In 2024, Texas was a battleground for the culture wars.
Democrats highlighted the state’s restrictive abortion policies in both the presidential and Senate races that year. They spent millions on ads featuring testimonials of women who suffered health consequences as a result of Texas’ abortion ban. Republicans, meanwhile, poured money into ads casting Democrats as weak on immigration and claiming they supported gender transitions for children.
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This year, it’s all about the economy.
In some of their first major policy speeches of the general election, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, candidates in this year’s competitive Senate race, unveiled competing economic plans to address the soaring cost of living.
Talarico laid out his “New American Dream” Wednesday featuring an array of policy proposals: universal child care, dividends from taxing artificial intelligence, medical debt forgiveness and investment in public higher and vocational education. The plan also tackled issues Democratic candidates often don’t touch, such as cracking down on tax fraud to bring down the federal deficit.
“The American Dream has become an American Nightmare. It’s too expensive to buy a home,” Talarico said during a speech Wednesday. “It’s too expensive to get married and have kids. It’s too expensive to retire comfortably. People are working hard every day. They’re playing by the rules. But those rules of today weren’t written for us. They were written for billionaires.”
Meanwhile, Paxton is on a statewide tour this week laying out a “Protecting the Texas Promise” plan that would use tax cuts to subsidize home down payments, health care premiums and “developing a healthy lifestyle,” including gym memberships and GLP-1 medications. Both candidates also propose making the child tax credit permanent.
“We all know that Texans and Americans are struggling with expenses, including medical expenses, and I want to make it easier for people to pay those expenses,” Paxton said at a Tuesday rally in Allen, Texas, to tout his economic plan. “The entire country depends on how this election turns out: Whether we keep the Senate, whether we’re going to tell the rest of the world that we’ve elected a liberal socialist Democrat.”
Talarico and Paxton have been neck and neck in public polls, and Talarico is one of the most prodigious fundraisers in the country, already raising more than $68 million. But no Democrat has won statewide in Texas in more than three decades, despite promising signs for past Democrats. Democratic Rep. Colin Allred challenged Sen. Ted Cruz in 2024 but lost by more than eight percentage points.
Candidates nationally have pivoted this year to highlighting economic issues as voters list affordability as a top concern. The economy and high prices were by a wide margin the most important issue for voters, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted last month. While 54 percent of registered voters put the economy as one of their top three issues, only 15 percent listed abortion or health care. Just 6 percent listed equality, women’s rights, racism or LGBTQ issues.
“Most people are going to resonate with just getting by right now,” said Emily Herrell, a nurse from McKinney, Texas, who attended Talarico’s economic platform announcement. “I’d love to figure out the abortion issues as well, but I think that’s kind of further down the line.”
Herrell said reproductive care was a major priority for her as a health care worker, but for most voters, “we’ve got to just be able to survive right now.” She lauded Talarico’s proposal to forgive medical debt, noting her family was $20,000 in debt after her son was diagnosed with cancer at age 6.
Democrats view the economy as a major vulnerability for Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused a spike in prices for fuel and other imported goods, and President Donald Trump has dismissed affordability concerns as a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.
Talarico’s campaign disparaged the Paxton proposal as an about face in response to growing voter frustration with the economy.
“The idea that Ken Paxton, a multimillionaire who owns 15 properties, has suddenly decided to care about Texans’ pocketbooks on his 479th day of running for U.S. Senate is laughable,” Talarico’s campaign said in a statement.
Paxton pushed back, saying his plan would bring some of the biggest tax cuts for Texans in a generation and criticizing Talarico for voting against a measure to bar Texas from ever adopting an income tax. He also noted that inflation spiked under President Joe Biden, blaming Democrats for high prices.
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The aftermath of the covid pandemic, which disrupted global supply chains, contributed to upward pressure on inflation during the Biden administration. Fuel price spikes caused by Russia’s the 2022 invasion of Ukraine were also a factor. Still, several Democrats criticized their own party for focusing too much on social issues in 2024 and not enough on the economy, giving Republicans an opening to cast them as more concerned with gender than voters’ pocket book concerns.
Republicans hammered Democrats with ads claiming Democrats wanted to legalize medical gender transitions for minors without parental consent. Cruz, who faced a competitive challenge by Allred in that year’s Senate race, credited his ads on trans youth as a major factor in his victory.
“That there was a mistake,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), who is running in a competitive seat won by Trump in 2024, said of the 2024 focus on social issues. “Last cycle, I was having some very serious arguments with my own caucus on some of the messaging on the national campaign. I don’t feel that way anymore.”
Neither Talarico nor Paxton has completely abandoned the social issues that drove the 2024 race. Paxton has repeatedly gone after Talarico for his support of trans youth and his past comments using his faith to justify progressive policy.
“First of all, he said God is nonbinary,” Paxton told supporters at the Allen rally. “This is a guy that’s also using the Bible and the story of Mary and Jesus to justify late-term abortions.”
Talarico maintains that abortion access is a priority. Still, he features abortion far less in his campaign materials than Allred did in his race two years ago against Cruz. Talarico has not run an ad focusing exclusively on abortion this year, and his campaign website devotes more real estate to combating corruption and helping to bring down the high costs of living. Allred ran several ads focusing on abortion, including with OB-GYNs and women who were denied abortions.
Texas maintains some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, barring the procedure in cases of rape and incest. The state has an exception if a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, but the stiff penalties have had a chilling effect on doctors attempting the procedure. Doctors can be prosecuted and face life in prison if they are found to have violated the abortion ban.
Activists supporting abortion access say they believe Democrats can still incorporate reproductive health into an economic message. Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, noted an unplanned pregnancy could be financially ruinous for low-income families with high costs of child care, housing and food.
Timmaraju also said Paxton’s past as attorney general enforcing the state’s abortion ban gives him a record Democrats can run against, even if it isn’t the top issue in this year’s election.
“Ken Paxton is public enemy number one on abortion nationwide,” Timmaraju said. “It would be a mistake not to go after him on this.”
Amanda Zurawski, an abortion activist who was one of the top surrogates for Democrats in Texas and in the presidential race in 2024, said she didn’t fault Talarico for focusing on the economy. She said she sympathized with focusing on the economy early in the race, with months remaining to discuss abortion.
Zurawski rose to national attention for suing Texas in 2023 after she was a denied an abortion to end her nonviable pregnancy. The complications from her pregnancy nearly killed her before doctors finally agreed to perform the procedure. She has since worked with a network of women with similar stories to advocate for abortion access.
“James has been extremely supportive of me and my work,” Zurawski said, adding that she texted with Talarico shortly after the primary and he seemed open to working on reproductive issues together. “And so when he’s ready to reach out if he wants to work together, I’ll be very happy to support him.”
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