Luke Heslip

Officially teaching my first graduate seminar on political science pedagogy! @UCSC #AcademicTwitter #PoliSci

After Ken Paxton’s win in the Texas Republican U.S. Senate runoff, VoteHub’s general election forecast between Paxton and Democrat James Talarico has shifted to Tossup for the first time this morning.

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New - Generic Ballot poll - 32 Swing districts (Latino voters) 🔵 Democrats 54% 🔴 Republicans 27% BSP #C - RV - 5/14

Are Courts Contributing to Democratic Backsliding? US courts have historically been slow to protect guardrails. Election law cases may now have them abetting backsliding. New #ScienceOfPolitics podcast/transcript with Thomas Keck & Albert Rivero. niskanencenter.org/are-the-courts…

This is the right play. I'm hoping Mamdani's successful pivot away from his statements on policing can give us a bold new era of people just ditching old bad positions. x.com/PollTracker202…

Texas has 133 Republicans currently serving in Congress & the state Legislature. Among the Rs who won their primaries this year or who aren’t up for reelection (i.e. those who could still be in office after this year), just 30 (23%) began serving as elected legislators pre-2014

Trump says the US will "blow up" Oman if it doesn't behave.

New - Senate poll - Texas 🔵 Talarico 45% 🔴 Paxton 38% PPP #B (🔵) - LV - 5/26

Ken Paxton is odious and James Talarico is a better choice. I think Jeff's clearly right about how many serious Christians will react to him, but he can only call it blasphemous while standing shoulder to shoulder with Evangelicals and Catholics because he, too, is liberal. Talarico is sincere in his Christianity, which is a different religion than Jeff's Christianity, a different religion than Evangelicalism, a different religion than Catholicism. He has a clear, predictable moral compass: he is a social justice progressive. He selectively reads and selectively focuses on scriptural points that align with that moral compass, the same way a thousand branches of Christianity formed with heartfelt disputes. And once upon a time, man, those differences really meant something. Catholicism was offensive to Protestants! Lutherans were not Anglicans. So Talarico quotes the Gospel of Thomas? Megachurches play "Christian" rock concerts in theaters. Blasphemy is in the eye of the beholder, and sects almost by definition trample on what other sects consider sacred. Lately, those internal disputes have gotten less focus as people are concerned about the wave of secularization. Whenever a vital religion pops up, people from more settled sects react the same way Jeff reacts to Talarico: with unease or disgust towards this strange new religion with strange new demands among them. But now, the thing that really unites a lot of Republican Christians is not adherence to a pure Christianity that all of them come anywhere close to agreeing on. It is adherence to a shared cultural conservatism that they prioritize over doctrinal purity, just like all religious liberals. Talarico does not answer to "his activist base" because he's cowed by the public. He is a progressive because, like his activist base, he sincerely believes in that moral frame. He is a Christian because, like other progressive Christians, he believes that moral frame stems from a higher power. Jeff asks if God makes demands of Talarico that might put him crosswise of his activist base. I ask if God makes demands of anyone that conflict with their deep-felt moral beliefs. Jeff frames Talarico as either dishonest or a coward because he fails to accept what Jeff sees as the demands of Christianity. You can make that accusation, just like Mormons and Evangelicals accuse each other of cowardice or dishonesty over sola scriptura, grace vs works, and Priesthood authority. Is Talarico's Christianity sloppy with things like the Gospel of Thomas claim? Yes, but not more so than a thousand other sloppy, contested claims in a religious territory full of disputes that look absurd to participants on all sides. Jeff is not defending a unified and coherent Christianity against a non-Christian interloper. He's defending a unified and coherent right-wing cultural conservatism against a progressive interloper, mistaking sincere belief in a competing set of religious values for insincerity in the expression of those values.

Fun fact: the Texas Railroad Commissioner no longer oversees railways. It oversees the oil and natural gas industry, natural resource conservation, pipeline safety, and sometimes utility regulations. It’s an extremely powerful and important position in Texas & winnable for Dems with Bo French as the Republican nominee.

Breaking NYT: CBS News declined to renew its contract with '60 Minutes' correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi — six months after her segment on torture in Salvadoran prisons was pulled off the air abruptly by Bari Weiss. nytimes.com/2026/05/27/bus…

Ron DeSantis had 6 House Endorsements in his 2024 bid. 3 of them have lost primaries: Bob Good (lost in ‘24) Thomas Massie Chip Roy

I cannot imagine how exhausting it must be to be the lawyer of an individual whose job is to essentially put his foot in his mouth on livestream 24/7. Actual nightmare.

The Governor knows it will be much more treacherous if Paxton is nominee

According to Ken Paxton’s wife of 38 years, he’s the most corrupt man in America.

@Barrowwight Fortunately, I wrote a whole blog post about what it means! Read this in detail for all my predictions and opinions on the topic! noahpinion.blog/p/will-this-be…

"In September 2025, nine mosques and cultural centers in and around Paris were targeted...Bloody severed pig heads, each marked with the word “Macron” in blue ink, were left outside their front doors." This was a Russian stunt. From @OCCRP. Read more: occrp.org/en/investigati…

This is extremely wrong. But don’t trust me, here’s Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative Supreme Court judges of all time, making the point clear.

America never believed the world belonged to us. We believed that the world, if allowed to determine its own destiny, would choose to look more like us. We weren't totally wrong about that either.

FWIW the median Talarico vs Paxton matchup is currently at R+1 in our (to-be-released) @SplitTicket_ model. Cornyn vs Talarico was R+6. Hard to overstate how badly Rs may have shot themselves in the foot; even if Paxton wins, he's taking a ton of money away from Ohio/Alaska/Iowa.