Permian Basin Democrats Tim McDaniel and Eli Hilbert took to the road on a Saturday in late August to knock doors in the small towns of Crane and McCamey. On either side of remote stretches of U.S. Route 385, pumpjacks bent their necks in perpetual motion and wind turbines spun slowly in the distance.

They were joined by Holly Taylor, the Democratic candidate for Place 9 on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, on their journey to connect with rural voters. Over the past year, Taylor has been on a mission to visit all 254 counties in the state—an ambitious goal for any statewide candidate, let alone one running for an oft-overlooked judicial slot—putting over 65,000 miles on her campaign car.

It was a serene and sunny morning when we arrived in the oil town of Crane, 30 miles south of Odessa and home to just over 3,000 people. The quiet was interrupted only by a rooster’s crow and barking chihuahuas. Hilbert, McDaniel, and Taylor knocked on doors but were often met by silence or a posted warning: “Texans don’t dial 911.” A handful of residents were eager to see a fresh face and air out their grievances without inviting any negative attention.

“Democrat! That’s like cussing around here,” one local resident told the crew. “I’m probably the only Democrat left.”

It’s those far-flung voters that could shrink the margins between Democrats and Republicans in November, and this year there’s a full slate of candidates running for seats in the Texas Legislature and U.S. Congress who are traveling far and wide with hopes of reinventing the party in the eyes of rural Texans. Dubbed the Texas Challengers, the party claims it’s the first time in modern Texas history that there will be a Democrat in every state and federal race. In West Texas—where Republicans often win at rates around 80-20—that means strengthening the Democratic Party’s rickety infrastructure and taking on politicians who have sunk comfortably into the highest seats of power during their long, often uncontested tenures.

“If you are a Republican and you want to hold public office in this state, you’re going to have to fight us for it,” Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said in an interview with the Texas Tribune after announcing the full slate of candidates last December. Recent polling also shows that the governor’s race and the senate race could be won or lost by just a few percentage points, and may be the closest Democrats have come to taking statewide office in 30 years. But despite the party’s achievements, it’s still a rough road for candidates in the vast expanse of West Texas where oil and cultural conservatism reigns, big donors are hesitant to invest, and being an open Democrat is ostracized.

“Rural voters are a huge part of the electoral firewall that the GOP maintains in Texas,” Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin told the Texas Observer. “For Democrats to be successful at the top of the ticket, they need Democratic candidates running competitive races down ballot all over the state.”

According to the Texas Politics Project, 61 percent of rural voters said they would vote for Governor Greg Abbott, while only 23 percent said they would vote for his Democratic opponent Gina Hinojosa. Furthermore, 38 percent of rural voters said they did not know or have an opinion of Hinojosa at all. Approval of the Democratic Party as a whole was critically low, with 53 percent of rural voters saying they hold a very unfavorable opinion.

“We do feel a little left out sometimes in the Democratic Party,” Tim McDaniel, president of the Permian Basin Young Democrats, told the Observer during a monthly meeting at their Midland headquarters. Just down the road, the city was celebrating National Petroleum Day with a tailgate, concert, and gala featuring local Republican officials.

Organizers like McDaniel and Hilbert have been fiercely devoted to progressive causes for years in the Permian Basin, an expansive region that contains much of West Texas and reaches into New Mexico, but maintaining a stable Democratic base is made difficult by the transient nature of jobs in the oil industry and the exodus of local Democrats to other parts of the state. “Everyone in this photo doesn’t live here anymore,” said Hilbert, looking back on a photo of a protest from 2022, “and neither does anybody else that I organized with at that time.”

Eli Hilbert and Tim McDaniel from the Permian Basin Young Democrats, in front of the Crane County courthouse, alongside Holly Taylor, the Democratic candidate for Place 9 on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. (Photo by Eden Shamy)

They also said it can be difficult to activate voters when Democrats hardly run for local office, and more prominent candidates frequently fail to make the journey out west. Oftentimes, the best option they have is to vote for “the lesser of the two evils in the Republican primary,” McDaniel said.

Indeed, like Democratic strongholds in places like South Texas, primaries are where most political battles in West Texas take place—most often between more traditional conservative Republicans and hardline right-wingers. This year, the Democrats in Congressional District 11 actually had a contested primary, one of only a few over the past three decades. An unexpected outsider came out on top.

Claire Reynolds lives over 300 miles away from Midland in the Central Texas suburb of Pflugerville, yet the mother and lawyer managed to handily beat West Texas native Pedro “Pete” Ruiz in the March primary. After the Republican gerrymandering of 2025, Reynolds said she woke up to find her home north of Austin had been plucked out of Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett’s district and tacked onto Congressional District 11—which stretches all the way to Odessa and beyond. The Republican incumbent Congressman August Pfluger is an Air Force veteran and San Angelo native. He hasn’t faced a Democratic opponent since he captured the seat in 2020.

Reynolds quit her job at the State Bar of Texas in December of 2025, days before the filing deadline to launch her underdog campaign for Congress. Every week, she drives hundreds of miles across the district to connect with voters and let it be known that there’s an Austin-area Democrat who cares about West Texas. “I’m not the lady from Austin coming down thinking I know more than them,” Reynolds said over a campaign lunch at Dos Compadres in Midland. It was the second-to-last stop on her five-day trek across all 20 counties in the district. “I’m just here to find out what they need in order to thrive.”

That includes protecting jobs in the energy industry, Reynolds reassured voters at the small cluster of tables at the Midland event. “My big problem is that August Pfluger has stock and owns stakes in several oil and gas companies, and I believe that it’s wrong to profit based on the laws that you write,” she said. “I have no interest in hurting oil and gas.”

Kyle Rable is another first-time candidate at the forefront of Democrats’ battle for West Texas. He’s a 30-year-old father, captain in the U.S. Army Reserve, and Texas Tech doctoral candidate also juggling a campaign for Congressional District 19. Rable is the first Democrat since 2020 to run for the district, which covers the South Plains region including Lubbock, Big Springs, and Andrews. After the crushing red wave of 2024, Rable said he looked at his pregnant wife and knew he needed to do more. Before the Democratic Party even launched the Texas Challengers, Rable decided he was going to run.

“I talked to pretty much every candidate that’s now running out in West Texas,” Rable said in an interview. “I told them that if they do it with me, and they’re within my congressional district, that we would do it together. We were able to recruit so many candidates by just the promise that you won’t do this alone.”

Rable considers himself a church-going, gun-toting, dirt road Democrat, and he’s knocked over 2,000 doors since January. He’s been advocating for greater investment in the region because he believes that the Democratic Party has left farmers and West Texans behind. In a speech before the general assembly at the Texas Democratic Convention in June, Rable said that Democrats owed West Texas an apology for failing to fight back against Republicans. He emphasized the importance of West Texas on the national stage, not only politically but for its cotton, cattle, and energy. “West Texas does matter because real people live there, because it feeds, clothes, and fuels this country!” Rable said.

In mid-July, he launched a campaign tour through the South Plains that was attended by nearly every statewide candidate—with the exception of James Talarico for U.S. Senate and Ben Flores for land commissioner. They rallied in Lubbock, Plainview, Big Springs, and Abilene. “I was able to call in favors, bully, and berate until everyone agreed to it,” Rable said.

Reynolds and Rable have tailored their platforms to focus on kitchen table issues with broad appeal: decreasing healthcare costs, protecting workers and farmers, and regulating powerful corporations like those in the data center and artificial intelligence industries.

Drew Landry, a government professor at South Plains College, said the growing controversy around money in politics, data centers, and Flock cameras can help Democrats get “a foot in the door” with rural Texans. Flock cameras stick out like a sore thumb in the vast, flat stretches of West Texas, and data centers have been popping up around the region. Democrats will have to target the 40 percent of rural voters who say they disapprove of how the state’s leaders have handled corruption, and the 44 percent who would strongly oppose a data center being built in their community.

“We do not want these things destroying our land. We don’t want them using up our water,” Rable said. “It’s already hard out here to grow cotton.”

(Courtesy of Rable campaign)

Rable and Reynolds said they have forged strong relationships with fellow first-time candidates, like Shiloh Salazar, a mother and former educator who is the first Democrat to run for House District 72 since 2004. She’s hoping to take down a nearly 20-year incumbent, Republican Drew Darby. They’ve teamed up with other challengers to campaign on the issues of affordability and data centers, such as Riley Rodriquez in Senate District 28 (sprawling across West Texas, held by Republican Charles Perry), and Malik Williams, who is challenging Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows in his Lubbock-based district. Burrows’ last Democratic opponent, in 2020, got 20.7 percent of the vote; Landry, the professor, ran against him as a Dem in 2018, doing only slightly better with 22.7 percent. 

There are some challengers, however, that appear to be little more than a name on a ballot. Ceasar Sanchez in House District 81, from Loving to Ector County, is practically a ghost. He has had no online presence or communication with local Democrats. The Republican incumbent, state Representative Brooks Landgraf, has comfortably held the seat for a decade and was only contested by a Democrat once before in 2018. Sanchez’ nonexistent campaign is indicative that, despite the party’s mass recruitment efforts, some races still fall through the cracks.

“Getting candidates is one thing. Getting them to do something is another,” Landry said. “I have a feeling a lot of them don’t really know what to do, or they don’t know how to ask for help.”

In the neighboring House District 82 resides the longest serving member of the Texas Legislature, Tom Craddick. The 82-year-old Republican, who once held the House speakership, has represented the district covering Midland, Martin, and Dawson counties for 57 years. When nobody would volunteer to run against him,  stepped down from her position as the Democrat’s Midland County Chair to do it herself. (Like Rable, she didn’t need any prodding by the Texas Challengers initiative.) 

Broadrick, a 68-year-old grandmother of six, saw firsthand the state’s transformation from blue to red. Her campaign strategy has been largely community focused, meeting with local women’s clubs, visiting churches, and working at food banks. However, her campaign has hit a snag due to her husband’s health issues, and she is planning to move out of the district to Georgetown, where she can be closer to family. 

Even with the Texas Challengers initiative, candidates and local organizers told the Observer it can often feel like they’re charting a path through deep red, rural Texas on their own. Rable said he always carries a firearm because he has received threats. Taylor said she’s met local Democrats who’ve had their tires slashed. And McDaniel said they were forced to remove the sign from their Ector County headquarters after they were egged. Many have been told they can’t win, and donations would be better spent elsewhere.

One group that has sought to champion the cause of rural Texas Democrats is the 134 PAC, which is dedicated to helping Democrats in the 134 counties west of Interstate 35 get the resources and support they need to be competitive. Ramon Rodriguez is the PAC’s new Big Bend Regional Director, the first of more regional directors to come as the group seeks to expand its reach. He said they work closely with county chairs and candidates on everything from strategizing and providing campaign materials to helping them run for office, including paying filing fees.

“County chairs have this huge list of to-dos from the Texas Democratic Party,” Rodriguez told the Observer, “but we aren’t at that point where they have all the resources they need to get those done.”

State House candidate Diana Luna of Abilene, left; state House candidate Malik Williams of Lubbock, right. (Photos courtesy of Luna and Williams campaigns)

The day after door knocking in Crane and McCamey, the Permian Basin Democrats received a visit from Rodriguez at their Midland headquarters. He delivered signs and other campaign materials all the way from Austin for them to distribute throughout the area. Rodriguez said the PAC was founded in 2020 by former party chairs and leaders with grassroots support from rural Texans.

Still, he said that rural Democrats have to work three times as hard as incumbent Republicans in the region, who have a broad natural base of voters and plenty of financial resources. Congressman Pfluger currently has over $2.8 million cash on hand compared to Reynolds’ $46,790, the latest federal campaign finance reports show.

“You’re going up against a 500 pound gorilla,” Rodriguez said.

Both Reynolds and Rable have sworn off taking money from corporate PACs. Reynolds also said she wants to ban members of Congress from owning or trading stocks like Pfluger has over his six years in office. Pfluger recently supported the Stop Insider Trading Act, which prohibits new purchases of stocks but comes short of banning members from owning or selling their current stocks. Plfuger did not respond to a request for comment. 

Reynolds invited Pfluger to a debate on October 5, hoping to challenge his record on stock trading and data centers. He accepted the challenge, making it the first confirmed debate of any federal candidates in Texas this election cycle.

Democrats in West Texas were all in agreement that it’s not just about winning in November. It’s about changing how Texans see the Democratic Party, recruiting volunteers, and building something for the next generation. Rable believes if Democrats can win in West Texas, they can win anywhere, and Reynolds is hopeful that the Texas Challengers is only the beginning.

“We should have been doing this 20 years ago,” Reynolds said. “The second best time is now.”

The post ‘Up Against a 500-Pound Gorilla’: Can Dems Make Inroads in Deep-Red West Texas? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

When she meets people who are visiting the Rio Grande Valley for the first time, Mollie Wallace—a 31-year-old occupational therapist in McAllen—usually asks whether they’ve gone to the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge yet.

The refuge is a point of pride for Wallace, who was raised in the Valley. She’s come there through multiple phases of her life, calling the 2,000-plus acres of riparian forest and thornscrub on the southern edge of Alamo a formative place for her and generations of local kids.

“I’ve grown older through here, and it’s a fun reference for anyone who’s from the Valley,” she told the Texas Observer on an early September morning, walking toward the refuge’s observation tower. “I love showing it to people who say, ‘There’s nothing to do in the Valley,’ or ‘We don’t have any green spaces.’”

It’s the first time Wallace has visited since surveyors thrust thin wooden stakes, some painted orange, others pink, into the earth along the levee road from east to west, marking where sections of 30-foot-tall steel bollards atop concrete wall will create a physical barrier miles from the Rio Grande, Texas’ border with Mexico. At some point in the future, Santa Ana’s visitors will see the wall before they get to the refuge’s trailheads, which will then only be accessible through a locked gate. Though the wall will not run through the heart of the refuge, it will trap much of it beyond steel. 

Mollie Wallace at Santa Ana on September 15 (Gaige Davila)

The construction—which started in June this year and paused in mid-July because of a lawsuit from the Hidalgo County Irrigation District—is nearly a decade in the making. President Donald Trump’s first administration quietly prepared to build a wall through Santa Ana in 2017, which was condemned by Valley’s congressional leadership, local residents, and beyond. The plan then was for an 18-foot-tall wall to go through the refuge, essentially destroying its function as a wildlife corridor. 

Saving the refuge from wall construction became a coalescing issue in the Rio Grande Valley and across the state. During one protest in August 2017, hundreds of people formed a human chain along the levee road. By the end of that year, CBP was intent on Santa Ana being the start of a 60-mile stretch of new barrier. 

Then, thanks to an effort led by U.S. House Representative Henry Cuellar, language was added to 2018 appropriations legislation shielding Santa Ana—called the “crown jewel” of a federal refuge system belonging to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that runs along the Rio Grande—from wall construction. The following year, additional Valley sites were added to this exemption list. Despite a brief scare when Trump declared a national emergency to shift Defense Department funds into wall building, Santa Ana survived that administration unscathed.

That state of affairs lasted until this past summer, when Congress passed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. As the nation’s attention fixated on the healthcare implications, the act pumped an unprecedented $46.6 billion into border barrier construction, drawing little outcry at the time. This bill—what’s called a reconciliation measure that doesn’t pass through the typical appropriations process—did not reiterate the protections for Santa Ana and other sites including the La Lomita chapel and National Butterfly Center, creating a green light for Trump to ignore the will of Congress as expressed in at least six prior funding measures. 

Contractors erected two short sections of wall in June and July on the western edge of Santa Ana, using what appear to be older bollards. Those bollards, weathered likely from years in storage, end a dozen or so yards from the black-painted bollards built during the first Trump administration. That section of older wall is the same that Trump spoke in front of, and signed, in 2021, in what was his first public appearance after the January 6 insurrection and former President Joe Biden’s election. CBP did not respond to the Observer’s emailed questions on when the bollards were made.

Steel bollards installed in July at Santa Ana (Gaige Davila)

Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat, is now trying to get the Rio Grande Valley sites exempted again through the next bill outlining the Homeland Security budget, he told the Observer in a phone call. This time, he said, neither appropriations nor reconciliation money could be used for border fencing through Santa Ana, La Lomita, or the other sites. He’s hopeful that Congress can get the bill passed before the end of the year.

“They’re trying to beat the clock, in my opinion,” Cuellar said, referring to the GOP. “And the more time the local folks can give us through lawsuits or whatever way to delay it—so we can at least get into December and hopefully have a shot at trying to pass the appropriation bill with this appropriate language—that will pretty much stop them [in] their tracks.”

Santa Ana is not in Cuellar’s current district but rather in Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz’s, which stretches north all the way to Seguin.

“The border construction pause is up to the courts,” her office told the Observer in a statement. “Congresswoman De La Cruz has supported exemptions specifically for the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, and she continues to consult closely with community leaders regarding ongoing construction plans.”

During the Biden administration, De La Cruz voted for the government funding bill for fiscal year 2024 that included the Rio Grande Valley site exemptions. She also voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill, which did not include these protections. (Her electoral opponent, Bobby Pulido, told the Observer in his first public comment on the Santa Ana wall in late July: “I haven’t said anything about it, but I obviously oppose it.”

The last protest over Santa Ana to get any news coverage was in February, as attention to wall building has instead concentrated at Big Bend, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is clearing portions of the West Texas national park for patrol roads and vehicle barriers.  Nearby residents sued the federal government last week to prevent further construction, following months of bipartisan befuddlement over the Trump administration’s border wall plans.

Wallace remembers the greater level of public resistance nearly a decade ago, when she was a student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

“It just kind of felt like what we did mattered,” Wallace said while reminiscing about those protests, which she attended. “I don’t speak for everyone, but I definitely feel like everything I do is like a drop in the bucket. I feel very powerless. But it’s not a good excuse to not show up.”

From atop the refuge’s observation tower, the new wall can be seen. Once the fence is finished, it will make an imposing scar through the north side of this 360-degree view that today shows what this region looked like long before it was called the Rio Grande Valley, filled with hardy, drought-tolerant trees, thorny plants, and tropical flowers.

“I think it represents us so well,” Wallace said of Santa Ana. “So to put a wall through it is just metaphorically and physically and literally such a stab to our entire home.”

Spencer Construction and Royal Concrete, the contractors building the wall through Santa Ana, stopped working in July after the Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2 filed a lawsuit against them, alleging that they were building on irrigation district property; had put debris in the irrigation district’s canal, which abuts the levee; and were trespassing. The canal supplies water from the Rio Grande to several thousand acres of farms and homes, including being the sole provider of water for Pharr, San Juan, and Alamo, according to the lawsuit. 

Two weeks later, in August, the Department of Justice (DOJ) moved the lawsuit into a federal court and requested the case be dismissed, arguing that state trespassing laws did not apply. Federal District Judge Arthur Jones, in McAllen, has yet to rule on the case but has ordered construction paused until October 15.

Scott Nicol, an art professor at South Texas College, has spent years advocating against the government building border wall anywhere in the Rio Grande Valley.

“The Trump administration goes on and on and on and on and on about how there were all these huge number of crossings during the Biden administration,” Nicol said while walking around the Santa Ana fence sections in early September. “That’s after Trump had already built hundreds and hundreds of miles of border walls. You had this huge spike in crossings, but the walls are there, so what the hell did those walls do?” 

Nicol was active in a coalition whose pressure helped push the site exemptions during the first Trump administration. About 12 miles west of Santa Ana, the historic La Lomita chapel will reportedly see the wall run south off of the levee—atop which almost all border fencing in Hidalgo County runs, part of a compromise approach stretching back to the W. Bush administration—and toward the river to accommodate the aged house of worship. Another few miles upriver, the National Butterfly Center, which the levee bisects, presently shows no signs of construction. However, there are placemarker buoys in the bend of the Rio Grande that creates the southern border of the center’s land, signaling that large, orange “waterborne barrier system”—sometimes known by critics as razor buoys—will soon arrive. Significant stretches of Hidalgo County already host finished wall.

“I think it was a lot easier to get people concerned when it was coming, and there was a chance of stopping it,” Nicol said. “I think it becomes difficult, very difficult now, because it’s like, ‘Well, shit, it’s already happened.’”

Birders along the trails of Santa Ana (Gaige Davila)

That’s the fight at hand in Big Bend: trying to stop the bulldozers before a sense of inevitability kicks in. In August, crews and heavy machinery arrived to start constructing what CBP now says are going to be patrol roads and vehicle barriers. But earlier this year, Big Bend was also set to get the same steel bollards making their way through Santa Ana. Bipartisan resistance from Texas congressional and legislative officials, and even Texas Governor Greg Abbott, made CBP change plans. Though CBP assured the public it was not yet constructing its planned vehicle barriers or patrol roads in the area, a New York Times investigation using satellite imagery found that it was.

CBP can legally tear through Big Bend and Santa Ana, protected public lands, in part thanks to the Trump administration’s waiving environmental laws to accelerate barrier construction along the southern border. That legal mechanism was created in 2005 by the Real ID Act, allowing the Department of Homeland Security secretary to waive dozens of environmental laws to “ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads” that make up the southern border.  

On September 14, the Hidalgo County drainage district named the United States as a defendant in its lawsuit against Spencer Construction and Royal Concrete, the wall builders. It’s seeking a permanent injunction, hoping to stop wall construction in the area completely. 

“The harm Plaintiff will suffer is irreparable because damage to irrigation infrastructure, interference with public water management operations, and unauthorized alteration of Plaintiff’s Property cannot be adequately compensated solely through monetary damages,” the filing reads. “Furthermore, the potential disruption or loss of water service to Plaintiff’s customers also cannot be fully compensated by damages. Plaintiff’s customers [sic] loss of water would be catastrophic and cannot be remedied.” 

During the early, muggy mornings of September, a month ahead of when wall construction might resume, birders, hikers, and bikers continued passing through this once-protected wildlife corridor. No one on the levee road paid much attention to the thin wooden stakes, some of which were already broken or taken out of the ground and thrown yards away from their points of origin. 

The levee road is supposedly closed, according to the refuge. Maps for visitors now highlight the road in red to signify this. But people, Border Patrol agents and Alamo Police officers included, quietly pedaled down the caliche and into the trails on their bikes as dawn faded, using the road as if it was not a construction site. Because, for now, it’s not. 

The post Santa Ana’s Last Stand appeared first on The Texas Observer.

It’s late June, more than two hours into the 2,518th episode of his mega-popular podcast, and Joe Rogan is critiquing part of James Talarico’s anatomy.

With his guest, the conservative-leaning comedian Tim Dillon, Rogan was riffing on possible 2028 presidential contenders. Dillon offered up Jon Ossoff, the well-known senior U.S. Senator from Georgia, prompting a “Who’s that guy?” from Rogan. The show’s producer having pulled up a photo of Ossoff, Rogan began to assess.

“That looks like a president. … His neck is medium. It’s not too thin; it’s not too thick,” he said. “Like Talarico’s neck is a little too small, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, that’s probably true,” replied Dillon.

This bit of neck-related commentary wasn’t turned into viral social media clips or fodder for quick-turn news writeups. But, frequently, Rogan’s off-handed political claims made deep in the woods of his meandering “longform” conversations are indeed treated as newsworthy—part of a long, hard turnaround over the last five years or so.

Gone are the days when presidential contender Bernie Sanders was ostracized for having appeared on the transphobic Rogan’s show and when liberals mounted a campaign for Spotify to deplatform the host over COVID-19 misinformation. Instead, presidential flameout Kamala Harris’ failure to appear on Rogan’s podcast was treated as a major hinge-point in her 2024 collapse. 

And, a little over a year ago, Talarico’s appearance on the show was among the biggest stepping stones in his rise from relatively obscure state rep to hot-shot U.S. Senate nominee. That July 2025 conversation began with Rogan not knowing which elected office Talarico held and ended, 133 minutes later, with the former telling the latter to run for president. “A Joe Rogan-Blessed Democrat? James Talarico Draws Eyes of a Party Desperate For New Leaders,” swiftly blared Time—and even this month GQ described Talarico as “a progressive, Christian state legislator who managed to hang with Joe Rogan.” The out-of-state money and support flowed like Black Rifle coffee during a Rogan podcast.

Joe Rogan laughs as President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office on April 18. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

A month and a half after that episode, Talarico officially declared for Senate. But, over the following year, it’s been unclear whether Rogan supports this bid by the man he told to run for the White House—or even to what extent the Austin-based host is aware of the race that’s unfolding around him. 

Using three separate sites that compile transcripts of Rogan podcast episodes, the Texas Observer identified 20 episodes in which Talarico or his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, were mentioned. A few clear trends emerge. Rogan often brings up Talarico when discussing possible ’28 presidential candidates—and particularly after bashing California Governor Gavin Newsom—rather than anything having to do with the 2026 midterms, in which the Austin state legislator is actually running. And Rogan tends to talk exclusively about Talarico’s position on the Ten Commandments being posted in public schools. As for Paxton, the state’s current attorney general, Rogan largely mentions him as the man who foolishly sued Texas cities for decriminalizing marijuana. 

Despite the largely positive comments on one hand and primarily negative on the other, Rogan usually talks all the way around the fact that the two men are engaged in a high-profile race that one will win and the other lose. Whether through studious avoidance or simple ignorance, he leaves the question open: Does he care who wins the Texas Senate race?

In the episode released on July 18, 2025, Joe Rogan opened by explaining to James Talarico that he’d discovered Talarico when Austin comedian Brian Simpson showed him a video of “some lecture … not a lecture, a speech you were giving about the Ten Commandments in schools.” 

Indeed, Talarico had recently gone viral on social media with a clip from a House floor exchange about Senate Bill 10, which requires public schools to display those principles of Mosaic law.

A few minutes in, perhaps detecting a certain vagueness in Rogan’s introduction and questions, Talarico specified: “I serve here in Austin at the state Capitol,” prompting the question “What is your position?”—to which Talarico responded by explaining the bicameral nature of the state’s legislative branch. 

Talarico, also a Presbyterian seminarian, elaborated his position that forcing Christianity on public school students would turn kids away from religion, and he explained to Rogan the role of big-money Christian nationalists Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks in Texas politics. He also made a biblical case for abortion access, arguing that the Virgin Mary chose to receive Jesus in her womb.

It was then in the middle of a late-episode tangent on government secrecy around Jeffrey Epstein that Rogan somewhat suddenly said, “You need to run for president,” setting in motion the wheels of history. 

Since then, Talarico has come up in at least 10 of Rogan’s podcast shows. There was a September 2025 Matthew McConaughey episode, in which the Texas actor responded skeptically to Rogan’s summation of Talarico’s view on the Ten Commandments issue. “When you look at the commandments, is there anything that anyone out there is going like, ‘I disagree with that one,’” said McConaughey.

Replied Rogan to his producer: “Let’s pull up the Ten Commandments, Jamie”—words that listeners of the show will hear ring in their minds clearer than a bell.

A month later, there was another exchange with National Geographic correspondent Mariana van Zeller, who had heard the Talarico interview and was so enthused that she compared the lawmaker to Martin Luther King Jr., which Rogan seemed to think was a tad much. Then, an episode released that New Year’s Eve with Australian comedian James McCann, in which Rogan called Talarico’s abortion argument “bizarre” and said it “doesn’t jive with how most people view Christianity.” And a February conversation in which another comedian, Matt McCusker, informed Rogan of the then-recent primary spat involving Colin Allred, Talarico, and Jasmine Crockett—producing great confusion on Rogan’s part. 

In general, however, Rogan stuck across these episodes to his script of bringing up Talarico as a favorable contrast to Newsom or to recite the Ten Commandments issue. Among the second category, Rogan engaged Vice President JD Vance in a lengthy July back-and-forth that led to Vance tapping out with a “We can agree to disagree.” 

As for Paxton, the scandal-laden Texas attorney general who defeated incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn in a bruising May GOP runoff, the podcast trail extends back a bit further. 

In January 2022, about a year and a half after he moved to Austin from California, Rogan learned who Paxton was from James Lindsay, a Tennessee man who runs the right-wing Twitter account “@ConceptualJames.” (Dialogue: “Who’s that?” “Your attorney general.” “Texas attorney general?” “Yeah.”) Then, two years later, Rogan told comedian Jeff Dye the following about marijuana’s legal status in the Lone Star State: “Apparently it’s decriminalized here in Austin, praise Jesus, but then I heard that Ken Paxton is trying to sue the City of Austin—who I’ve met. He’s a very nice gentleman. Ken, how dare you? … This is stupid, Ken.” 

Across at least eight additional episodes, Rogan generally acknowledged the AG’s existence only to criticize the latter’s stance toward legal weed, other than a passing defense in August 2024 of Paxton’s efforts to root out supposed voter fraud.

Based on this evidentiary record as maintained by Spotify and YouTube, it is possible that Rogan’s political awareness simply begins and ends at the bounds of his own recorded conversations; thus, to him, Talarico and Paxton also start and finish at the edges of his niche interests. It is also possible that—while Rogan explicitly endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2024—he’s intentionally limiting his engagement with this race to avoid blowback from part of his audience. Some of his apparent ignorance, too, could be feigned—a means to stand in for a poorly informed listener. 

It’s hard to guess based on the publicly available material, and his stray comments about politics more generally do little to clarify.

In both late July and mid-August, Rogan made remarks to the effect that Democrats taking over Texas would be deleterious. “The liberals that want to turn Texas blue, like, don’t. You’re going to ruin it. You’re going to ruin it for you, too. … Balance is important,” he said in the earlier instance. “[Austin is] a liberal city surrounded by like hardcore Republicans with guns and tigers. And it works. … It makes for nice people.” (Talarico responded to this, saying he agreed with the idea and thinks “the best color for Texas is purple.”)

One thing that’s clear: Rogan is haunted by what he sees as the liberal excesses of his former West Coast home state. But what does “balance” look like in a particular race for U.S. Senate, in which the candidates are opposed on issues including, to name one, marijuana legalization? We don’t know, because he won’t let his conversations become specific enough to find out.

Requests for comment sent to an email address and multiple social media accounts associated with Rogan or the podcast went unacknowledged.

This ambiguity came to something of a head in mid-September, when Ron White, the stand-up comic who is sometimes known as Tater Salad and became famous in his days touring with Larry the Cable guy et al., put the question rather plainly: “So what we gonna do about the Texas Senate—you met Talarico, you liked the guy, right?” 

“I did like him. I liked his thoughts on the Ten Commandments in schools,” answered Rogan, launching into his well-worn spiel.

Then, like a thunderbolt of contextual knowledge, the surprisingly erudite Tater Salad, who hails from a small town in the Texas Panhandle, said that he’d first noticed Talarico when the rep was opposing school vouchers in the Legislature. Apparently unfamiliar, Rogan requested an explanation of the extremely high-profile school privatization scheme, which White provided before concluding: “You really can’t put Ken Paxton back in office in the state of Texas. That guy’s just too corrupt; he’s just a bad egg and we don’t need him around here.” 

Without missing a beat: “There’s a lot of shenanigans with weed in this state right now,” Rogan said, redirecting to his pet Paxton-related topic. 

An hour later, though, White managed to steer the ship back to Talarico, saying the Democrat could be an unusually ethical leader.

“I would hope so,” responded Rogan, before expressing a reservation: “He’s said some things that I think are questionable,” with the subsequent conversation roughly revealing that the “things” are trans participation in competitive sports and gender-affirming treatment for minors. 

White tried to put Rogan’s objection in relative context, summarizing the various scandals that have gotten Paxton sued and impeached over the years. “He’s a criminal, just a piece of shit.”

“I don’t know enough about him,” Rogan replied.

Well, at least there are still a few weeks left to brush up.

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