Before attending the Texas Youth Summit on Friday and Saturday, Walker Doner, 21, said he wasn’t sure whether he would vote next month.
One of Doner’s coworkers was recently deported. “That really discouraged me from voting,” he said in an interview. But then he heard speakers at the conference talk about the fight between Christianity and Islam – and the spiritual warfare they believe will end in Jesus’ return.
Doner said he doesn’t know when the world will end. But he wants to ensure he’s ready.
At this year’s summit for conservative youth, Texas GOP leaders galvanized a crowd of 500 with a warning that the upcoming midterms aren’t just important, but represent an existential fight between good and evil. They urged listeners to back Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate bid and condemned his opponent, Democratic state Sen. James Talarico, as a dangerous socialist.
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Young attendees at the two-day conference said in interviews that they were inspired to vote Republican and save America. “The stakes of this election are practically the future of Texas,” said Asher Barreras, 18, a student at Lone Star College’s Tomball campus. “If we lose this election, then … Texas is not going to be Texas.”
Christine Almeda, 29, a pastor from Conroe, said she agreed with Paxton that Talarico would “pervert” the Christian faith if he is elected. “Once that gets perverted, or someone gets elected into office and perverts that, I think it goes downhill from there,” she said. The upcoming midterms are “crucial,” she said, because they’ll show where the younger generation is headed.
The event gave young people a chance to hear directly from Paxton, who said God had called the people of Texas to save their freedoms. “Pray that God will deliver us from evil, ’cause that’s where we’re headed,” Paxton told the crowd. “If Texas doesn’t preserve and we end up with a socialist Marxist who’s one of our leaders, we are on a very bad pathway towards more of that.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, speaks at the Texas Youth Summit in The Woodlands, Friday, Oct. 9, 2026. (Adrian Ashford/Houston Chronicle)
State Republican leaders have ramped up their warnings about Talarico as numerous polls have shown him slightly ahead of Paxton. No Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. Talarico, who once called capitalism an “oppressive system,” denies that he is a socialist and has said he wants to reclaim “old-school capitalism.”
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Nevertheless, socialism and its consequences were a central theme of the two-day summit at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott Hotel & Convention Center.
“We’ve all seen the sad statistics of young people who are losing faith in capitalism, who think, ‘Gosh, maybe socialism is a good idea,'” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said on Saturday. He warned people that socialism doesn’t work, and touted President Donald Trump’s new Trump accounts, which allow parents to claim special investment accounts for children up to 18 years old.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick recounted past fights for American independence, including the Battle of the Alamo and the American Revolution. This upcoming election, he said, is a contest just as important for Americans and Christians.
“The Democrat socialists are real; they’re on the march, and they want to take this country away from you and me,” he said. He said that if Democrats gained a statewide foothold in Texas, they would take away Texans’ religious liberty and right to bear arms.
“This battle is more than Democrats and Republicans,” he said. “It’s about darkness and light.”
Officials’ warnings were punctuated by talks from Yeonmi Park, who fled North Korea as a girl, and Chloe Cole, a detransitioner and professional advocate against medical gender transition.
Activist Riley Gaines walks on stage for a talk at the Texas Youth Summit in The Woodlands, Friday, Oct. 9, 2026. (Adrian Ashford/Houston Chronicle)
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Park talked about the extreme and restrictive nature of her home country, telling the audience that in a socialist country, citizens can’t own anything, not even their own thoughts.
Cole said modern leftists are intent on intimidating and crushing any opposition and destroying the fabric of American society. “Transgender ideology is truly a population-ending existential threat to our country,” she said.
In addition to his attacks on Talarico, whom he called “the little socialist,” Paxton also boasted about his record of lawsuits against Democratic administrations. He said he sued former President Joe Biden’s administration over 100 times, and highlighted his suits against technology companies like Google and Meta. He touted Meta’s agreement to pay Texas a $1 billion settlement in a case over child safety on its platforms.
Matthew Markarian, 28, said he liked the attorney general’s focus on his record, not just the shortcomings of his opponent, whom conservatives have nicknamed “Talafreako.”
“He might have missed one or two things,” Markarian said of Paxton, without going into specifics. State Sen. Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce from the attorney general on “biblical grounds” last year, spoke on panels at the conference on Saturday but did not mention him by name.
“But when you look at Talafreako, it’s like hey – he missed everything,” Markarian said.
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This article originally published at At Texas Youth Summit, GOP leaders cast Paxton-Talarico Senate race as a battle against ‘evil’.