Testosterone, Divorce, and Big-Ass Trucks: On the Trail With James Talarico and Ken Paxton

One guy has a decent chance of flipping the state blue. The other guy excels at surviving scandal. Their Senate race shows what the rest of America gets wrong about manliness in Texas.Zohar LazarFew things unite Texans like the aggravation of watching the rest of the country periodically try to parse our state politics. This year’s US Senate race in Texas is a shining example. The Republican on the ticket is Ken Paxton, the state attorney general. He is backed by President Trump and comes with a surplus of local baggage (derailed felony prosecution, impeachment by his own party ending in acquittal) and a spectacular deficit of charisma. When the Democratic-primary winner emerged—a progressive, Christian state legislator who managed to hang with Joe Rogan—it was clear that Paxton had a fight on his hands. The conservative movement arrived to help carry him, coalescing around a single message: Didn’t his opponent, James Talarico, seem kind of unmanly?He is “clearly transitioning into a female,” reported White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller. He was a “gay vegan,” Fox News host Jesse Watters added. A Republican National Committee spokesperson charged that he “might still sleep in a kid’s-sized bed with sheets from his favorite Disney princess.” Paxton himself, 63, called his opponent “Low-T Talarico.” Reporters dutifully took this to the state legislator: Did he have low testosterone? “I don’t think guys my age are really concerned about that kind of thing,” Talarico, 37, said.Picking through this distraction campaign is mostly counterproductive, but I’m going to try, because of the obvious ignorance on display about Texas manhood. Let’s start with the taco. In May, Talarico went to a taco joint in Austin with Barack Obama and got two potato, egg, and cheese breakfast tacos. See? A vegan! Republicans cried, though it was a vegetarian order. “Eggs and cheese aren’t going to get you any Latino voters,” said a CNN This Morning With Audie Cornish panelist. “Clearly not,” said Cornish. This was all profoundly embarrassing. Papas con huevo is one of the most popular taco orders in the state.Then there was the photo of Talarico eating barbecue. “He is holding that rib with a FREAKING NAPKIN. They just don’t get it,” said Cynical Publius (one of those guys on X with a Roman-statue avatar and hundreds of thousands of followers). But the picture was—as any Texan could have determined through context clues—of Talarico eating a turkey leg at the State Fair of Texas, where it is served wrapped in paper.Finally, the campaign released a photo of Talarico and his hot girlfriend at Austin City Limits. Haters seized on a new point: Talarico went to a music festival in a white button-down shirt? Kind of a nerd, wouldn’t you say? Context had collapsed again. He was wearing a Columbia fishing shirt—affordable, vented for the heat—meaningfully more “authentic” than the Marine Layer polo a newer Austin transplant might wear. “I don’t wear no Stetson,” sings Terry Allen on his 1979 double album, Lubbock (On Everything), “but I’m willing to bet, son, that I’m as big a Texan as you are.”The Texas Senate race has enormous implications for the state (it is the Democrats’ best chance in nearly three decades at overturning the Republican monopoly on power) and for the country (inasmuch as control of the Senate could determine how Trump’s presidency will come to an end). So it seems only natural that the race would devolve into schoolyard shenanigans. I followed both campaigns to Texas’s southern border to unpack the question that is, at the end of the day, being asked in November: Do the chuds own Texas, like they say they do—or can the state be something, anything, else?“Why did you cheat on your wife?” asked the woman caller. “Um,” began Ken Paxton. We were assembled for a Paxton telephone town hall, and this could hardly be said to be an unfair question: In some ways it was the most obvious one.Zohar LazarPaxton is in the middle of a divorce from state senator Angela Paxton, who was his strongest supporter as he ascended from one office to another. Back in 2014, when he ran for attorney general of Texas, she penned a song—“I’m a pistol-packin’ mama, and my husband sues Obama,” she sings—and performed it at rallies. When Angela joined the Texas Senate in 2019, she wrote a bill to legalize the financial crimes for which Ken had been indicted in 2015—which, even in Texas, took some real balls. (It was killed before it went to a vote.) In 2022, when a process server tried to serve him a subpoena at his house, Angela was the getaway driver as Ken fled in a truck.Last year, she shocked the state by announcing she was seeking separation on “biblical grounds.” Paxton began traveling with a Christian influencer from Louisiana. No weapon formed against him prospered, to put it biblically.But Paxton, on this call, didn’t seem to have ever considered an answer—he acted surprised to have been asked. He had been slow to start campaigning and took a trip to London for the July Fourth holiday weekend. His operating system seemed to spin and then reboot. “I’m not going to talk about personal issues that relate to my family, just like I don’t think you would want to discuss your marriage on a call with thousands of people,” he said, before a staffer eventually rescued him.Paxton’s spokesperson, Madison Cercy, told GQ: “We are declining to comment and fully expect this profile will remind Texans of your attempt to position Beto O’Rourke as ‘Kennedy-esque’ when he was running against Ted Cruz. Texans will see right through your glowing piece. James Talarico will lose just like Beto did and become the butt of jokes like him too. As much as you try to mask his weakness, James Talarico is the leftist socialist who will never be able to represent the majority of Texans.”Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign is the natural point of comparison for Talarico’s run. O’Rourke’s charisma, which surfaced through his long, livestreamed wanderings of the state, combined with Trump’s midterm unpopularity, carried the Democrat to within three percentage points of victory against incumbent Ted Cruz. Though nobody ever went broke underestimating the Democratic Party in Texas, it doesn’t seem unrealistic to think that the state could have moved three points left in the past eight years, with the national climate having gotten much worse for Republicans.Stylistically, however, the two Democrats couldn’t be more different. O’Rourke came up in the El Paso punk scene and ran a DIY campaign, swinging at hard pitches—a question about Colin Kaepernick’s protests, for example—in his raucous town halls. Because the idea of a Democrat winning in Texas was self-evidently ridiculous, he could kind of just do it. In Marfa, the high-desert art mecca, I was with his campaign at a rally at the glamping hotel El Cosmico. He sat down to talk to me over a beer and ended the night talking at length with an adobe craftsman who, because he was a Mexican national on a worker visa, could not actually vote for him. We might never see a campaign like it again. But he got close.And because O’Rourke got close, the idea of winning is not that ridiculous anymore, and now Talarico is running a somewhat conventional purple-state campaign with traditional message discipline—affordability, security, opportunity. These are skills he developed in the legislature by questioning Republicans about illogical bills, clipping videos of the interrogations, and hoping they’d go viral on social media. He’s a planner, not an improviser.I was with the Talarico campaign partway through its 750-mile swing from El Paso to McAllen, which makes up more than a third of the US-Mexico border. I hadn’t been to far-west Texas with a candidate since O’Rourke’s run. I was slow therefore to recognize the scritching sound that occurred when I was poking around the bushes. A diamondback rattlesnake, maybe four feet long, obligingly slithered away from my feet.Zohar LazarWe were in Alpine, a town of 6,000 beset by critical failures in its water-distribution system. The campaign party had come down a long rocky road to look at the community’s efforts to drill an emergency well. The mayor told Talarico and his filming team, diplomatically, that the state’s congressional delegation hadn’t been much help. She didn’t say that the district’s current congressman was retiring, his career ruined after one of his staffers, with whom he had allegedly had an affair, died after setting herself on fire last year—or that his likely replacement was Brandon Herrera, a “guntuber” who cracks jokes about the Holocaust. A person at the event suggested Talarico should run for president next. Talarico let it pass by. The video team made sure to get the rattlesnake.In nearby Marfa, Talarico’s campaign had arranged a rally at the Thunderbird Hotel. Tightly orchestrated, mostly on time. The candidate’s stump was polished, relatively brief, and didn’t vary much from town to town. He spoke about his love for his great-grandfather, whom he calls Poppy, who returned from fighting fascism in WW II to model the honor of service and the teachings of Jesus Christ. There were hundreds of people present, in a town of about 2,000, and the photo line curled around three sides of the large room.I decided to talk to the two most visually dissimilar men in the audience. The first was Jerry Mitchell, a retired homebuilder, who came from Alpine. Big cowboy hat, white ranch shirt, clean boot-cut blue jeans, black boots, wiry build. A man who’s seen some sun. Had he voted for Democrats often? “Lately,” he said, in a low voice, “you gotta vote for the woman.” (He seemed to be referring to Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton, not Talarico.) Decent Republicans, he said, “and there’s a lot of them, they’re just not gonna vote in this race.”If Paxton’s “runnin’ around on his wife,” Mitchell said in a fine twang, “that’s his business.” The problem was “he’s become a millionaire while he’s in office, on a state salary.” In Texas, this is not a crime per se—little is, in the way of political corruption. But the Trumpian masculinity of getting away with it isn’t considered a good look, either.Across the room was Dillon Orr, 27. Black boots, black skinny jeans, black denim jacket, long black hair, black leather wrist bandolier decorated with ammo cartridges. He is named after Dillon Aero, manufacturer of the M134D Minigun, he told me. He is a docent at the nearby Chinati Foundation contemporary art museum and a former telescope operator at the McDonald Observatory. He makes leather goods and builds hot rods—among them Angel, a souped-up Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, all black also, with exhaust pipes fanned up on the side like wings. “This Machine Kills Fascists” is painted on the back.“Someone who pardons rapists, that’s not masculine in any way,” Orr said. (Paxton’s office has drawn criticism for lenient plea deals in cases involving sex trafficking and child sex abuse.) “That’s not doing the male job of protecting you’re supposed to do.” J.R.R. Tolkien was a veteran, Orr pointed out, and the father of veterans. Didn’t he have Lord of the Rings character Faramir say, as Orr paraphrased, “I love the bright sword, not for its sharpness of steel or its ability to kill, but for that which it can defend?” When I peeked inside Angel, on my way out, there was a longsword on the back seat.A few days later, in McAllen, Paxton held his Rally in the Valley at a steamy outdoor venue. He was endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council and appeared with various south Texas bigwigs. The Paxton campaign’s focus on macho, it has been widely reported, is aimed at voters here, at the southern tip of the state, in former Democratic strongholds where in 2024 Hispanic voters, particularly men, swung to Trump.Talarico had been able to notch a small win on the border, in far-off Big Bend, where a handful of sheriffs who oppose the construction of the wall through their iconic landscape appeared at Talarico’s rally, though they stopped short of endorsing him. Paxton’s friends were less reticent. Tano Tijerina, current congressional candidate and a former judge in Webb County, home to Laredo, introduced Paxton. Tijerina looks a bit like Dave Bautista. A wrestler’s build, big bald head covered by a bigger white hat, a forceful personality. Tijerina said he was a “beef-eating, Bible-thumping patriot.” The crowd got riled.But Paxton seemed unsure of himself and the crowd. “So, what are the differences between me and my opponent? I’m sure you know some of them,” he said. “One of them is family. Actually…let me talk about faith first. Faith.” Talarico was a fake Christian, he said, who wanted to genitally mutilate children. (Talarico voted against a bill to ban gender-reassignment surgery for minors; he has lately argued that he opposed that bill because it was too broad, and he generally opposes the procedure for children.) Paxton did not talk much about his own faith, or his own family.I might not be a prince, his campaign seemed to say, but the other fellow isn’t even a man. Over the summer, Paxton’s camp pointed out that Talarico shared a joint checking account with his mother. A bit embarrassing, maybe. But this attack, like others on Talarico’s masculinity, changes meaning depending on one’s expectations. State representatives like Talarico make less than $8,000 a year, and, in Texas, there are a thousand different legal ways of paying off a lawmaker. To be a broke legislator, you have to be one of two things: stupid or honest.When I caught Talarico for a one-on-one in August, he seemed to be putting the summer’s virility debate in the rearview, tightly focused on the buzzword of the cycle: affordability. Watching Paxton talk about affordability, Talarico told me, “it’s kind of like watching him speak French or something.” Paxton wants to offer tax deductions for second homes, medical bills, and gym memberships, Talarico said, even though some of the major factors driving price increases are tariffs and the war in Iran, and the preferences given to special interests and billionaires. “I’m mystified,” he said. “A lot of people in my family, a lot of my friends, voted for President Trump in 2024 because of this issue of prices…and instead of lowering prices, he decided to start a new forever war in the Middle East.”Zohar LazarBut “when Ken Paxton started all this talk about who’s a real man,” Talarico said, “I decided to engage with it.” The terrain was too important to cede, he felt, even if it had been inlaid with cringe-inducing traps. Such as when, in July, the Talarico campaign released an ad showing the candidate ripping down a country road in a big-ass Dodge Ram—a rental, it turned out. Talarico’s own white Chevy Colorado, a truck disdained by Truck Guys for its diminutive stature, has tinted windows that made filming difficult, the campaign said.Still, when Talarico gets going on the influence of his adoptive father, he can be genuinely moving. “The luckiest day in my life was when I met Mark Talarico, who fell in love with my mom and fell in love with me and gave me his last name, which I’m very proud to have on these campaign signs all over the state,” he said. “He took responsibility. He raised me as his own.”He hopes that young men are “hungry for an alternative” to manosphere masculinity. Even if culture is telling them masculinity is something to be consumed and acquired—here I’ll paraphrase: eat beef, hustle and grind, get a better wife—he thinks they also know, deep down, “real men don’t lie and cheat their way through life.”In Eagle Pass, a sun-drenched working-class border town, Talarico gave his familiar, polished stump speech, speaking in the round. Then he took questions. Each one offered up some explicit, or implicit, feeling of pain. Each person was asking to be seen.Rogelio, 21, works overnights at an office. Kicked out of his last residence, he “can’t even afford an apartment.” Last week, he said, he dropped out of college in order to keep up with his car payments. “My problems are smaller than other people’s. But to me, those problems are still big.” A man who doesn’t give his name said that he got hurt on the job only to find out that the state’s workers’ comp system had been gutted. Leah, 17, related that she’s the daughter of an Army veteran of 20 years—then asked, quietly, how we can help veterans with “mental issues, PTSD, after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” On and on.Talarico answered each in turn and, at the end, offered a more expansive response. “I want to be honest that, like many of you, I am tempted by hopelessness,” he said. The candidate, who trained as a seminarian, said that when he feels this way, he often returns to a line in the Gospel of Luke. “Jesus says something really strange. He says, ‘Blessed are you who weep.’ ” How, he asked, can someone who’s weeping be blessed? “In our culture, we tend to avoid grief.”None of this was off the cuff. It was so well-polished it gleamed. But it was also uncommonly—painfully—earnest, in a way that few politicians would risk. “If your heart is breaking, as you watch what’s happening to our beloved country, it means you still have a heart,” he said. “And I want you to trust that.” In the middle of the crowd, Talarico briefly looked taller, his shoulders wider. His voice sounded deeper. “I want you to protect that. Because that is what’s going to get us out of all of this. Blessed are you who weep.” ★Sign up for Manual to receive useful advice on style, health, and more, five days a week.