Politics

Texas Democrats think this is finally the year they’ll flip the Senate

Published

1 month ago

May 27, 2026

Texas Democrats have wandered in the wilderness for decades. They hope a seminarian-turned-politician will finally lead them out.

Now that Republicans have nominated Attorney General Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate, Democrats see November as their best opportunity this century to flip Texas blue. They have a favorable political environment, aided by nationwide dissatisfaction with the economy and President Donald Trump’s leadership. They see the Texas GOP fractured after a messy Senate primary that took out Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of the party’s senior statesmen, and a potentially fatally flawed candidate in Paxton with his significant personal baggage.

They think their nominee, state Rep. James Talarico, is the ideal candidate to break through.

“Democrats have been in the desert for three decades,” said Mark McKinnon, a longtime GOP strategist and adviser to former President George W. Bush. “Talarico could be Moses.”

Cliff Walker, a Texas Democratic strategist and principal at Seeker Strategies, echoed the sentiment: “Folks are pretty damn bullish. I think this is the year.”

The pieces are all aligning, Democratic strategists, lawmakers and activists argue: Talarico is a charismatic candidate who has fundraising prowess and boasts a lead in early head-to-head polling.

Still, it’s a target that has long eluded Democrats in one of America’s most conservative, and costliest, battlegrounds. In election cycle after cycle, they’ve raised their hopes and poured money into trying to flip a statewide seat blue. Try as they might, Texas Democrats haven’t elected one of their own to the Senate since 1988.

Paxton won’t make it easy. The Texas attorney general, who defeated Cornyn by a wide margin in Tuesday’s runoff, emerged from the most expensive Senate primary on record with his eyes trained on November. After securing Trump’s endorsement last week, Paxton announced he’d remove all ads attacking Cornyn from the airwaves and instead focus his gaze on Talarico, who he calls a “leftist lunatic” and “Talafreako.”

“My opponent is the most extreme radical the Democrats have ever nominated,” Paxton said in his victory speech Tuesday. “No matter what he says or how much he raises, the reality is that James Talarico is going to be nothing more than a Texas-based puppet for Chuck Schumer and the national Democrats.”

Texas Democrats have been bullish before. In 2014, former state Sen. Wendy Davis elicited hopes of flipping the governor’s mansion, but her campaign spent $36 million only to lose to then-Attorney General Greg Abbott by a whopping 20 points.

In 2018, national Democrats were hesitant to back former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s challenge to GOP Sen. Ted Cruz. O’Rourke eventually caught fire in the race’s final months, smashing fundraising records and running neck-and-neck in the polls, before losing by less than three percentage points — and leaving national Democrats wondering what could’ve happened if they jumped in sooner.

In 2020, Cornyn defeated Democratic nominee MJ Hegar by nearly 10 points; in 2024, Cruz toppled former Rep. Colin Allred by eight.

This cycle could be different, Texas Democrats say. Talarico is polling and fundraising ahead of where O’Rourke was at this point in 2018. And Talarico benefits from a Democratic political operation in the state — much of it built by O’Rourke — that was nonexistent when his predecessor ran.

“It’s the best chance Texas Democrats will have to win a statewide race in the entirety of my career,” said Democratic strategist Jeff Rotkoff, who has advised campaigns in Texas for 25 years.

The national headwinds facing Republicans — as voters’ patience for the Iran war and its effect on energy prices has eroded — are blowing especially hard in Texas, said Matt Angle, founder of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic-aligned group.

“At the voter level, what you’ve got is just an overwhelming dissatisfaction with Republicans in a way that you just haven’t seen in Texas in the past,” Angle said.

Some point to Texas’ 9th Senate District as evidence, which Trump won by 17 points in 2024 and a Democrat flipped in January. When the Democratic-aligned Texas Majority PAC surveyed voters there, they found that 90 percent of Republican-leaning voters who backed the Democrat in the race said they did it because “they just would not support any MAGA candidate,” said Katherine Fischer, the group’s director.

“It was tough for us last cycle to run in an environment where our president was deeply unpopular,” Fischer said. “Now it’s on them.”

Democrats believe Cornyn’s closing argument: That Paxton and his long trail of controversies will create a drag on the Republican ticket.

“Ken Paxton will be an albatross,” Cornyn said during a Fox News appearance Tuesday. “He could well lose, but even if he doesn’t lose, he will win by such a razor-thin margin that it’s likely to have a negative drag on the down ballot races in Texas.”

It’s a message that has some national Republicans wringing their hands. “The national mood is not great for Republicans right now, and Texas feels even worse,” said one Washington GOP operative close to Cornyn, granted anonymity to speak openly. “We already know we’re heading into a headwind in the state, up and down the ticket, and we just put up the worst possible top-of-the-ticket person.

“I can’t think of a worse person to put on the top of the ticket than Ken Paxton,” he added. “It’s laughable. All I can do is laugh.”

Still, it may be Paxton who gets the last laugh. Although his impeachment, the securities fraud investigation and ethics complaints against him, and his ongoing divorce were played up in the many attack ads Cornyn ran, the attorney general still managed to garner support from a large majority of GOP runoff voters.

“I think Talarico is the only opponent Paxton can beat,” said Tim Edson, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s former political director. “Democrats are going to wish they had Beto again. … Talarico is a Marxist creep who will make Paxton seem normal after this race is litigated.”

The NRSC backed Cornyn in the primary. In a post-election statement the group blasted Talarico, but didn’t mention Paxton.

“A state President Trump won by nearly 14 points isn’t going to elect James Talarico — a radical leftist who thinks God is nonbinary and that Texas should be a welcome mat for illegals,” said NRSC spokesperson Samantha Cantrell. “He is the most dangerous flank of the far left. Texas isn’t swapping brisket for open borders.”

Paxton is already laser-focused on attacking Talarico as too progressive: A Paxton-aligned super PAC spent the past week running an ad that labeled Talarico as “weird,” clipping the state representative’s statements on gender, race, meat consumption and patriotism.

Those culture war issues are seen as Talarico’s largest liability as he seeks to win over a wide umbrella of progressive and moderate Democrats, independents and Republicans dissatisfied with Trump. Talarico has claimed there are “more than two” biological sexes and said he’s had to “reckon” with his own whiteness and masculinity.

Some of his allies want him to avoid those issues altogether.

“Stay away from it,” said state Sen. Royce West, a Democrat who represents Dallas. “I’m pretty sure he’ll have a strategy to do that, but he’s got to be able to get centrists.”

The same goes for downballot Democrats, who may be hoping to ride the energy of Talarico’s campaign to victory in their own races. The stakes are high: Future control of Congress could run through the Lone Star State, as the post-2030 Census reapportionment is poised to gift additional House seats to Texas while kneebuckling the map for Democrats nationwide. With newly redrawn House maps that favor Republicans and not another U.S. Senate race in the state until 2030, now is the ideal moment for Texas Democrats to notch victories up and down the ballot and send a message that they can play in the state.

“There’s just a ton of evidence to suggest that this is a much more favorable cycle than anything we’ve seen in Texas in the last 30 years. Is it enough to win in November? I don’t know,” said Fischer. “If it’s possible to win in Texas, all of the things are there for us to do it.”

Politics

The Croatian team’s favorite singer is a fascist salute away from the mainstream

Published

4 minutes ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

BELGRADE, Serbia — When Croatian supporters flooded Toronto and Philadelphia this summer, draping city halls in the red-and-white checkerboards found on the Croatian coat of arms and belting out one power ballad after another, the loudest songs, as always, belonged to Marko Perković.

“He’s become an inseparable phenomenon anytime Croatia plays or participates in any kind of competition, especially sporting events,” said Hrvoje Klasić, the leading Croatian historian focused on the legacy of World War II.

“People both at home and abroad view him as synonymous with love for one’s country,” he continued.

Better known as Thompson, after the submachine gun he carried in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he is the country’s most popular singer — and its most enduring embarrassment.

Croatian fans have made his song, “Lijepa Li Si,” the unofficial anthem of the team and a fixture at every match, a song whose chorus salutes the wartime Croat statelet in Bosnia whose leadership was convicted of war crimes.

Thompson’s wider catalog is more explicit still. One track opens with “Za dom spremni,” the salute that functioned as Croatia’s answer to “Sieg Heil” during the World War II Ustashe regime.

In the past, his concerts have been banned or canceled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria and Germany.

None of this is fringe within Croatia, however. Last summer Thompson drew more than 500,000 people to a single Zagreb concert, the largest in the country’s history, where fans chanted the same Ustashe slogan while the authorities looked away.

In 2018, when Croatia nearly won the World Cup, the second-placed team was welcomed back with Thompson aboard the victory bus and star midfielder Luka Modrić personally asking for him to perform.

Croatia has spent three decades declining to reckon with the Ustashe past, treating the fascist puppet state’s symbols as heritage rather than crime.

Across post-communist Europe, the end of the Cold War brought a wave of historical revisionism, as nations that felt their identity had been suppressed under communism recast neo-Nazi and far-right figures as patriots. Hungary, Ukraine and the Baltic states, as well as Croatia, have all made a version of this bargain, folding once-condemned nationalists into their modern national myths.

“These nations believe they were robbed of their national identities in the past century or are dissatisfied with their country’s present achievements, so they reach back into the past for themes from a more distinguished past,” Klasić concluded.

Politics

Inside the DHS’s World Cup nerve center

Published

34 minutes ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Every day, FBI intelligence officials, weather forecasters, diplomats, security coordinators and people from more than a dozen federal agencies gather on a conference line for what has become one of the most unusual meetings in Washington.

It’s dubbed the “WISLE call” — an acronym that stands for Warning/Weather, Intent, Safety/Security, Logistics/Communications and Event Operations. And it happens every morning around 10 a.m. Eastern during the FIFA World Cup, which is about to enter its fourth week.

From a secure operations floor inside FEMA’s Washington headquarters, officials spend about 30 minutes running through the day’s World Cup matches, touching on everything from extreme heat advisories and fan festivals to cartel activity in Mexico, drone threats, visa issues and stadium security.

On Tuesday, when Brazil played Japan in Houston and Germany faced Paraguay in Boston, the biggest concern on the call wasn’t terrorism. It was the weather.

“The main story over the next couple of days is going to be building heat across the central and eastern United States,” a National Weather Service official told the group. Philadelphia, Boston and New York were all under heat watches, while Houston officials reported temperatures nearing 95 degrees with a heat index above 100.

The daily briefing offers a rare window into the machinery and threat assessments that underpin the largest sporting event ever hosted in North America.

The command center resembles a national emergency operations center more than a sports headquarters. Ten Homeland Security agencies including TSA, Customs and Border Protection, and FEMA work side-by-side on a watch floor staffed around the clock. The State Operations Coordination Center for Event Response — yes another “SOCCER” acronym — is also involved.

About 50 people occupy the physical operations center during 12-hour shifts, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and again overnight, monitoring every match, fan festival and emerging threat across the United States. The center works closely with the International Police Cooperation Center in Leesburg, Virginia, where law enforcement officials from participating countries work alongside U.S. officials. Monday’s “WISLE” call began with intelligence — and, again, concerns about extreme weather.

An FBI official updated participants on the coming heat wave, noting the bureau was coordinating with federal, state and local partners ahead of the July 4th holiday while also tracking security implications as national teams exited the tournament and closed their training camps.

From there, officials moved city by city. In Boston, clear weather for the sellout crowd of nearly 66,000 for Germany-Paraguay. In Houston, preparations were underway for heat-related illnesses for the Brazil-Japan match.

The State Department’s representative dialed in from the Joint Coordination Center at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City with an update spanning three countries. Mexican police had dismantled a criminal group targeting tourists around World Cup venues, Vancouver’s fan festival had reached capacity during Canada’s match, and officials were monitoring large fan gatherings expected later that evening in both Mexico City and Monterrey.

Despite the long checklist of potential problems, nearly every operational report ended the same way: “All teams are green.”

Andrew Giuliani, executive director of the White House World Cup Task Force, used his remarks to thank FEMA and Homeland Security personnel while highlighting accomplishments across the federal government that extended well beyond soccer.

He praised U.S. Marshals for recovering 35 missing and endangered children during Operation Yellow Card in Boston, noted DEA fentanyl seizures in Kansas City and public health operations led by Health and Human Services and the CDC. He also announced that the mother of the Capo Verde goalkeeper had successfully received a visa to travel to the United States. “The behind-the-scenes work that goes into it,” Giuliani said, “is one of the reasons we’re able to talk now halfway through the World Cup about the incredible success.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin pointed to what he called the largest counter-drone operation ever assembled for a sporting event in the United States, saying officials had confiscated more than 500 drones while also using the tournament’s security posture to pursue human trafficking networks, fentanyl traffickers and counterfeit operations.

Because stadium security has remained stable, he said, law enforcement has been able to focus resources elsewhere.

“Because you guys are doing such a good job making sure that the games are going off without any major issues,” Mullin said, “we’re able to focus on other things.”

Politics

Why this year’s World Cup is so pricey

Published

2 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Americans are breaking the bank to attend the FIFA World Cup.

This year’s tournament is historically expensive for fans looking to support their favorite teams in person. Tickets for group stage matches routinely cost more than $1,000 in the months before tournament kickoff, reportedly even drawing the ire of President Donald Trump.

Ticket problems don’t end there. A number of states have launched investigations into whether FIFA misled fans over the location and quality of seats they bought to attend matches. Many fans who bought tickets on resale sites have fallen victim to ghost ticketing, in which resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.

To get a better sense of it all, Blue Light News talked to Florian Ederer, a professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business — and a soccer super fan. He’s written extensively about World Cup ticket pricing and access during the tournament, and hopped on the phone the day before his beloved Austria takes on Spain in a knockout match Thursday.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Why are World Cup tickets so expensive this year?

Well, there are several factors in this. Number one is that this is the biggest sports event in the world. There’s tremendous demand for it. It only happens every four years. FIFA basically has a monopoly on this biggest sports event, there’s nothing that sort of can supplant it. You can’t start a rival league or anything of that sort. Secondly, the event is being held in the United States and in Canada and in Mexico, in particular the U.S. and Canada. These are some of the richest countries in the world, they have also very, very, very large populations, and Mexico does too.

You also talk about another phenomenon, that FIFA has realized this is an opportunity to maximize profits.

It has also adopted two additional things. One is price discrimination, which is that all the group stage matches of previous World Cups were all priced exactly the same. And here, FIFA has taken the approach, well, England vs. Croatia is a more interesting match than Algeria vs. Jordan, and so we’re going to set prices higher for England Croatia than for Algeria Jordan.

They’ve also introduced dynamic pricing, so the price that I get charged for buying a ticket, even if it’s the same ticket for the same game, is going to be different depending on when I buy. Basically like buying a ticket for an airline.

The third tactic that FIFA has engaged in — in addition to price discrimination, dynamic pricing — is that they’ve also done some very opaque supply management, where they’ve not made it clear at all as to how many tickets are actually available at any given time, and they’ve created a little bit this artificial scarcity where they want to keep fans in the dark as to whether they should buy now at higher prices, or just wait until the very end, and maybe get a good deal close to the start of a game.

Then there’s ghost ticketing and other practices out on the secondary market that sometimes leave fans outside a World Cup stadium arena with no tickets, even though they spent the money on a resale platform.

This is something that I think is separate from FIFA. I think the problem there is that the platforms have not used sufficient fines and punishment for resellers that are not fulfilling these promised transactions. The reason they are not fulfilling those transactions is because they resold those tickets for a potentially very interesting match already three months before, and then the prices increase even further, and then the temptation is, of course, to not deliver on that transaction, and instead resell it on another platform for even higher markups. And this is, of course, when these platforms should step in and say, look, you know, somebody was deceived here. We need to institute fines to keep those non-reputable sellers off our platforms.

Are there any steps the federal government could take to make things easier for consumers next time around?

I think there should be much clearer guidance that gives consumers information about how many seats are actually available and what are the prices, and then I think that’s an issue of just consumer transparency and lack of deception that can absolutely pass with legislation. Similarly, with those ghost tickets, I think you should be able to hold the platform liable for these issues, rather than just any particular seller, and the platforms should have to compensate these buyers for other charges that they incurred. If I’m buying a vacation to Dallas to see Austria vs. Argentina, then I’m not just buying the ticket on a platform, but I’m making everything else reliant on that ticket.

—

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has defended the high cost of attendance in recent months, telling an audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference in California in May that the organization was applying “market rates” to its tickets.

“We have to look at the market — we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world. So we have to apply market rates,” Infantino said. “In the U.S. it is permitted to resell tickets as well. So if you were to sell tickets at the price which is too low, these tickets will be resold at a much higher price.”