When Vice President JD Vance told the midterm convention audience that he had absolutely no desire to see James Talarico’s browser history, it got a good laugh. Talarico has that weird, smarmy creepiness thing going on, combined with casual blasphemy, a hatred of capitalism, and the sensibilities of a white-wine woman who works in HR and celebrates Kwanzaa. He’s a terrible fit for America, and an unimaginable fit for Texas.

But people are imagining it. They’re imagining it hard, especially people outside Texas. If you listen to the pollsters- and you should never listen to the pollsters- he’s either neck-and-neck with Ken Paxton or beating the TX AG handily. The smart set contends that Texas is about to tumble into the blue chasm at the hands of a guy who’s less Beto’s heir than Pete Buttigieg’s grinning Mini-Me. So, I decided, now that I’m back at my Texas house for the fall, to see for myself what’s really going on. Here’s what I found.

Not much. I am not seeing the Talaricomania.

I was here in Texas during Betomania, and the big difference is that Betomania existed. He excited people. He was young and cute, and they were willing to overlook his communism and his furry dalliance to surf his sporty vibe. You saw Beto signs everywhere, and you could also feel that people were interested in the guy. In the end, he came pretty close to beating Sen. Ted Cruz (T-TX). But close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and #MeToo allegations, which Talarico’s allies seem to have planted about him as part of a strategy of deception.

I drove about 1,000 miles through Texas on my trek from Los Angeles because Barkey and Bitey don’t fly, and the first Talarico sign I saw was in my left-leaning Houston neighborhood. Eight years ago, I would’ve seen a ton of Beto signs. They would’ve been everywhere. Is that proof of anything? After all, I didn’t see any Paxton signs either, but Paxton seems to have adopted a different strategy, one that doesn’t count on sending his party’s base into a frenzy of excitement. But Talarico desperately needs to generate a frenzy of excitement to win. So, where is it?

In my neighborhood, Talarico signs are out in front of a few houses, probably one or two per block, and they are on exactly the houses you would expect — the ones with the rainbow flags, the ones with the Ukrainian flags, the ones with the Priuses, the ones with the many, many cats. If you’re conservative around here, the way you show it is to hang a big American flag out front. That’s the first thing I do when I arrive in Texas after I slide a loaded 9mm into my belt. Every few houses has a big American flag out front, but none of them — zero, nil, the number of real girlfriends I believe Talarico ever had — has a Talarico sign. Of course, Talarico considers our flag a “complicated symbol.”

The houses that do have Talarico signs often also have signs for other Democrats, indicating........

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