Texas Senate candidate James Talarico’s favorite drag queen is a buxom, platinum blonde who loves working with children.
Will she sink the Democrats’ chances of flipping a red seat in the Lone Star State?
Mr. Talarico has backtracked on many of the liberal positions he has pushed in the past as he battles Republican Ken Paxton for the support of Texas voters.
Some might consider it a slip-up when, during a Houston campaign stop last week, he did not hesitate to name his “favorite” drag queen in Texas.
“Oh my god, probably Alyssa Edwards,” Mr. Talarico exuberantly responded on camera to the questioner.
Mr. Talarico’s answer has gone viral, and Republicans hope it will stall the momentum he has toward capturing a seat that Republicans have held for more than 30 years.
Republicans saturated social media with photos of drag queen Justin Johnson, who performs as Alyssa Edwards, alongside young dancers from his Beyond Belief dance studio, including a 9-year-old student Mr. Johnson referred to as his “mini-me” during competitive dance performances.
Republicans also pounced on an X post in which Mr. Johnson identified himself as “your favorite politician’s favorite drag queen” and thanked Mr. Talarico for the recognition.
“Huge endorsement for James Talarico from his favorite drag queen who grooms little boys,” said Republican spokesman Zach Kraft. “Will they be campaigning together?”
They probably will not.
Now that he is running for the Senate, Mr. Talarico has abandoned some of the liberal positions he espoused four to five years ago during debates in the Texas House of Representatives, where he represents the Austin area.
He has replaced it all with a statewide-friendly, populist agenda and an aggressive social media campaign showing the 37-year-old leading energetic rallies and holding earnest sit-downs with voters across Texas.
Mr. Talarico no longer talks about running a vegan campaign, which he pledged to do in 2022, or supporting transgender medical procedures for children, as he did in 2023.
He is promising to reform “this broken, corrupt political system,” and has pledged to ban gerrymandering and prohibit lawmakers from trading stocks.
His social media videos show Mr. Talarico visiting with residents in flood-ravaged Kerrville, where he listened to their pleas for more help from the federal government. He is shown sitting down with teachers and business owners in Port Arthur to discuss inflation.
Republicans, meanwhile, are seizing on Mr. Talarico’s recent drag queen endorsement as they scramble for an opening to stifle the momentum that has favored Mr. Talarico since the general election campaign began in August.
Recent polling shows a competitive race: A July New York Times/Siena poll showed the contest tied at 47% to 47%, and the University of Texas Texas Politics Project gave Mr. Paxton a 1-point edge, while a Texas Southern University poll showed Mr. Talarico leading by 2 points.
The competitive polling has forced Republicans to dump millions of dollars into a race they normally ignore.
Mr. Paxton, the Texas attorney general, entered the race with significant personal and professional baggage after a bruising Republican primary runoff this summer against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn — a contest Mr. Paxton won with 63.8% of the vote on May 26, aided by a late endorsement from President Trump.
Mr. Cornyn spent tens of millions of dollars saturating the Texas airwaves with all the dirt on Mr. Paxton’s ugly divorce and his 2023 impeachment trial on charges of bribery, obstruction of justice and abuse of public trust, among others — a trial that ended in his acquittal by the state Senate.
Now, Mr. Paxton is fighting to keep Mr. Talarico’s liberal record top of mind for Texas voters.
He began airing a campaign ad last week depicting an AI-generated rendering of Mr. Talarico repeating past statements, including a line from a March 2021 “Active Theology” podcast appearance where he described himself as “a Christian who hates Christianity,” as well as accusing him of professing there are “six genders” — a reference to a 2021 committee hearing in which Mr. Talarico said modern science recognizes “six biological sexes.”
Mr. Talarico, years ago, also declared God to be “nonbinary” and that America “was not founded as a Christian nation.”
Mr. Talarico has backed away from those comments, calling them “cringey” and saying some of his earlier positions “missed the mark.”
He managed to spin the negative fallout from his 2022 “vegan” campaign for the state Legislature into an attack on the Republicans’ handling of the economy.
Appearing at a Dallas barbecue joint in June, Mr. Talarico settled into a platter of ribs while highlighting the skyrocketing price of beef under Republican leadership.
“These nicknames they are throwing at me don’t do much to lower the price of groceries,” Mr. Talarico said.
Mr. Paxton hopes Mr. Talarico’s new drag-queen endorsement will lower voter enthusiasm for his opponent, who he said is “too weird and radical” for Texans.
“What normal person can name their favorite drag queen this quickly?” Mr. Paxton said.
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