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The Democratic Senate victories in Texas and Kansas on Tuesday night were about more than just turning two red states blue — which, to be sure, is historic enough.
They also signal the rise of a new kind of Democratic politics in the late Trump era — a more explicitly religious one.
In Texas, James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian, was beating Republican state attorney general Ken Paxton by 20 points at the time of the call. And in Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century, the Rev. Adam Hamilton, the chief pastor of the state’s largest church, has defeated incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall.
They belong to a rising tide in American politics: the emergence of a religious left that marries moderate or liberal strains of Christianity with Democratic policy and political priorities. Their wins are the first major victories of this movement in the 2026 cycle.
Meanwhile, in nearby Iowa, two more Democratic Christians — the Lutheran minister Sarah Trone Garriott and Presbyterian minister Lindsay James — are also leading in their races to flip Republican-held House seats.
Back when Talarico won his bid to be the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Texas, I wrote that he and his opponent represented two drastically different visions of American Christianity. Talarico had emerged victorious from a bitter primary battle, betting that the best way to do Democratic politics in a red state was to expand the base by reclaiming religion, forgiving political rivals, and loving neighbors, even if they voted differently. He basically preached on the campaign stump — even saying in a recent interview that Paxton is a “child of God.” And he was doing this as a pastor-in-training, representing a dying breed of mainline Protestant Christians as a Presbyterian.
He was facing off against an avatar of the dominant brand of American Christianity today. A hard-line conservative evangelical Christian, Paxton represented the kind of religious politics that has made Christianity synonymous with conservative Republicanism in the modern era.
Paxton had been a leading figure in the Texas GOP’s crusade to infuse the public square with a more conservative-tinged vision of Christianity, arguing last year that “in Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up. … Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”
It’s a more authoritarian-flavored variety of Christianity — some might call it Christian nationalism — and it created a perfect foil with the more tolerant, inclusive vision of Christianity that Talarico was preaching.
Hamilton did the same throughout his stronger-than-expected campaign. On the trail, as he’s done for decades as the pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City suburbs, he spoke frequently about his faith journey and belief in Christ, about loving one another, and about repairing relationships ruined by Trump-era politics. Also like Talarico, he doubled down on kitchen-table issues and listed off all the ways the Trump administration had hurt Americans.
But he also told me that he viewed himself as part of this national movement of pastors, ministers, and religious people squaring off against “Christian nationalism” and showing Christians and non-Christians alike how biblical values and Jesus’ teachings might lead someone to a Democratic policy worldview.
“I want Democrats to be able to talk about faith and to do so in a way that reflects a difference from what you see in Christian nationalism,” Hamilton told me in early October when I visited Kansas for a profile of him. “Our faith reflects the ideas of justice and fairness. Two thousand verses in the Bible talk about poverty and taking care of the poor. That’s not what you hear from Christian nationalists. But it is what you hear from Christians who are Democrats.”
He told me last month that, whether he won or lost, he hoped people of faith who happen to be Democrats continue to play an active role in politics — for the sake of the Democratic Party and for the sake of Christianity. “Thoughtful Christian people have something important to add to the conversation,” he said.
Both Hamilton and Talarico faced criticism of their religious message. Detractors, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, as well as average evangelical and conservative Christians, took issue with their theological interpretations, the state of their denominations, or the authenticity of their faiths (some attacks were less sophisticated, such as simply calling Talarico or Hamilton “woke”).
But their wins suggest at least that enough moderate Christians, and independent-minded Republicans, were persuaded by their articulations of their faith to side with these religious candidates. That should be an encouraging sign for Democrats moving forward to continue to expand the faith lane and think about the faith angle in future elections and coalition building.
To remain competitive in future congressional and presidential contests, some analysts argue, Democrats must continue to make inroads with the religious vote. “At some point you’ve got to say to the loud secular left, ‘Hey, we appreciate you and we want your votes, of course, but you’re going to vote for us anyway. We need the votes of Catholics and mainline Protestants and those kinds of people,” the religion and politics scholar Ryan Burge told me.
Historically, though, the establishment class — the donors, activists, and organizers who power campaigns — has not always been comfortable appealing to these religious groups, since they often have priorities at odds with those of the base. But Talarico’s win in deep-red country shows what can be gained if they can get more comfortable with a new kind of Democrat.
