One of the most fascinating Senate races this year is in Texas: James Talarico versus Ken Paxton. The young James Talarico has been rising in the polls, even against incumbent John Cornyn, who actually earned the ire of Donald Trump. The orange president endorsed Ken Paxton instead, which led to Cornyn losing the Republican primary. But can Texas actually turn blue?

James Talarico is a member of the Texas State House, which does not exactly make him a high-profile politician. The Texas state legislature is heavily conservative, so there is very little he can actually do in Austin for the people of Texas, especially with a governor like Greg Abbott. But instead of playing the typical Southern Democrat role of being a boring moderate, he is actually very progressive, which is something I wish the Democratic Party took as seriously as the Republican Party takes its unapologetic far-right candidates. Boring-style candidates may seem safe in theory, but not in the South. There has not been a vanilla moderate candidate to win any high-profile office in the South in a very long time, unless you count the time Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama was such a gigantic piece of garbage that even Republicans voted against him or simply stayed home.

Speaking of pieces of garbage, Ken Paxton is the current attorney general of Texas and has held that office for quite some time. He is an ultra-conservative who filed a petition with the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Not only that, he has faced numerous corruption allegations, cheated on his wife, and has a large and well-documented history of criminal scandals. Honestly, looking at the guy, are you really surprised? If this man were a Democrat, his chances of winning more than 20% of the vote in Texas would be a miracle, let alone winning the election outright.

In my state of South Carolina, we have both a governor’s race and a Senate race this year. There will be Democratic nominees, but nobody is attacking them the way they are attacking James Talarico in Texas because those candidates likely will not win at all. They spread a lot of lies about Talarico and mock him at every opportunity because they know the possibility of Texas sending a progressive senator to Washington, D.C., is more real than they are willing to admit. If Georgia can send two Democratic senators to the Capitol, then Texas can absolutely send one, especially if voter turnout is high in the cities.

But Democrats should never take any lead in the polls for granted. Neither candidate has polled over 50% yet, and technically liberals are still competing on Republican home turf, with a long road ahead until November. The Texas Democratic Party, along with the national Democratic Party, should do a much better job of highlighting just how controversial Ken Paxton really is. Republicans are very effective at simple, emotionally charged right-wing propaganda, and Democrats often struggle to counter it. Ken Paxton would be one of the most controversial people to walk up the steps of the United States Senate in recent times, perhaps rivaling figures like Rick Scott of Florida.