All photographs courtesy of Sara Van Horn.

It was overcast and drizzling just after sunrise, a relative rarity for Austin, and I decided to vote at a nearby theological seminary, hoping a religious spirit might carry into the day. James Talarico, the thirty-seven-year-old state legislator running for the U.S. Senate, is also a Presbyterian seminarian, and was now contesting religious terrain long vacated by Texas Democrats. He has called the relationship binding the governors to the governed a “covenant,” albeit a broken one. He intends, like one barefoot rabbi in the temple courts, to “start flipping tables.” 

Pick the right polling place in Texas and you will be hand-shaked and possibly hip-checked. But the seminary, teeming with UT students, was completely silent—nary a campaign flyer in sight. Still, everyone I asked on the street was hopeful, hopeful, more hopeful. Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa was still considered a gubernatorial long shot—with Kalshi traders predicting her victory at just 37% even on Election Day. But even then, it seemed Talarico was going to win, giving the Democrats their first statewide victory in thirty-two years. 

A trio of nonpartisan observers wearing “Election Protection” baseball caps were beaming at me. Anyone with an “I voted” sticker could pick up a free slice from Austin’s beloved Home Slice Pizza (“In Crust We Trust!”). A reporter for an Italian newspaper called Il manifesto assured me that Talarico would make tomorrow’s front page. “So this a big election for you in Italy?” I asked her. “Oh my god!” she cried, admonishing me. “That is an understatement!” 

***

Outside the Texas Union, a bustling polling place just off Austin’s main commercial strip, sacred covenants were held more loosely. A cadre of City Council hopefuls, armed with campaign literature, jostled for position between two fast-moving tributaries: voters searching for the polls and a stream of indifferent college students, who ducked their heads, refused the flyers, and speedwalked to class. The candidates were fearless in their extroversion, forcing the unvoted to slalom quickly between them as if navigating a particularly treacherous obstacle course. Had I voted? Once asked a certain number of times, I started to doubt myself. 

Like all sphinxes, city council aspirants will step aside upon hearing the correct answer. Approached by a candidate whose tousled hair I suddenly recognized, I tried my hand. “I just voted for you,” I said, which turned out to be an even better answer. I received a fist bump. The candidate, Rich Heyman, was fired by the University of Texas in 2024 after getting arrested at a pro-Palestine protest. Today, he told me, he was feeling “really good,” at least before one of his opponents nearly slammed into him. She’d rushed over to tell me about her platform, accompanied by visual aids—a collection of personalized animal stickers, each with their own Austin-specific meaning: an armadillo, a salamander, and a bat in bright pastels, surrounding a slogan that read “Make Austin Magical.” I asked them how it felt to be rivals, eliciting an unconvincing side-hug. They are friends, they assure me. Loving your enemy, proclaims Talarico after all, is “good strategic advice.”

The Senate-hopeful’s own enemy was decidedly less easy to love. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had withstood many scandals: felony securities fraud, cutting sweetheart deals for confessed pedophiles, two extramarital affairs, pocketing a very expensive pen. But “Teflon Ken” seemed impervious; though indicted and impeached (then acquitted), he had remained in public office for over a decade, winning election after election, pushing his party farther to the right, and eliciting a string of bizarre endorsements. One PAC-funded ad intended to tout Paxton’s record on combating human trafficking went viral for effectively communicating the opposite: “When missing posters go up, Ken Paxton takes them down.” As even our president put it, Paxton “may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.” None of this has stopped Elon Musk from shelling out at least $212 million in donations to his campaign, helping make this contest the most expensive non-presidential election in the nation’s history.

***

In the afternoon, I headed to a polling place in East Austin flagged as a potential hot spot for ICE activity. I took a Waymo rideshare there and back, closely supervising the steering wheel’s countless micro-adjustments and reflecting on Greg Abbott’s legacy. Over the past eleven years as governor, Abbott has been responsible for one of the “hardest right turns in recent state history,” according to the New York Times. His most infamous triumph is Operation Lone Star, a military initiative which skyrocketed the number of migrant apprehensions along the border, and resulted in a vehicle pursuit death rate eight times higher than the national average.

We pulled to a superbly smooth stop at a traffic light. In September, ICE shot a delivery driver named Wilber Rafael Garces Perez in the back. He was brought to Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas, where he was discharged into ICE custody with the bullet still lodged against his spine. 

But at the George Washington Carver Museum, I learned there had been no sign of ICE all day—in fact, no sign of ICE at polling places in Texas at all (ICE had been given orders, it turned out, to stand down on Election Day). The sun was setting, slicing across the extravagant mural on the museum’s south-facing wall. Two Election Protection volunteers were relaxing on lawn chairs. They’d flown down together from New York: one was a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, the other from Manhattan.

I spoke with more city council hopefuls, who seemed as a cohort to have relaxed over the course of the day. One candidate, Misael Ramos, had been arrested at a recent protest over the shooting of Garces Perez; soon after, he’d secured a national nomination from the Democratic Socialists of America. Misael invited me to his watch party, promising free food, free booze, and a Trump piñata.

***

Misael’s party was not as large as Hinojosa’s or Talarico’s—the latter so oversubscribed that when I emailed for a press credential, his comms team wrote “please do not show up”—but the energy was certainly better. People packed themselves under a backyard tent hung with string lights and screen-printed T-shirts, chattering in English and Spanish, eyes trained on the giant projected television. On a table inside, I found campaign flyers, aforementioned free booze, and containers of taco fillings, scraped clean. Organizers were gathering signatures to end the development of a massive Amazon facility nearby, and the Trump piñata rested on the lawn—still, for now, intact. 

As the results rolled in, the DJ switched between reggaeton and “Party in the U.S.A.” But all music was drowned out by shouting when the Senate race was called for Talarico. “Is Texas blue now?” strangers voiced aloud to each other, incredulous, while others made jubilant phone calls or simply stared at the screen in tears. 

When Hinojosa’s victory followed shortly thereafter, there were louder screams, heavier jumping. The two life-long Austinites next to me were stunned. People leaned against each other and sang. “The stars at night! Are big and bright! Deep in the heart! Of Texas…”

Neither Talarico nor Hinojosa support abolishing ICE, we reminded each other, but the defeat of Paxton and Abbott felt like the first of many flipped tables. Just after midnight, as promised, an article appeared in Rome’s Il manifesto, calling Talarico a “fenomeno.”