Tofu Can Win You An Election

In a stunning night for the political establishment, Democrats swept nearly every race that mattered in both chambers of the US Congress, led by the Texas victory of James Talarico, a failed target of the meat culture war.

Tofu Talarico is the new US senator-elect for Texas, and the meat industry can stick it.

The culture war around meat has long had more than a whispering influence on American politics for ages, and played a helping hand in the election of the current federal administration.

In the run-up to the 2024 election, JD Vance made his disdain for “fake meat” clear, calling it “disgusting” and “highly processed garbage”. He was elected vice president on the Trump 2.0 ticket, serving as deputy to a man who, just last week, claimed he didn’t know how to pronounce ‘vegan’ because “I really do like the meat”.

That man is the president of the US, whose record-low ratings have driven Democrats’ sweeping victories in the midterm elections this week.

Donald Trump has routinely attacked James Talarico, a Democrat, as a tofu-eating vegan who gets “sick as a dog” every time he eats meat. His hope was to paint him as an anti-masculine, “low-testosterone” man who couldn’t put down a steak in America’s largest cattle-producing state.

Talarico has advocated for reducing meat consumption to help mitigate the climate crisis, so it’s unsurprising that the climate-denying president isn’t a big fan.

In the end, though, voters don’t care if you eat beef, or tofu, or both – they care how much these products cost, and that has been one of the most glaring failures of the current administration. Talarico’s win, by a 12-point margin in a state the Republicans won by double digits two years ago, is proof of that.

Why did the Republicans go gaga over tofu?

The saga surrounding Talarico and tofu stemmed from a 2022 speech while campaigning for reelection to the Texas House of Representatives. Speaking at a fundraiser for Texas Humane Legislation Network, an animal rights group, the Democrat said cutting back on meat was the “moral thing to do” and “necessary to fight climate change”.

“I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign, so we are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses,” he said. “Everyone has to take personal responsibility in this effort.”

He is right. Meat has a higher impact on the planet than any other food, and red and processed meats have been found to raise the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, dementia, cardiovascular disease, and early death.

In his speech, Talarico never said he was vegan. But nevertheless, that tag caught on as Republicans sought an attack line against the Senate challenger – the best they could come up with was “tofu eater”.

Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and the GOP’s nominee for the Senate seat, came out with this gem: “He’s a vegan who thinks God is non-binary and that there’s actually six biological sexes.” This was a speech where he referred to his opponent as “Tofu Talarico” and “Low-T Talarico” (no points for guessing).

Trump, who thinks it’s pronounced ‘vay-gan’, made similar retorts. “He’s a vegan in Texas, and you can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas,” he said, calling Talarico a “very defective candidate”.

Such was the vitriol from the right – meat-eaters are legally barred from eating tofu, of course – even Talarico’s nonchalant approach was spooked. His campaign quickly came out with a media blitz where the candidate was chowing down all kinds of meat, from turkey and chicken to steak at a classic Texas BBQ.

“I want to say this definitively, and categorically, that I deny all accusations of veganism,” Talarico said in a March interview “And our campaign basically runs on barbecue these days.”

It was a carefully curated reaction to Republican attacks in the hopes of courting Texas’s most committed steak enjoyers, though the overload of meat-eating content didn’t sit well with his comments about humanity’s need to eat less beef. Nevertheless, the effort got him elected to the Senate.

Democrats’ historic wins in Texas could signal a win for the planet

The scrutiny over Talarico’s diet has less to do with his actual meat consumption, and more to do with the culture of meat-eating. Masculinity is very closely associated with meat in the US – if you don’t eat meat, you’re not manly enough. Ask Vance, who has called men with plant-based diets “soy boys” previously.

You only have to look as far as the manosphere to illustrate this point. Influencers like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, and Jordan Peterson have sung the praises of the carnivore diet, as have billionaires like Elon Musk. The rise of generative AI, meanwhile, has accelerated disinformation, thanks to deepfakes, automated bots, and targeted curation.

These figures have a sizeable impact on young men. A 2025 study showed that 14% of American teens find meat-eating cool. By contrast, only 6% said the same for vegetarian diets, dropping to just 2% for vegan eating.

Texans eat more meat than their compatriots in any other US state, so by painting Talarico as an anti-meat candidate with low masculinity, the Republicans hoped to galvanise the cattle-loving base in a state where Trump won the male vote by a whopping 28 points. In fact, 63% of men voted for the GOP in the 2024 elections, compared to 50% of women.

Still, Talarico overcame these historical barriers to become Texas’s first Democratic senator in 32 years.

“In Texas, he talks about: ‘I’m a vegan, I’m a vegan,’” Trump said at a rally last month, adding: “Vegan meaning he likes lettuce.” That label came 19 years after Barack Obama complained about the price of arugula and was swiftly labelled an “arugula-eating, pointy-headed-professor type” by a spokesperson for his Republican presidential rival John McCain. We all know how that election went.

The reality is, Texas has a Democratic senator who recognises the threat of climate change. This is important in a state that emits more carbon than all others in the US, and its status as the number-one beef producer doesn’t help.

The triumph of Talarico’s victory was further magnified by the ouster of Governor Greg Abbott, who was unseated by Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who will become the state’s first Latina governor. The new senator-elect and governor-elect celebrated with a meal at Whataburger. Did they eat a beef burger? Who knows, and frankly, it matters little in the grand scheme of things.

Abbott was the governor who presided over Texas’s ban on cultivated meat, which caused a lawsuit that the state has failed to get dismissed. Whether a blue Texas would overturn such a ban remains to be seen, as does the immediate impact on the future food industry.

But one thing is for sure: in 2026, an alleged tofu-eating “vegan” can win over the public in a state that has been deep-red since 1994. If that isn’t hope for the future of democracy and, to an extent, the planet, I don’t know what is.