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Early Voting Opens as Talarico’s Faith Campaign Faces Crude Posts Tied to Adoptive Father

David

A Report Arrives at the Starting Gate

As early voting opened in the Texas Senate race, a Washington Examiner report published October 18 put an awkward item on James Talarico’s campaign calendar. The report assembled older social-media posts from an X account that Talarico has publicly identified as belonging to his adoptive father. The timing matters, but so does the boundary: the report does not establish that Talarico wrote, approved, endorsed, or knew about the posts. The Examiner made the account connection through Talarico’s own public exchanges, including a 2020 reply thanking “Pops” for teaching him and a 2022 correction saying another user had confused the account holder with his biological father. That supports the account’s reported identity. It does not transfer responsibility for every post to Talarico.

What the Account Reportedly Posted

The posts described in the report are from 2023 and 2024, not newly written during the campaign. In February 2023, the account reportedly answered an Ash Wednesday image with a video showing a vulgar word across a man’s forehead. In September, it gave a crude response to a hypothetical involving Christ’s crucifixion. January 2024 posts compared Kari Lake and three other Republican women to strip-club workers, while another used Disney villain Ursula in response to a photograph of Kimberly Guilfoyle. An August 2024 reply to a woman’s Christian conversion testimony invoked her family trauma. That is an unpleasant archive, though the report’s point is not that Talarico authored it. It is that the account’s reported conduct now sits beside a campaign built around faith and character.

Why the Timing Matters

Talarico’s own message showed how sharply the report collided with the campaign calendar. On October 18, he posted that he was in the final stretch, that early voting started the next day, and that supporters should join his final tour. He is running against Republican nominee Ken Paxton. At a March 2026 event, Talarico said his father taught him that manhood means caring for people, doing right when nobody is watching, and avoiding the online destruction of others. The Examiner said Talarico’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. It also sought responses from representatives for Lake and Guilfoyle. Campaigns usually prefer old posts to remain old posts, but the internet has never been known for respecting a carefully timed message calendar.

Faith Is Part of the Political Pitch

Faith is not a side note in Talarico’s public pitch. The Texas Tribune reported in February that Christianity and his seminary background are central to his political identity. He regularly uses Scripture to defend progressive positions, and the Tribune described his hope that open discussion of faith could reach Christian Texans who do not normally vote Democratic. Some conservative evangelicals disagree, viewing his interpretation as a distortion rather than a bridge. The Tribune also revisited Talarico’s 2021 statement that God is “nonbinary”; he later said the phrase was deliberately provocative and meant that God transcends gender. That history explains why the reported posts became politically relevant: they collide with a faith-and-moral-leadership brand, while the available evidence places the posts with the account attributed to his adoptive father, not with Talarico himself.

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