The most unusual resume in American politics now belongs to the attorney general of Texas. Nathan Johnson, who on Tuesday became the first Democrat elected to the job since 1994, spent part of his earlier life composing music for the English-language dub of Dragon Ball Z, one of the most popular anime series ever shown in the United States.
Johnson defeated Republican Mayes Middleton with 52.4 percent of the vote to Middleton’s 45.9 percent, according to the Associated Press tally of unofficial results, completing his part of a Democratic sweep of every Texas statewide office. The attorney general’s race drew a fraction of the attention given to the Senate and governor’s contests, but the office he has won is one of the most powerful in state politics, and his path to it is unlike any other winner’s on the night.
From the recording studio to the courthouse
Before his legal and political career, Johnson worked as a composer, and his best-known credit is the score for the English dub of Dragon Ball Z produced for American television. Reporting by Times Now and Dexerto credits his music across 67 episodes of the series and five of its movies, work that introduced a generation of American viewers to the show’s sound. The credit followed him into politics as a piece of trivia; after Tuesday, it is part of the biography of a state attorney general.
Why the office matters
The Texas attorney general is not a ceremonial post. For decades, Republican holders of the office used it as a national legal weapon, filing suit after suit against Democratic presidents and federal agencies, a strategy that made the job a springboard and a headline machine. That same machinery now sits in Democratic hands for the first time since the mid-1990s, in a state government that flipped in a single night.
What Johnson does with it will be one of the tests of the Texas realignment. The office defends state laws in court, issues legal opinions that bind state agencies, and decides which federal actions Texas challenges or supports. A Democratic attorney general in Austin changes the legal map far beyond Texas, because few state offices file cases with national consequences as routinely as this one.
Part of a larger night
Johnson’s win was one piece of the sweep that also sent James Talarico to the US Senate and Gina Hinojosa to the governor’s mansion, ending a Democratic statewide drought that stretched back to 1994. Of all the winners, he may be the easiest to underestimate and the hardest to categorize: a lawyer who took the state’s top legal office, and a composer whose earlier work plays, to this day, in the childhood memories of millions of voters.
Sources: Associated Press and USA Today tallies of unofficial Texas results; Reuters on the statewide sweep; Times Now and Dexerto on Johnson’s composing credits, November 4, 2026.