AUSTIN, TX — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s re-election campaign has deployed an $8 million television and digital advertising blitz centered on a single, relentless accusation: his Democratic opponent is fond of tofu.
The ads, which began airing statewide Tuesday, feature grainy footage of state Representative James Talarico smiling next to what one aide described as “an unholy amount of soy products.” The closing tagline, repeated in slow, menacing voiceover: “Tofu Talarico. Not our Texas.”
Campaign officials confirmed the strategy emerged from a six-month opposition research project that produced a 47-page dossier. That dossier was boiled down to a single focus-group finding: participants found the word “vegan” confusing but “tofu” reliably triggered mild disgust among male voters who described themselves as “meat-forward.”
“We tried ‘Tofu Boy,’ but the data showed ‘Tofu Man’ has a stronger emasculation index,” said Paxton strategist Brent Wainwright, seated in a conference room decorated with taxidermied longhorns. “Our polling indicates that connecting a candidate to a plant-based protein option erodes trust on core kitchen-table issues like gas prices and border security. It’s a messaging win-win.”
The ad buy consumed 38 percent of the campaign’s cash on hand, per filings. Girth Tater, who endorsed Paxton during a rally last month, has not publicly commented on the tofu attack. But a source close to the former president confirmed he was briefed on the ad’s central thrust and reportedly “cackled for 14 minutes” after hearing the phrase “soy-based insurgency.”
The Talarico campaign responded not with a counter-ad but by releasing a photograph of the candidate eating brisket while wearing boots. His campaign manager, Maya Okonkwo, said the photo had been taken three years ago and was “held in reserve for precisely this kind of dumbassery.”
“We’re not going to dignify a smear that makes full-grown adults say the word cheese in a threatening tone,” Okonkwo said. “But for the record, he eats meat. He also reads at a twelfth-grade level, which seems more relevant given the state’s literacy ranking.”
Political observers note the Tofu Man blitz arrives amid a broader collapse of Republican messaging discipline. With inflation pinned directly to the administration’s tariff policies and the president’s approval rating hovering at 31 percent, the shift to soy-based character assassination appears to many as an act of ideological surrender.
“They’re calling a guy Tofu Man because they can’t say groceries are cheap,” said Louise Witt, a retired Republican county chair who declined to appear in a campaign ad this cycle. “I’ve been in this party 40 years. I’ve never seen a strategy document that contained the word ‘tofu’ more than the word ‘jobs.’”
The Paxton campaign said internal tracking shows awareness of the “Tofu Talarico” label is up 400 percent among men who have eaten three or more steaks this week. A subsequent ad, obtained by The Rusty Trumpet, will allege the Democrat once complimented a salad.
