate or his surrogates to serve as anyone's spiritual authority.
Paxton's first general election ad went after Talarico on transgender policy and immigration. That was the right instinct. The ad's closing tagline about testosterone was not, because it moved the conversation from what Talarico believes to what kind of man he is, which is the same category error as the theology fight.
The race is close and the clock is short.
Cook moved Texas from Lean Republican to toss-up on August 26. Talarico has been polling ahead. Paxton told the Republican convention in Dallas that he needs financial backup, which is not something a statewide nominee says unless the internals are real.
Thirty-six days remain.
Talarico walked back some of his religious comments after the primary, which tells you his own campaign knows they are a liability. Let them be a liability. Republicans do not need to prosecute the theology. Voters heard the quotes and formed their own views months ago.
What Republicans need is for the final five weeks to be about abortion, the border, transgender policy in schools, and who pays for health care.
Those are winning arguments in Texas, and they do not require anybody to play God.
