In less than two months, Texans will cast primary ballots in the first statewide election in at least a generation in which both parties are holding competitive primaries. The prize? The seat currently held by Texas’s senior senator, John Cornyn, who is locked in a three-way battle with Attorney General Ken Paxton and rising star U.S. Congressman Wesley Hunt to retain the party’s nomination. 

Whoever emerges victorious from that contest will face the winner of a struggle between two promising young Democrats: state Representative James Talarico, from Austin, and Dallas congressional member Jasmine Crockett, both of whom are running rare well-funded primary campaigns. 

There are a lot of ways to parse the differences between each of the candidates, but one is to look at how they’re presenting themselves to their most enthusiastic supporters. What do they have to offer to the kind of politics junkie who will spend cash money on merchandise promoting their preferred Senate candidate? What does a Cornyn-head wear on the weekend to show his support for his boy? How does a young Democrat show her friends and neighbors that she’s caught Talarico Fever? The answers to these questions help reveal the way the campaigns understand themselves and their supporters. So let’s take a look at the wearable pitch coming from each candidate. 

John Cornyn

Cornyn’s supporters aren’t being asked to demonstrate their devotion to Big John—rather, they’re being given multiple opportunities to express their opposition to Ken Paxton. The beleaguered attorney general, whose time in office has been plagued with scandals that have led to felony charges (dropped after he agreed to pay restitution and perform community service), impeachment (he was acquitted), and a separation from his wife, state Senator Angela Paxton (she filed for divorce on “biblical grounds,” a.k.a. infidelity). It’s perhaps a bit diminishing for an incumbent to focus on his challenger’s misadventures, but positioning oneself as an underdog is a time-honored political strategy, and the polling shows the candidates locked in a tight battle. (Most polls have Hunt, about whom Cornyn has nothing to say, in a relatively close third place.) If every campaign is a Rocky movie, then every candidate wants to be Rocky—in Cornyn’s case, he’s apparently trying to establish himself as the weathered Rocky of Rocky V, and cast Paxton as the upstart challenger Tommy “the Machine” Gunn. 

To establish that dynamic, Cornyn’s merch focuses on deep cuts that only a true Texas politics sicko would recognize. Did you know that in 2013, Paxton lifted another lawyer’s fancy pen from the tray after going through the metal detector at a North Texas courthouse? (After the story was reported in the media, he returned it.) If you not only recall that anecdote but also know that the pen was manufactured by a company called Montblanc, then you’re the target market for a “Ken Paxton stole my Montblanc and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” T-shirt. Are you aware of how many homes Paxton claimed as his primary address for a homestead exemption? (Three!) Maybe you’d like to plant a yard sign in front of your house that says, “Unlike Ken Paxton, this is my only primary residence.” Got him! 

The rest of the merch is less clever. Mostly, Cornyn’s camp has had an unflattering photo of Paxton blown up and put on T-shirts, stickers, a mug, and even koozies, with “kenstoppers.com” beneath the photo and text taking various cheap shots at the embattled A.G. Do you need a reason to vote for John Cornyn? Look no further, the candidate’s merch suggests, than the fact that he is not Ken Paxton! 

Jasmine Crockett

Crockett’s clapbacks at her GOP colleagues have made her one of the Democratic Party’s biggest stars, despite the fact that she was just elected to the House in 2022. Her greatest hits include describing then-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as having a “bleach-blond, bad-built butch body” from the floor of the chamber in which they both served; she’s also referred to Greg Abbott, a wheelchair user, as “Governor Hot Wheels,” for which she earned a mention in Texas Monthly’s 2026 Bum Steer Awards. 

Crockett’s campaign store is light on this style of rhetoric, however. Her merch consists of just five T-shirts and a yard sign, all built on the same elements: her last name, in block letters, and her generic campaign slogan, “Texas Tough.” They come in multiple colors, and you can get one with her face on it, lest you worry that a passerby will assume you’re endorsing Davy Crockett, or one with the outline of the state behind the text, in case there’s any confusion over what you mean by “Texas.” (In Norway, it’s slang for “crazy”!)

That said, fans of Crockett’s rhetorical style aren’t completely unserved—they’ll just have to wait a bit for items from the Clapback Collection, a web storefront paid for by the campaign, to once again be available for order. There, supporters can get tees and hoodies with Crockett’s famous “bleach-blond” epithet, attributed as “a Crockett clapback,” as well as merch defining the congresswoman’s use of the word “chile” (“used to refer to any person(s); generally, while expressing annoyance”), a reference to the time she said “Chile, listen” to GOP Congresswoman Nancy Mace on the House floor. 

Wesley Hunt

The Wesley Hunt web store offers mostly standard, nondescript fare—it features twelve different items that utilize the two versions of Hunt’s campaign logo, which is just the words “Hunt for Senate” in a generic sans serif font. It looks more perfunctory than aspirational, like something the candidate had an intern draw up in an afternoon. 

However! Hunt’s personality starts to shine through in a few items at the bottom of the page—and his personality is apparently “guy who doesn’t think much of Jasmine Crockett.” He sells both bumper stickers and a coffee mug attacking his Dallas-area counterpart. Hunt supporters befuddled by Crockett’s whole deal can slap “Honk if Jasmine Crockett Confuses You” stickers on the bumpers of their F-150s, while caffeine addicts can drink their morning joe out of a cup that says, “My Coffee Works Harder Than Jasmine Crockett.” As attacks go, these are kind of mid—“I’m confused” isn’t the toughest flex anyway—but they certainly demonstrate that Hunt is spoiling for a fight without directly going after either of his primary opponents, which is probably a wise move for the candidate polling in third place. (He also has one sticker that says, “Vote Conservative. If Liberalism worked, you’d still be in California,” presumably accusing everyone driving behind the hypothetical Hunt fan of being a Golden State transplant.) 

Ken Paxton

The laziest merch store among those of the Senate hopefuls belongs to the betting favorite to win the seat. Ken Paxton’s collection sports a single campaign logo—a bold sans serif font that simply reads “Paxton” over the words “U.S. Senate.” That logo appears on a handful of items—a bumper sticker and a yard sign, of course, as well as a white tee, a white baseball cap, and koozies in either red or white. Additionally, there’s a little spice in the form of a cardinal-red sweatshirt with the logo emblazoned proudly across the chest, as well as a camo trucker hat, a trend that the Harris-Walz campaign was also on. 

As of mid-January, prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket give Paxton a 61–62 percent chance of winning the GOP nomination, and they give the party a 72–77 percent chance of winning the race, which suggests that Paxton feels he may just not need to hustle out merch in order to inspire voters. 

James Talarico

Texas Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in about three decades, but they are loyal to the losers who have tried. There are still houses in Austin with their “Beto for Texas” signs in the yard eight years later. And Talarico, the young state rep whose fans include Joe Rogan and Barack Obama, seems to be actively courting those same diehards with his merch. 

For one, he’s got the same slogan format and aesthetic: You can get “Talarico for Texas” on a tee, a sweatshirt, a ball cap, a mug, a sticker, or a sign, all in a heritage-style Western typeface that might also be used by a craft brewery or a direct-to-consumer brand that sells handmade cowboy boots at a surprisingly affordable price. Everything is in black and white—downright edgy for the seminary student. The vintage approach to graphic design served Beto O’Rourke well, and Talarico would very much like to be seen as the next stage in the evolution of Texas Democrats. If O’Rourke evoked John the Baptist, in other words, then that would make Talarico . . .  

Well, we’ll let another one of the seminarian’s shirts suggest the end of that sentence. The back reads “Talarico for Texas,” while the front reads “It’s time to start flipping tables,” a reference of Matthew 21:12, in which Jesus drives the money changers out of the temple. Talarico’s Christian identity is very much a part of his campaign, and his invocation of a righteous, table-flipping Christ is part of his attempt to reclaim that identity for the left. 
The final pieces of merch available from Talarico utilize his alternate logo—a capital T with the candidate’s last name running across the top bar and the “for Texas” running down the centerline. It looks a bit like a roadside neon sign for a taqueria—one can imagine generations of high school students parking under the big T after school as they grab their tacos and Dr Pepper—but at least it’s not a lowercase T, which would bring some of the subtext of Talarico’s branding uncomfortably close to outright text.

Image credits: Talarico: Mark Felix/Bloomberg/Getty; Crockett: Omar Vega/Getty; Paxton: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty; Cornyn: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty; Hunt: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

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