Talarico, meanwhile, is a 36-year-old seminarian with the bedside manner of a Sunday school teacher. Republicans have sought to cast him as an effete extremist. Trump keeps saying “he wants six genders” and that he’s a vegan, a crime punishable by political death in the Lone Star state. Talarico, who is not a vegan, has cooked up a pithy riposte to this attack: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”
The midterm elections are upon us. Democrats are looking to win back the House and just maybe the Senate, promising to use that power to stop Trump. For Republicans, despite victories in a bare-knuckle redistricting war, the House already looks lost. They’re just hoping to hold on to the upper chamber of Congress.
A year ago it would have been unthinkable for Republicans to lose the Senate, but as Trump wages an unpopular war with Iran while gas prices climb (“peanuts,” Trump says) and economic anxieties mount (“hoax,” Trump explains), his polls keep sinking. Republicans are panicking.
Trump isn’t. “I don’t care about the midterms,” he said at a Cabinet meeting this week.
Instead, the president is consumed with unpopular and unserious fixations. There is the ever-gilded presence of the giant ballroom he wants to build at the White House. Then there’s the $1.8 billion slush fund created as a result of his settlement with the IRS, money which he apparently intends to dole out to his allies. For the first time since the start of his second term, his iron grip over Republicans in Congress is slipping.
“We need Republicans to do well in November,” said the exasperated Republican senator Thom Tillis last week, “but the stupid stuff is killing our chances!”
Read on for a Vanity Fair guide to the midterm elections—the races to watch, the key dates, the latest polls, and whom to keep an eye on.
June 2: California governor primary
If only Kamala Harris had run. That’s what I keep hearing from Democratic operatives as they reckon nervously with a primary in which a handful of deeply flawed candidates are vying to be the next governor of California. This is a jungle primary, which means that the top two candidates on June 2 will enter into a runoff in November. Right now, polls show a few front-runners.
There’s Xavier Becerra, the former secretary of Health and Human Services, whom critics have called “incompetent” and “not effective.” There’s Tom Steyer, the billionaire class traitor running as a tax-the-rich progressive. There’s one viable Republican: Steve Hilton, a British political operative who made his name in the United States as a host on Fox News. From that perch, he preached the virtues of American populism in a thick accent and earned the admiration of Rupert Murdoch. Now he’s top of the polls and fielding donations from Silicon Valley billionaires, like Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who feel the Democrats have gotten too liberal. He’ll have a tougher hill to climb after the runoff—the Dem vote won’t be split—and he carries one particularly heavy albatross: He was recently endorsed by Trump, which in California could be a kiss of death.