EXCLUSIVE — The campaign arm of Senate Republicans is using a new deepfake ad generated by AI to spotlight past tweets from Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico that the GOP hopes will undermine his bid to flip the Lone Star State.
In a nearly 1.5-minute digital ad first seen by the Washington Examiner, an AI-generated Talarico narrates what the National Republican Senatorial Committee calls some of the Texas state representative’s “extreme statements praising transgenderism, twisting Christian beliefs, and advocating for open borders.”
The ad is the latest instance of the NRSC using a deepfake video to turn online quotes from Democrats into video and audio, as it did to criticize Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) during last year’s longest-ever government shutdown.
The Talarico video includes a small watermark disclosing it is AI-generated and features several tweets from the years prior to launching his Senate campaign. Those posts included statements such as “Radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country”; “Our office is the first in the history of the Capitol to add pronouns to our official business cards”; and “in my faith, God is nonbinary.”
“James Talarico is the most radical, woke Democrat Texas voters have ever seen, and voters will reject his extreme statements praising transgenderism, twisting Christian beliefs, and advocating for open borders,” NRSC Regional press secretary Samantha Cantrell said in a statement.
The Talarico campaign responded that Republicans and their donors fear for the Democrats’ ability to win a Texas Senate seat and achieve what no member of his party has since 1988.
“John Cornyn, Ken Paxton, and the billionaires who prop them up are scared of James Talarico for good reason: our campaign is building a movement poised to change the politics of this state and take power back for working people,” Talarico campaign press secretary JT Ennis said in a statement. “While they lob stale attacks to mislead Texans, we are uniting the people of Texas to win in November.”
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Republicans have shone a spotlight on a litany of prior comments from Talarico that they see as a political liability with voters in a state the GOP has dominated for decades. But the party also has yet to secure its own nominee, as Republican leaders in Washington plead with President Donald Trump to endorse NRSC-backed Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in his hotly contested runoff against State Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Talarico bested Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) in last week’s primary and will face the winner of the GOP’s May 26 runoff.
