I received a metric fuckton of texts that were like, “ZOMG YOU GUYS WE ARE SO REPUBLICAN AND CROCKETT HATES ICE CAN YOU BELIEVE IT-ZORZ?!?!?!?” They seem to trace back to a shady republican group. Apart from a couple of milquetoast Cornyn ones, everything else I got was for various Dem candidates despite my living in a very red zip code.

The campaigns have excellent lists, and somebody on the right wanted blue voters to know how very “terrified” they were of her. The only reasonable alternative is that she ran them herself as a low-grade false-flag, and in either case it made me go ahead and decide on Talarico, though I’d have happily voted for either in the general. I think he’s made such a brand of being a blue christian that he’d probably feel obligated to make separation of church and state an important part of his brand, and he’s speaking very explicitly to the wealth divide in a way she hasn’t.

I do tend to think the dust-up over the Talarico’s Allred comment has at least some truth to it, but while I assume he’s much more calculating than his public persona, even in the worst case the story hit my (admittedly white) ears like someone who assumed that his allyship exempted him from micro-aggressions, rather than his being some cackling hypocrite. He’s got his work cut out for him, but if he can energize the base, recover Trump 2024 Hispanics, and get a couple of percentage points’ worth of red voters to flip or even just say, “meh” and stay home, he’s got a chance.

Realistically, I think the most likely scenario is that we’re looking at a pre-guns Beto campaign that comes close but can’t get over the hump versus an unpopular Republican, but I think he’s the best chance we’ve had since then to flip a seat. All of which is incumbent on elections happening semi-normally.

Imagine if that one fire were the series finale. All-time great show if you end it there.

Rubio’s gonna get fired anyway. He made a speech that that didn’t terrify people in Munich as badly as MAGA speeches usually do, so he got a standing ovation, and Trump HAAAAATES that.

I think they’ve both had their issues with where their money comes from, her corporate PACs, him with the Adelson family that’s trying to somehow get gambling legalized in Texas without any Native American reservations and with a Christofascist state government. That said, neither one is a Schumer-style appeaser. He wears a brand of class-conscious social justice theology on his sleeve, throwing the Christian Nationalists’ so-called faith into clear focus, but because of that he’s also very much pitching “electability,” which in Texas right now means “I’m a cishet white guy so maybe some of the racists will stay home on election day.”

She is a firebrand who has made calling out Trump and the gang her full-time job, but her campaign seems to revel more in the idea of pissing off Donald Trump than in letting us know what she’ll do. There is a zeitgeisty element to that, and I think she’d be a more prominent and powerful advocate in Congress, but I think either would slot more into the Progressive wing. Ultimately, either would also be an insane improvement over Cornyn or (gag) Paxton.

Would be remiss of course without mentioning the dustup where a Tiktoker left the Talarico camp for the Crockett camp, saying that Talarico told her he was expecting to run against a mediocre black guy, not a talented black woman. He’s admitted to using the word mediocre about Colin Allred’s prior campaign, and TBF it was extremely mediocre (like Allred knew from day one he had no chance, so why knock yourself out?), but if Talarico did try to add in Allred’s race as (one would hope) a rhetorical flourish, then it was a tone-deaf moment that harmed his credibility in promising to advocate for the black community. “Electability” with white people doesn’t help if you simultaneously depress the vote of the usual 4/9 of Texans who vote blue. I’m as white as Talarico is, but it really gave me pause.