Will a Data Center Backlash Help James Talarico Turn Texas Blue?
Texas voters are souring on their state's growth machine and the long-ruling GOP that's claimed credit for it.
Texas might finally turn blue, and the man poised to do it is a mask-wearing, trans rights–supporting, Gnostic Gospel–quoting liberal from Austin. In an already tough year for Republicans, voter dissatisfaction at the state's data center boom is giving the Democrat an edge.
A few weeks out from the 2026 midterm elections, the polls have been giving state Rep. James Talarico (D–Austin) a small, steady edge over Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the race to fill the Senate seat currently occupied by Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994. The chattering class's constantly misfiring prediction that the latest liberal challenger will beat the favored Republican has made "Texas turning blue" a mockable meme—the political equivalent of Charlie Brown winding up to kick the football.
But this year may be different. The national environment is very bad for Republicans. President Donald Trump's unpopular tariffs and unpopular war have made him, well, unpopular and given GOP candidates little to run on. Texas Republicans are also saddled with Paxton, who won a hotly contested primary despite having little natural charisma and a lot of scandals (both personal and political) to explain away.
Republicans' political headwinds have made Talarico, a 37-year-old legislator with a history that puts him solidly to the left of the median Texas voter, a surprisingly competitive candidate. Some of Talarico's edge can no doubt be chalked up to the candidate's own political skill and fundraising advantage. But he is also benefiting from a late-breaking development that few saw coming: the Lone Star's data center revolt.
For as long as Republicans have run Texas, they've been able to claim credit for the state's decades-long economic growth streak. But the grassroots groundswell of opposition to Texas' data center boom has helped to neutralize that traditional GOP advantage. In solidly red rural areas, large majorities are telling pollsters that they are opposed to the hundreds of data centers proposed in their backyard.
When Republicans thus talk about their economic stewardship today, it conjures up not positive feelings of persistent prosperity but dissatisfaction at all the ways the party has allowed an unpopular data center to be built next door. In a tight race, that might just be enough to give Talarico the last little push he needs to finally turn Texas blue.
Lab-Grown Liberals vs. the GOP Growth Machine
All the Texas Senate races of the past couple of decades have taken place within a growth machine. From 1998 through 2024, the Lone Star state posted the fourth-highest GDP growth rate, a period that roughly matches the GOP's unbroken record of statewide election wins. Not a day goes by, it seems, without a major corporation announcing a Texas megaproject or a billionaire relocating to booming Austin.
The state's frenetic growth rate has given the Texas GOP a good story to tell voters about why they should continue Republican rule: Under their low-tax, low-regulation regime, Texas has prospered. The jobs and businesses flooding into the state tend to be coming from states ruled by the Democrats trying to unseat them.
Those Texas Democrats whose bids for statewide office have managed to electrify liberals, meanwhile, have been ill-suited to convince voters that they'll keep the "Texas Miracle" going. There's an old joke that "Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in love." In Texas, this hopeless romanticism has led to repeated heartbreak. In 2014, Wendy Davis inspired a national media buzz with her pro-abortion messaging while running for governor against Greg Abbott. Beto O'Rourke's style-over-substance challenge to Ted Cruz in 2018 produced a similar mania. Both lost.
You might expect Talarico to meet a similar fate. The fresh-faced lawmaker seems almost grown in a lab to leave liberals giddy while making swing voters stick with the GOP. A former teacher, he first won elected office in 2018, when he flipped an open Texas House seat in the Austin suburbs from red to blue. At 29 years old, he was then the youngest member of the Texas Legislature.
Analyses of lawmakers' voting record put Talarico squarely in the ideological middle of his fellow Democrats, and well to the left of the state's political center. His national star began to rise among Democrats when he used religious arguments to challenge Texas Republicans' culture-war battles over education.
In 2021, Texas Republicans proposed a bill requiring K-12 athletes to play on girls' or boys' sports teams according to the sex listed on their birth certificates. Two years later, they introduced a measure that would require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, cited his liberal brand of Protestantism to oppose both bills. "Trans children are God's children, made in God's own image. There's nothing wrong with them. Nothing at all. They are perfect. They are beautiful, and they are sacred," he said in a floor speech opposing the sports bill. In a debate on the Ten Commandments bill, he declared the legislation "deeply un-Christian," citing Christ's instructions in the Gospel of Matthew to pray privately. (The sports bill eventually passed. The 2023 Ten Commandments bill failed, but a near-identical bill would pass in 2025.)
Conservative Christians would quibble with Talarico's progressive readings of the Bible. For national Democrats and liberal-leaning magazine writers, however, his penchant for reframing the Annunciation as a pro-abortion parable and his citations of the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas to support trans rights all served as proof that this "deeply religious" Democrat could effectively speak to Christian swing voters in their own terms.
Talarico has also taken many secular positions that might be hard sells in Texas. In May 2020, a couple of months into the COVID-19 pandemic and weeks before George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, Talarico declared that racism was the real virus. At a 2022 animal welfare fundraiser, a mask-wearing Talarico said he was running a vegan campaign. The same year, he said in a public hearing, again wearing a mask, that "fossil fuels are destroying the planet."
In a state where oil, gas, and beef are champion industries, swing voters to not swoon ordinarily for race-critical, carbon-neutral veganism. Talarico himself seems to have conceded that point. He's dispelled rumors of his veganism by eating barbecue on camera and waved away his past wokisms as "cringey" and "miss[ing] the mark." Even so, Talarico's campaign platform remains stridently progressive. He wants to tax billionaires and raise the minimum wage. If it were up to him, he'd open up Medicare to everyone, regardless of age, and would codify abortion protections into law. He's pro–marijuana legalization and fanatically anti–school choice.
So why are polls showing Talarico maintaining a consistent two- to six-point edge over Paxton?
In one sense, his continued leftward lean is an electoral boon. In a race with a clear enthusiasm gap, some 91 percent of Democrats say they'll be supporting Talarico in the general election. Only 79 percent of Republicans say the same about their candidate. Talarico has also been blessed with a national environment that's shaping up to be a bloodbath for Republicans, who have to answer for the rising prices driven by Trump's tariffs and the Iran war.
But there is one final factor putting Talarico over the edge: a statewide data center revolt that's souring Texas voters on their state's growth machine and neutralizing the pro-growth message that has carried the GOP through so many other tough election cycles.
It's the Data Centers, Stupid
In November 2025, on the heels of Google's decision to invest $40 billion in data center development in the state, Gov. Greg Abbott proudly declared, "Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy." Just a few months later, the governor was vowing to impose new regulations on data centers to "protect" Texans from the consequences of their rampant development.
The U.S. has experienced a rapid revolt against data centers this year, and in few places has that backlash been more sudden or more pronounced than in Texas. According to a 2025 poll by the University of Texas at Austin, nearly 60 percent of Texans were either supportive or neutral about a data center being built in their neighborhood. In August 2026, 57 percent said they would oppose a local data center project.
This backlash against data centers couldn't have come at a worse time for Texas Republicans, or, consequently, at a better time for Talarico. The policies the Texas GOP have long touted as the key to the state's economic success—loose land use and environmental regulations, no state income tax, and the cheap commercial energy prices created by its deregulated energy sector—are the same policies attracting data centers. When the most visible recent consequence of those pro-growth policies is a data center boom most Texans hate, the state's Republicans are having to run away from what were once their prime selling points.
The sudden negative turn in public opinion on data centers has "proven a catalyst for people raising questions about governance and the economy in the state," says James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Making matters worse, says Henson, is the geography of the data center backlash. Opposition to these projects is concentrated in rural areas that have long been Republican strongholds and in suburban areas where the party needs to stay competitive to win statewide elections.
As Abbott's pivot demonstrates, Texas Republicans feel acutely vulnerable on this issue and are scrambling to adopt policies that ensure these developments do not lead to higher electricity prices for residential consumers. Paxton himself has called for a raft of new regulations on these facilities' water and power use and for ending a sales tax exemption on data centers, as well as some more off-the-wall conservative-coded policies, such as holding data centers criminally liable for facilitating AI chatbots that "endanger" children.
Talarico's data center proposal isn't all that different. He too would require data centers to pay for the full costs of their power and would end the sales tax exemption they can currently claim on equipment purchases. He'd also give local communities veto power over data center projects. That makes him more moderate on data centers than fellow Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who is running for governor against Abbott. She's called for a moratorium on data center construction until the state Legislature can convene to discuss "protections" for Texans.
Talarico's moderation could be partly explained by the fact that data centers are more popular, relatively speaking, in heavily Democratic urban areas. He also represents a slice of Austin, which has become a booming tech town. Why risk upsetting one's base when long-ruling Republicans already have to own the data center boom they were so recently bragging about?
'Talafreako'
The 2026 midterm environment seems almost tailor-made to neutralize Republicans' long-time advantages in Texas. Nationally, they have to own higher prices. Locally, they have to own an unpopular data center boom. Waning voter concerns about illegal immigration have caused their favored red-meat issue to turn a dull brown.
The Texas GOP's only weapon left is personal attacks on the man they call "Talafreako"—some weirdo liberal who calls trans kids "perfect" and thinks racism is the real virus. Talarico's persistent lead in the polls and on the prediction markets (which, in late October, put the chances of him winning at nearly 70 percent) suggest that these attacks are not working.
One could sense Republicans' desperation when right-wing influencers spun up a rumor that Talarico was absent from the campaign trail in early October because he was in a mental health facility in Ohio. (The hospital publicly denied ever treating Talarico. The candidate himself said he'd been recovering from the flu and said he'd never even visited Ohio.)
When Republicans call Talarico a freak, they mean to cast him as abnormal and off-putting: a "freak of nature." But freak has multiple usages. The word can also mean an unpredicted or unusual event: a "freak occurrence." Talarico succeeding in ending Republicans' three-decade run of statewide victories in Texas would fit the latter definition.
Rather than run from the Talafreako barb, Talarico's campaign has emblazoned merch with the intended insult. They at least seem to appreciate the irony of it all.
If Talarico is a freak, that will make his likely victory all the more freaky.
