Unfortunately for Talarico, what he offered up was not a defense of his past comments, but a walk-back issued in a frantic attempt to position himself as a centrist in his fight against Paxton, the Texas attorney general who won the Republican primary over Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a nearly 24-year veteran of the chamber.

“There are some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret,” Talarico said. “There are statements that I’ve made where I’ve missed the mark. I’ll be the first to admit that.”

Naturally, Talarico blamed Paxton for “clipping my cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption.”

It makes sense to try to turn it on his opponent. Still, the comments were Talarico’s, not Paxton’s, and disowning them is its own kind of admission.

If this approach to past questionable comments sounds familiar, it was evident in the 2024 presidential race. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris quietly walked back a slew of positions she had embraced while running for president in 2019 and courting the progressive base. These included a fracking ban, the decriminalization of border crossings, and having taxpayers foot the bill for prison inmates’ sex change operations.

The bet was that voters in the middle would accept the newer, more centrist version without asking about the old one. It did not work for Harris in 2024, as the then-vice president lost to President Donald Trump in his successful bid for a second, nonconsecutive term.

That is a challenge for Talarico in the Lone Star State. Unsurprisingly, he’s already won the endorsement of Harris.

A long record of questionable comments

Talarico has a long paper trail to explain.

In a 2021 Texas House floor debate over a bill restricting transgender athletes, Talarico said: “God is non-binary.” Recently pressed on it by CBS, Talarico said he had been “intentionally provocative,” adding that the line really meant that “God can’t be defined by human categories.”

He has also argued that “modern science recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes; in fact, there are six.” Talarico, when asked whether he still believed that, said, “I know there are two sexes, men and women.” He allowed only that a small number of people have “chromosomal abnormalities” deserving of dignity and respect.

The issue here is that Talarico is not changing his position or defending what he said. Rather, he is boxing himself in by using the misunderstanding defense, as though the problem were how he presented it rather than what he said. A voter who watched him insist on six biological sexes on the floor of the Texas House, and who now hears him affirm that there are two, is asked to believe both that the first statement was merely some youthful provocation and that nothing fundamental has actually shifted. Those two claims cannot be reconciled.

The second move is to change the subject to economics when cultural issues become uncomfortable. He has built his campaign around the line that the race is not left versus right but “top versus bottom.”

“We’re all getting screwed,” Talarico told CBS. “None of us can afford anything. None of us can get ahead, no matter how hard we work, and that’s because the system, this political system and economic system, are rigged against us. It’s been rigged for 50 years by billionaire megadonors and their puppet politicians, like Ken Paxton.”

Whenever a reporter raises gender, race, or any of the statements now in Paxton’s ads, he will deflect by discussing grocery prices and gas prices.

The most striking departure is that Talarico is now courting voters who didn’t matter to him before. The same politician who made his name as a left-wing firebrand spent the hours after Paxton’s GOP primary win making an open play for Cornyn’s voters.

“We don’t agree on everything, but we both still believe in public service,” he wrote. “To Senator Cornyn’s supporters: you have a place in our campaign.”

On CBS, Talarico extended his hand further, appealing to anyone who “still believes in that old-fashioned idea of service.” For a candidate who once treated Republicans as the problem, the embrace of the Cornyn-friendly wing is telling in that he knows he cannot win without some crossover support.

Voters may not care

None of this means Talarico is doomed. Post-primary polling shows him performing well. And some early polls showed a decent percentage of Cornyn voters would cross the aisle to vote for Talarico over Paxton. But that sentiment is often temporary, with voters expressing frustration when their preferred candidate loses.

Republicans understand the potential danger because Talarico doesn’t match the caricature in the attack ads. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called Talarico “absolutely extreme” on his podcast, but he relayed a concern about the Democratic nominee’s electability.

“What makes Talarico dangerous, and that worries me, is he packages it in this very nice, ‘Aw, shucks’ demeanor, and he sounds like a preacher,” Cruz said.

Talarico’s demeanor is part of the strategy. A candidate who talks about loving your neighbor is harder to fit into a neat box than a backbencher who insists there are six sexes, even when it is the same person.

He has even had to defend his cultural bona fides against the smaller, silly issues. When the right pointed out that he boasted of being vegan, not something that will play well in cattle country, he denied it with a good line: “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”

It is a good joke and a clever way of getting past the controversies over his past statements, but it is also somewhat of a problem. A candidate confident his record would not have to address his barbecue consumption on national television.

The latest polling since the race has tightened in a way that should concern Democrats. As Paxton consolidated GOP support, his numbers climbed. Surveys that showed Talarico ahead in the spring now point to a race within the margin of error, with Republican support for Paxton rising from the low 60s to the mid-80s as the runoff results faded.

That is the part of the 2024 analogy that frightens Democrats. Trump was a highly flawed nominee. He was twice impeached, under indictment, convicted in court, and faced a host of other scandals, yet he not only won but also outperformed his 2016 and 2020 showings. A reliably red state tends to revert to form once the in-party stops feuding.

It doesn’t mean Talarico cannot win. Paxton is a uniquely vulnerable Republican — the money is pouring in, and a sour national environment for the president’s party could carry a Democrat closer than Texas has since 2018, when Beto O’Rourke gave Cruz a scare.

TEXAS DEMOCRATS RIP PAXTON AFTER VIDEO SHOWS HIM FLYING TO ICELAND AHEAD OF JULY 4

But hope for Democrats and the Talarico campaign rests on the idea that voters will accept the new, moderated version and forget the one that is alive and well in the age of instant media. Harris tried the same tactic against a far more polarizing opponent and discovered the old positions do not disappear simply because she stopped repeating them.

Talarico has to hope that Texas will be more forgiving. The record he is running from is still out there, and Paxton has the campaign budget to keep it flowing to all areas of the state.

Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) is a writer living in Florida.