The Texas Senate race has become a national laboratory for anti-"woke" politics, testing whether voters still recoil from the language of 2020 amid the economic pain of 2026. Why it matters: Republicans came away from 2024 convinced they had won more than an election — they had broken through on culture, turning Democrats' progressive language and identity politics into symbols of elite detachment. The durability of that culture-war coup is now an open question, as the GOP tries to redeploy the