Ken Paxton may hand a big win to Democrats—and LGBTQ+ Texans

Politicians like Ken Paxton, who just secured the Republican nomination for a Texas Senate seat, have built entire careers turning trans Texans into political prey. Not because trans people represented any meaningful threat to the state, but because fear is useful when you have nothing else to offer and when people get a little tired of racism.

That does not mean they do not still use racism; they absolutely do, constantly. But trans panic became the headliner. Fear keeps people emotionally activated while their quality of life deteriorates around them. And Paxton’s securing this nomination may ultimately become the death rattle for Texas Republicans, handing progressive Democrat James Talarico a victory for the record books.

Related: Texas AG Ken Paxton calls James Talarico’s support for trans kids ‘weird’ in runoff victory speech

If you were to ask Paxton, every problem in America is now supposedly caused by trans people. Rising housing costs. Trans people. Failing schools. Trans people. Health care collapse. Trans people. Corporate greed. Trans people. The loneliness crisis. Inflation. Book bans. The collapse of public trust. Somehow, always, a tiny vulnerable minority was supposedly responsible for the unraveling of American life. And for a while, the strategy worked.

But eventually, people notice the roads are still crumbling, their rent is still unaffordable, their wages remain stagnant, their schools are still underfunded, their health care is still impossible to navigate, their power grid is still unreliable, and their government is still consumed by corruption scandals, billionaire worship, Christian nationalist performance art, and endless culture war hysteria. What if trans kids were never the problem?

That question now hangs over Texas as Talarico emerges as the strongest Democratic Senate candidate the state has seen in years following Paxton’s Republican runoff victory. Donald Trump and Ken Paxton may ultimately become the men who help flip Texas for progressives. Not because they intended to.

People are sick and tired of their old, ugly agendas and endless sociopathy because they never see improvements in their communities or daily lives. Paxton represents the absolute endpoint of modern Republican politics: scandal-ridden, punitive, authoritarian, cruel, and fundamentally disconnected from ordinary human struggle. Even by Texas Republican standards, he has spent years behaving less like a public servant than a man conducting a permanent ideological vendetta against vulnerable people.

Related: Texas AG Ken Paxton says ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids also applies to talk therapy

His office aggressively targeted gender-affirming care. Texas Republicans created systems encouraging citizens to report transgender people in bathrooms. Paxton pursued investigations tied to families of trans youth and lawsuits against providers and even companies connected to trans inclusion. Texas became one of the country’s most aggressive places for government-sanctioned surveillance of its own citizens and a laboratory for anti-trans governance.

Did all this nonsense lower grocery prices? Did it stop school shootings? Did it stabilize the power grid? Did it make health care affordable? Did it improve schools? Did it make Texans less exhausted, less overworked, less financially cornered, less furious at the cost of existing in America? Did any of these sick jokes we have all been living through improve anyone’s lives? No. It just made life more dangerous for trans people while powerful men accumulated more power.

Although we might be acting like it lately, Americans, including Texans, are not infinitely stupid. They can feel when politicians are manufacturing panic to distract from the collapse. They can see when cruelty becomes performative. They know when politicians appear more emotionally invested in policing pronouns than solving material problems. And people are exhausted from this nonsense.

That exhaustion is now colliding directly with Talarico’s campaign.

And Talarico is not emerging in isolation. Texas Democrats like Jasmine Crockett have spent years enduring Republican hysteria while refusing to surrender their intelligence, humor, moral clarity, or humanity to the grinding tomfoolery of modern conservative politics. Crockett has become one of the few Democrats in America who seems genuinely unafraid of these people. Unafraid of their media ecosystems, their bad-faith outrage cycles, their performative moral panic, or their increasingly bizarre attempts to turn basic human decency into some kind of extremist position.

Courage is contagious. And after years of watching Democrats behave like terrified hostages whenever Republicans start screaming about trans people, immigrants, race, books, drag queens, teachers, or pronouns, seeing elected officials simply refuse to participate in the panic starts to feel almost revolutionary. Unlike many Democrats terrified of being associated with trans people, Talarico has refused the ritual performance of distancing himself from the community, and it is paying off. He has not treated trans Texans like an embarrassing constituency that must be hidden whenever ultra-conservative school boards and self-appointed morality crusaders begin foaming at the mouth over LGBTQ+ people merely existing, let alone existing openly in Texas.

Related: John Cornyn booted from Senate as indicted anti-trans Texas AG Ken Paxton clinches GOP nomination

When asked about anti-trans politics, Talarico redirected attention toward the actual forces hollowing out American life: corruption, economic inequality, concentrated wealth, and political manipulation. It is a shame that this level of basic human decency now reads as politically revolutionary, but here we are. For nearly a decade, Democrats have often approached trans people with visible anxiety, as though defending them too clearly might trigger electoral catastrophe. Republicans sensed that fear and escalated accordingly. Every election became another opportunity to test how much humiliation, surveillance, exclusion, and dehumanization the public would tolerate.

People are tired of these toddler-like adults constantly whining about the same garbage, never offering help when it is desperately needed. Tired of screaming and tired of conspiracies and sick of politicians obsessing over children’s bodies while entire communities become economically unlivable. Tired of billionaires and political operatives demanding constant outrage while offering nothing materially transformative in return.

And perhaps most importantly, people are tired of being told to hate strangers while the people actually responsible for their suffering continue looting the country in broad daylight.

And now Talarico has the opening of his lifetime. Not just an opening for Democrats, but an opening to bring back some moral courage during one of the most morally bankrupt periods in modern American political life. And fittingly, he refuses the emotional logic of modern Republicanism. He does not sound consumed by resentment. He does not sound like someone whose politics require enemies small enough to crush. And in Texas, that difference suddenly feels enormous for LGBTQ+ Texans. For trans Texans in particular, the last several years have felt like living inside an escalating state-sponsored warning shot. Families have fled while doctors have faced threats. Children have become national political props, and ordinary people trying to survive adolescence or parenthood found themselves transformed into ideological targets by some of the most powerful officials in the country.

Paxton helped engineer all this while simultaneously becoming one of the most scandal-ridden and ethically compromised politicians in modern American government, which is truly saying something in 2026. This is a man who spent nearly a decade under a felony securities fraud indictment before ultimately avoiding trial through a settlement agreement after years of procedural delays and legal maneuvering.

Related: Texas AG Ken Paxton's wife files for divorce, citing God and ‘recent discoveries’

A man impeached by his own party’s House Republicans on allegations including bribery, abuse of office, obstruction, and corruption tied to wealthy donor Nate Paul. A man whose own senior aides reportedly went to the FBI with accusations that he was using the attorney general’s office to benefit a political ally, then saw several of those employees sue over alleged whistleblower retaliation. A man sued by the State Bar of Texas over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. A man whose financial life has drawn scrutiny over investment disclosures, property disclosures, and mortgage-related allegations. A man whose public image as a Christian conservative family-values crusader collapsed under the weight of affair allegations and a highly public divorce initiated by his wife of nearly four decades.

Through every scandal, every corruption allegation, every humiliation, and every abuse-of-power accusation, the obsession with trans people never stopped. None of this means Texas suddenly becomes Vermont overnight. It does not mean the state’s political realignment is inevitable or complete. But for the first time in years, Republicans seem genuinely vulnerable to the possibility that they mistook fear for consensus.

And if Texas does begin shifting, historians may eventually note the delicious irony: Donald Trump and Ken Paxton spent years trying to radicalize Texas through fear, cruelty, corruption, and trans panic.

Instead, they may have finally pushed Texans toward someone offering the exact opposite.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness @thedeadbetties

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