There’s an old saying in campaign politics that you should never post a photo of your candidate eating something at a state fair. Texas state representative James Talarico just reminded Democrats why.
The day after scandal-plagued Texas attorney general Ken Paxton walloped incumbent GOP senator John Cornyn in last week’s Republican Senate primary, the Democratic National Committee posted a photo of their guy Talarico on X. The photo showed the Democratic Senate nominee wearing a shirt with a Texas flag while chowing down on some barbecue. The caption read: “November, here we come.”
The intended takeaway for voters: Sure, Talarico may be a progressive former middle-school teacher, a Presbyterian seminarian from Austin who calls women “neighbors with a uterus,” thinks “God is nonbinary” and, in 2022, pledged to run a “non-meat campaign.” But he’s really a brisket-eatin’, gun-totin’, football-lovin’ Texan just like you.
The DNC also posted two glam shots of the candidate. In one, he harked back to Beto O’Rourke’s famous 2019 Vanity Fair cover, his hands in both back pockets, smiling into the distance against the backdrop of a Texas flag. The other had him posing once again in a Texas flag shirt.
