Man, just about any Texas Democrat can get a credulous headline that they’re about to turn the Lone Star State blue.

Here we go again. Politico declares that Democratic Texas State Representative James Talarico “might turn Texas blue,” in large part because he recently was a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Talarico is thinking of running for Texas’s U.S. Senate seat in 2026.

This is a couple months after Politico wrote about the “eye-catching showing of support” Democrats had for Senate candidate Colin Allred, who lost to Ted Cruz by about 960,000 votes in the 2024 Senate race. And about seven years after Politico wrote “Beto-Mania Sweeps Texas.” And the August 2013 “Game On” cover of Texas Monthly. And . . . well, you get the idea.

You know what a Texas Democrat must do to get members of the national mainstream media to write that they have a chance to win that deep red state? Just show up, apparently.

Let’s start by being nice. Talarico does sound different from your usual Democrat; he’s a seminary student who’s active on social media, talking about his Christian faith. And Rogan saying “you should run for president” is a nice feather in any candidate’s cap. And Talarico sounds rather sensible in his advice to his party:

I think we need to start listening to Democrats who are in red and purple areas. There is something about living in a red state that makes you different from a national Democrat who lives in a blue city on the coast. I think we learn how to talk with people outside of our party in a more effective way, because it’s a matter of political survival out here. I can’t pass anything in the Texas Legislature without getting Republican support, so I’ve had to find ways to build relationships and build bridges across partisan divides as a Texas Democrat.

And while Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in Texas since 1994, all streaks come to an end; someday, some Democrat will win a statewide election in the Lone Star State again. Just keep in mind, colonies on Mars may arrive first.

It is extremely difficult for a Democrat to win big deep red states like Texas, just as it is extremely difficult for a Republican to win big deep blue states like New York or California.

Allred’s 44.6 percent of the vote last year was the best any Democrat had done in a statewide election since O’Rourke’s 48.3 percent in 2018. O’Rourke raised $80 million, the most any challenger had ever raised in a Senate race up to that point. His national press coverage was gushing. And he still fell short.

Talarico represents a Democratic-leaning state senate district that covers a part of Austin that has about 200,000 registered voters in it.

In the last midterm, 8 million Texans voted; in the last presidential election, 11 million Texans voted. If turnout is 8 million, and a Democrat is behind by “just” five percentage points, he’s trailing by “just” 400,000 votes.

And yet cycle after cycle, we get not only credulous coverage saying a Democrat could win Texas — sotto voce conceding it is unlikely — last year you could easily find left-of-center columnists who were willing to go on the record predicting Allred would beat Cruz. Again, Cruz won by 959,492 votes or about 8.5 percentage points. It wasn’t close, and it was never close. Every cycle, the “Democrats could win Texas this year” coverage turns out to be pure wishcasting, as farfetched and unlikely as Trump’s quadrennial prediction that he will win his home state of New York.

Could the Republicans’ chances in 2026 get complicated by a primary fight between incumbent John Cornyn and state attorney general Ken Paxton? Sure, that battle is likely to get as messy and expensive as . . . well, Paxton’s impending divorce. Remember, the divorce is all the fault of the media, not his:

But you would need Texas Republicans to be spectacularly divided to overcome their inherent advantages while running in a deeply culturally conservative state.