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Losin’ Texas

The Preacher Texas Will Not Hire

He’s losin’ Texas, I can tell.

Gen X already knows the face. Isaac. Black hat. The child preacher whose sermon did not belong to the town. James Talarico gives off the same vibe. Soft voice. Still smile. Holy language in a room that is not holy.

That flinch is not a movie joke. It is how a lot of people get to the real word before they get to the tape. Inauthentic. Texas has hired preacher candidates. It has not hired this one and thought ours.

I wrote in March that he would not win Texas. Ella Langley has a chorus the country already knows. He’s choosin’ Texas, I can tell. Talarico is losin’ Texas, I can tell. It does not take a crystal ball. The last six months are why.

March already had the verdict

Calm down, panicans. That line still works.

He won a Democrat primary as the aw-shucks seminarian. I said the product would not survive the state. The Jesus he sells is not the exclusive Son of God most Texas believers confess. The border line was a welcome mat and a lock on the door. The coalition was a quirk: white Democrats over Jasmine Crockett while Black precincts stayed with her. No Democrat has won statewide here since 1994. Beto was the high-water mark and still lost. Small-dollar money would look like a wave and spend like a lesson.

Heresy. Welcome mat. Wasted cash. I said Texas would stay red.

The general election is no longer a theory. The state has now heard the man.

The voice Texas met

In 2020 he told a Sierra Club audience that climate, white supremacy, and capitalism are linked oppressive systems that must be dismantled, and that oil and gas are cassette tapes. This year he says he is a capitalist who supports oil and gas. Jonathan Turley called the first version the Texas Trotsky. The second version is the one he needs on a statewide ballot. Both versions cannot be the man.

He says he is an eighth-generation Texan. Plenty of people in this state were not born here and got here as soon as they could. They still sound like they live here. He sounds like a seminar. Straight white people, he told a podcast, are born with blinders. “I, as a white straight guy, have those same limitations.” That is not Odessa. That is a faculty lounge asking Odessa for a vote.

Then the itinerary. A meat reveal and a girlfriend reveal in the same week. A sold-out Hollywood night with Jon Ossoff under a banner that called them “Two Visionaries.” Tickets from a thousand dollars to twenty-seven thousand. Shonda Rhimes in the host chair. Visionaries is donor English. Pairing him with Ossoff did not make him look larger. It put the inauthentic file on a senator already running for his life in Georgia.

David Marcus walked a Dallas Labor Day rally and did not find Betomania. He found determination without heat. One voter called Talarico a square. Another remembered 2018 and said he does not feel it this time. Kurt Schlichter drove a thousand miles and found the yard signs in the rainbow-and-Prius blocks. The election, he wrote, is about disqualifying Talarico. I have been saying that since March. The ground caught up.

The record he is editing

A reporter asked why Texans should believe he will buck his own party. He said he called out Biden on the border. Pressed on when, he pointed to a 2022 speech. He did not repeat “the border.”

Reporter asked Talarico why Texans should believe he will buck his own party when it comes to Texas’ interests.

Talarico responds that he’s “called out Biden on the border.”

Reporter then asks when he’s called on Biden policies — *during* or after the admin ended?

Talarico responds that he called out Biden mid-presidency in a speech in 2022.

Notice the very precise language used here. He did NOT say he called out Biden on the border in 2022, just that he called out the admin’s policies — an artful dodge.

Ok, so let’s take at what he said in his biggest speech of 2022 at the Texas State Democratic Convention.

He actually DID call out Biden.

But here’s the rub:

He called out Biden for NOT BEING AGGRESSIVELY HARD LEFT ENOUGH:

– Lease federal land to abortion providers
– Impeach SCOTUS Justices
– Prosecute Trump
– Call the filibuster a Jim Crow relic

No mention of the border crisis at all, of course. Which was raging at the time.

As an additional note, look at his tone and delivery in the speech to state Democrats vs the image he presents now in a general election.

Talarico somehow now wants Texans to believe he’s some sort of centrist, independent maverick ready to fight his own party.

Total fraud. Slippery as hell. But a total fraud.

Western Lensman played the tape. That convention speech does call out Biden. It calls him insufficiently left. Lease federal land to abortion providers. Impeach justices. Prosecute Trump. Treat the filibuster as a Jim Crow relic. There is no border critique in the speech. The border was not a side issue in 2022. He chose a different list.

The letter is worse because it is on Texas letterhead. June 24, 2022, to President Biden. Lease federal property in Texas for abortion clinics. Direct the FDA to stop states from limiting medication abortion. Hire providers as federal employees so they can claim immunity from Texas law. “Women in states like mine will die if we do not.” That is not a man who spent 2022 demanding a secure border. That is a man asking Washington to punch a hole in Texas law and call it compassion.

The Christian line from that era is still live. You cannot call yourself a Christian, he said, and reject the stranger seeking asylum at the southern border. Put that next to “I called out Biden on the border” and watch the sentence collapse.

Voter ID he hates with every fiber of his being. He calls it anti-American. The country does not. You do not run Texas as the man who treats a driver’s license at the polls as a moral crisis.

Brooke Taylor put the old statements on the table. Six biological sexes: “No. I’ve missed the mark.” Then the pivot. Republicans want to talk about six sexes so they do not have to talk about six-dollar diesel. God is non-binary: he was being provocative. Trans athletes: oppose them if they endanger safety or fairness. The conditional is the tell. When one phrase is the solvent for an entire worldview, voters treat it as a memo, not a conversion.

Concede the words. Keep the posture. Change the subject to prices. I called it political reassignment surgery when the first interviews landed. It has not gotten more convincing.

He claimed the church. The church claimed him.

St. Andrew’s since he was two. Jim Rigby the mentor. The sanctuary in the intro video. That was the biography.

Rev. Babs Miller, minister to the parish, said people in that church still wish the Butler gunman had not just nicked the ear, but had been more successful. Talarico did not say the sentence. He ran as the product of the institution that did. Alinsky’s fourth rule works in both directions. Make the man live up to his own book. He published the church. The church now has a line he has to disown or carry. Disowning costs him the biography. Carrying it costs him the state.

March was heresy as theology. September is heresy as a building with a pastor in it. Different weight. Same problem.

The rest of the file is the stack. God is a girl. Six genders. A Christian who hates Christianity, on tape with a progressive pastor. Islamic mystics shaping his faith as much as Christians. A church that funds abortions and trans summer camps. Pride billing an eleven-year-old drag performer. Texas will tolerate a lot of private belief. It will not hire a Senate candidate whose pulpit keeps moving.

The money story flipped after Labor Day

He burned the introduction budget while Paxton was still in a runoff. More than fifty million into summer television. “Outraised Paxton” was a receipts sentence. Burn rate is what is left. You cannot spend introduction twice.

Paxton said the calendar fact out loud. It took him a couple of months to raise it because he had a runoff. Backward-looking finance is how you get slippery conclusions. One pile bought name ID against the Republican. The other pile bought a nomination.

Then the committees did what I said they would do if the average tightened. They showed up so they could stamp the win. Senate Leadership Fund’s Texas PAC reserved on the order of fifty-one million in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, with a reported fifty-four million infusion. MAGA Inc. put in ten million. America PAC is in the field. Paxton Victory is on in the Valley with an economy flight and a “Tala-broke” contrast. The summer story of a starved Republican and a Democrat drowning the state in spots is the story that ended last week.

Do not read SLF as salvation. Do not read it as proof Talarico is about to win. Read it as the establishment arriving late to a race it tried to kill in May. If they spend, they will claim the imprimatur. If they had stayed out, Paxton would have owed them nothing. They did not stay out. The air war is now a fight. The file is still his.

The coalition never closed

Crockett will not endorse. She called the primary a racist race. Dallas Democrats told Marcus they need her for Black turnout. Jolanda Jones said Talarico needs to pay Black voters to come out. Colin Allred has kept his distance. I called the race gap before the primary ended. White Democrats would not nominate Crockett. Black Democrats were not required to fall in love with the winner. They have not.

Reparations talk does not fix that. Neither does a national tour that looks like panic. A man who has not consolidated his own base does not get to lecture Texas about belonging.

Panic is data

Marcus listed the seventy-two hours that mattered. Every outlet in the country. Kimmel. Beto. Reversals on the progressive stack. Republican validators nobody in Texas GOP world can find. That is not a campaign protecting a lead. That is a campaign trying to talk an August average back into existence.

I have said look at behavior, not the summer poll. Another snapshot dropped this week with him ahead. Same instruments. Same problem. They missed the pressure line in Michigan and Wisconsin by double digits. August in Texas measured a state that had seen one candidate and not the file. Republicans come home. I held the O/U at nine through Labor Day because the file was not fully on. Direction of travel has not changed since March. Ceiling is still the mid-forties if the tape keeps running.

He’s losin’ Texas, I can tell

Talarico tried to make this state fall in love with a version of him that lives on a Kimmel couch and in a convention speech that did not mention the border. The state met the other version first.

I am not asking anyone to love Ken Paxton. I said from the start this race was about disqualifying the alternative. Seal the border. Cut the taxes. Put the criminals in jail. Play your strengths. Hit Talarico’s weaknesses. Relentlessly. The weaknesses are now on tape, on letterhead, in a church, in a Hollywood invite, and in a walk-back that uses “missed the mark” as a solvent.

He’s losin’ Texas, I can tell. I could tell in March. I can tell now that the song is in the country’s mouth and the committees are finally on the buy. The hook is Langley. The point is the man. Texas is still choosin’ Texas. He was never it.

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James K. Bishop

James K. Bishop is a conservative writer and raconteur hailing from Texas, known for his incisive and often provocative takes on political and cultural issues. With a staunch commitment to originalist constitutional principles, he emphasizes limited government, individual liberties, and traditional American values. Active on X under the handle @James_K_Bishop, he frequently engages his audience with sharp critiques of progressive policies, media narratives, and overreaches by the federal government. His style is direct, often laced with humor and wit, which resonates strongly with his conservative followers.