James Talarico Puts His Faith in Texas Voters
After the 8:30 A.M. service at the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, Senior Pastor Amos Disasa brought two worshippers to his office for a prearranged chat. One was Mike Rawlings, the city’s glad-handing former mayor. The other was a visitor, James Talarico, who’s running for Senate. A thirty-six-year-old state representative from Austin, Talarico has a novel platform for a progressive Democrat: the New Testament. Though he has spent seven years in the Texas House, he has the bearing of a young minister, and much of the training; he is on leave from the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, with a year of class work to go. His framing of politics as a sacrament has attracted two million followers on Instagram. When he delivers an aphorism in his deep, soothing voice—“The closest thing we have to the Kingdom of Heaven is a multiracial, multicultural democracy”—it’s civic A.S.M.R. for anyone sick of Donald Trump. In one analysis of social-media engagement among Democratic officials, Talarico trailed only Kamala Harris and Barack Obama.
The men settled into armchairs and leaned in to get acquainted. Disasa, a soft-spoken Ethiopian immigrant, asked Talarico, “What kind of welcome are you getting from evangelicals?” White evangelicals make up about a quarter of the Texas electorate, and in 2024 nearly ninety per cent of them voted for Trump.
Talarico blinked and widened his eyes, gauging the room. “We think we can make real headway with Christians,” he said. “Evangelicals . . .” He shrugged.
Rawlings asked about his sabbatical from seminary: “You’re putting being ordained on hold? God’s gonna wait?”
“This is where I’m being called.”
Rawlings rattled off several Black pastors who could help. Then he clasped his hands and said, “Help me understand your strategy.”
Talarico’s message, and his medium, are clear. On Instagram, he likes to say, “The biggest divide in our country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other so that we’re not looking up at them.” Like Pete Buttigieg, he thrives on Fox News. Last summer, when Trump directed a gerrymander in Texas, Talarico appeared on Fox and flummoxed the host by asking, “If Republican policies are popular, why do they need to redraw these maps?”
Electoral strategy is harder. Texas last elected a Democratic senator in 1988, and the state is so firmly in the grip of MAGA legislators that its elementary-school curriculum permits treating Bible stories as historical fact. Talarico began his answer to Rawlings by noting that, late last summer, he was thirty points behind his opponent in the primary, the former congressman Colin Allred. Then, in early November, a new poll “shocked all of us. We’re ahead by six per cent.”
Rawlings raised a hand and said, “I care about that—but I don’t care about that. Your job is to beat Ken Paxton.” Paxton, a cartoonishly nefarious Trump ally, is the state’s attorney general. He somehow survived a sixteen-article impeachment for a rich gumbo of alleged malfeasance, including persuading a donor to hire a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair and retaliating against whistle-blowers on his staff. He is nonetheless favored to win the Republican primary over the four-term senator John Cornyn, who has distinguished himself chiefly by serving four terms. “Everyone talks about getting out the Democratic base, getting young people to the polls—”
“Yes—” Talarico said, nodding.
“We’ve been trying that for fifty years!” Rawlings said.
“Sure, yep—”
“I just care about winning.”
“We have to win,” Talarico said. “Democracy is withering on the vine.”
“I wouldn’t even use the word ‘Democrat.’ I’d just say, ‘I’m a Texan who can beat Ken Paxton!’ ”
“That’s great advice.”
Rawlings’s tutorial zeal seemed to derive equally from the existential stakes of the race and the candidate’s evident need of guidance. Talarico, clean-cut, clean-shaven, and wearing one of his three white J. C. Penney dress shirts, looked like he’d just finished his paper route and was eager to shovel the church’s walk. During the ten-o’clock service, he greeted two dozen parishioners who lined up to meet him. Rawlings shook his head at how long Talarico took with each baby proffered for approval. “He hasn’t learned to maximize his touches,” he said. “But he’s authentic.”
Talarico told me later that he didn’t intend to take Rawlings’s advice about positioning: “I’m not a huge fan of being against someone. Ken Paxton is a symptom, not the disease, and so is Donald Trump—they are the products of a broken system. A campaign based on love is more durable than one based on fear.”
On the trail, Talarico invokes his mother, Tamara, as love incarnate. When he was seven weeks old, Tamara left his father, an abusive alcoholic, and moved into an empty room at a residential hotel where she worked as a sales assistant. She was determined to raise her son in a healthier environment; Talarico’s applause line is “My mom showed me that true love doesn’t tolerate abuse.” Yet even Tamara is mystified by her son’s relentless urge to repair. “I’ll tell Jimmy I’m annoyed at one or both of my sisters, and he’ll always start with ‘You have much more in common than you have differences,’ ” she told me. “We’re regular people—we’re judgy and icky. And he’s so reasonable. He won’t trash-talk. And that’s very annoying, because some people need trash-talking.”
After a rally in Wichita Falls—hard-right terrain—Talarico and four members of his campaign staff were driving south, workshopping themes for a talk the following night. Talarico fills the Notes app on his phone with quotations from such theologians as Richard Rohr, Dorothy Day, and Gustavo Gutiérrez, along with his own ideas, and he and his aides sift it for usable nuggets. “Is there a ‘Love is strong’ riff?” Talarico wondered. “ ‘Hate doesn’t lower anyone’s electricity bill’?” He has a knack for love-and-hate antitheses: “Christian nationalists walk around with a mouth full of Scripture and a heart full of hate.” It’s this rhetorical gift which made Obama call him a “really talented young man.”
“We’ve never done ‘What if Jesus went to the U.S. Senate?’ ” Antonio Esparza, who runs Talarico’s social media, said.
“ ‘For I was hungry and you cut my food stamps,’ ” Talarico said, recalling a line from a draft.
Esparza was having second thoughts. “The whole thing is about weeping, though,” he said. “It’s not fire.”
Talarico laughed and said, “The whole campaign is about weeping!” His blood-sugar alarm went off; in his first campaign, in 2018, he canvassed the length of his district on foot, felt so woozy that he went to the hospital, and discovered that he has diabetes. A staffer noted that it was time to take insulin, but he said, “It’s fine,” and went on thinking. He tends to ignore urgent beeps—from his glucose monitor, his gas gauge, his alarm clock—because he dislikes being rushed. His staff often has to yank him out of his ranch house in Austin to get on the road.
Talarico is remarkably consistent onstage, but in private his affect fluctuates. When he bolts Kraft Mac & Cheese without chewing because he enjoys the “liquid tubes” feeling of childhood, or when he gets defeated by airline luggage tags—“The sticky thing is complicated!”—he resembles Dennis the Menace. More often, though, he calls to mind Robert Caro, as when he passed by Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, and gave staffers a disquisition on the aftermath of J.F.K.’s assassination. (“It’s why the Dallas Cowboys becoming ‘America’s team’ and the show ‘Dallas’ were so important—Dallas had to shake the cloud that had hung over it.”)
In the car, J. T. Ennis, Talarico’s press secretary, looked up from his phone to announce, “Dems in the Senate are caving on the government shutdown.” It had been going on for forty days, in a standoff over health care.
“Democrats always do this!” Talarico said. “If you’re serious about the danger of authoritarian rule, then why capitulate?” As his team began drafting a statement, he continued, “We would have had a few more weeks of pain—which I know is very easy for us to say and very difficult for everyone to endure—but we had to provoke a conflict in order to heal a conflict. Trump is smart enough to know that it would have hurt him to have Thanksgiving air travel ruined.”
They eventually agreed on a single disdainful sentence: “Any ‘deal’ that kicks 1.7 million Texans off their health insurance isn’t compromise; it’s surrender.”
Talarico, still hot, suggested, “Let’s just say, ‘This is why everyone hates the Democratic Party.’ ”
Everyone cried “No!” in unison and cracked up.
He added, softly, “It’s true, though.”
Texas is nearly as multifarious as Texans claim. Its thirty-two million residents inhabit two time zones, seven cultural regions, and twenty media markets. It has the third most Asian Americans of any state, the second most Hispanics, and the most Blacks. It contains eleven “world’s largest” roadside attractions (including the largest rattlesnake and patio chair) and by far the most miles of interstate highway. State Highway 130 has a stretch with a speed limit of eighty-five miles an hour, the highest in the country; the night the road opened, three cars crashed into feral hogs.
Political observers struggle to handicap races here. “It’s folly for anyone to say they know what works to win, because everything is so broken,” Gina Hinojosa, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, told me. The Rio Grande Valley, a predominantly Hispanic region on the Mexican border, voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential primary, Beto O’Rourke in the 2018 Senate race, and Donald Trump in 2024. Voters don’t select a political party when they register, and many sit elections out; in 2024, Texas’s turnout rate trailed every state but Arkansas’s. In great part, this is because Republican legislators have made it exceedingly difficult to vote. Texas generally forbids automatic, same-day, and online registration, and it places severe limits on voting by mail.
Democrats often console themselves by saying, “Texas isn’t a red state or a blue state—it’s a non-voting state.” There are three problems with this maxim. First, every time ballots are counted, Texas is a red state; in 2024, Trump won there by fourteen points. Second, when turnout rises, it tends to favor Republican candidates. And third, after years of gerrymandering and Republican consolidation of power, the Democratic turnout machine is exceedingly rickety. The state Party has a new chairman, a thirty-six-year-old progressive named Kendall Scudder, who describes his election to the post as “a Hail Mary.” He told me, “More than sixty per cent of our nine thousand precincts don’t have a Democratic precinct chair, and the bottom twenty precincts for turnout in the last election were blue ones. You can’t put a sack of flour in the oven and make biscuits.”
The recurrent hope—in Texas and elsewhere—is that Republican extremism will finally alienate enough moderates to flip a seat. Tens of millions of dollars have flooded into the state to support Democrats such as O’Rourke, who narrowly lost to Ted Cruz in 2018, and Colin Allred, who lost to Cruz less narrowly in 2024. The coming elections offer promising indicators: the President is highly unpopular, and there is a Democrat in every race on the ballot for the first time since 1974. But are there still persuadable moderates out there? Allred told me, “People are telling us in election after election that they think the system is rigged against them, and Democrats have been responding, ‘No, this is the best economy in the world.’ You do need to be a moderate Texan, but now it also has to be ‘I’m going to go break some of these molds that are holding you back.’ ”
Democratic strategists argue variously that the key to winning is shaving Republican margins in rural areas, or keeping the Anglo vote below sixty per cent, or focussing on Harris County, home to Houston and nearly a fifth of the state’s voters. Katherine Fischer, the executive director of the Texas Majority PAC, said, “It’s all monkeys on keyboards trying to get to fifty per cent plus one vote.” Some activists, resigned to losing elections, are aiming merely to rebuild the Party and narrow the gap.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, recently laid out a path to a Senate majority: flipping seats in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio. Texas was left out. Schumer’s grasp of generational dynamics is increasingly in question, but there are sensible reasons for caution. “Texas is expensive,” Sam Cornale, who until last year served as C.E.O. of the D.N.C., told me; the committee began the year in debt. “It’s been leaving us at the altar for a long time. And ‘National Dems coming into Texas to take a Senate seat’—the Republican attack ad writes itself.”
Some observers argue that successful campaigns in Texas have to be local, based on neighborly appeal. Yet the stakes are inherently national. When the 2030 census reapportions the Electoral College, Texas is expected to gain four votes, raising its total to forty-four of the necessary two hundred and seventy, while the “blue wall” states will likely lose as many as eleven. As Scudder said, “By 2032, if you’re not winning Texas, you’re not going to have a Democratic President anymore. So you better figure it the fuck out!”
In May, Beto O’Rourke convened a Zoom meeting with three leading Texas Democrats, hoping to assemble a statewide slate. He believed that he’d fallen short in 2018 in part because the Democrats didn’t have strong candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. Now he was weighing another run, and he thought they could all help one another.
On the Zoom, Joaquin Castro, the respected congressman from San Antonio, said that he was also considering the Senate, but would be willing to try for attorney general. Colin Allred—ex-congressman, former N.F.L. linebacker, and all-around model of decency—said that he was definitely planning a Senate campaign.
Talarico, the junior member of the group, was seen as a potential gubernatorial candidate who could distract Greg Abbott, the powerful incumbent. As one person familiar with the discussion said, “I don’t know if it was exactly like ‘Here’s our sacrificial Talarico lamb for governor’—but pretty much.” Instead, Talarico argued that his youth and his legislative experience made him better equipped to be a senator. “I told them the fact that I was new, and different, and had no D.C. connection was a huge advantage,” he recalled. “They were all retreads—which I said lovingly.” He added that he offered the sharpest contrast with Ken Paxton, having studied his misdeeds during the impeachment proceedings and sparred with him last summer, when Paxton filed a lawsuit to remove him and twelve other Democrats from their seats. (Talarico tweeted, “Come and take it”—the legendary Texan reply to the Mexican Army’s request to return a loaned cannon.) “I told them that I have flaws, too: I don’t have the infrastructure, the name I.D. But I have the fewest flaws.”
O’Rourke was nonplussed. “I think the world of James,” he said recently. “I told him, ‘If you end up being the guy who runs for Senate against the Republican machine, you will want friends on that ticket.’ ” Instead, “James came in, like, ‘I don’t care what you guys are doing with your little huddle. Fuck all y’all, I’m doing this.’ He blew everything up in his excitement to make the case for himself.” O’Rourke called Castro afterward and said, “What the fuck?” But he also told me, “You’re not going to win in this game unless you’re really fucking confident.”
Talarico declared his candidacy after Labor Day, and tried strenuously to run a positive race, even declining to distinguish his policies from Allred’s. But it was apparent that he wouldn’t get much help from the Party or from independent PACs. Someone close to his campaign told me, “Ninety-seven per cent of this is going it alone.”
Some of Talarico’s early videos owed a debt to other politicians, including one from the State Fair in which he wore a Texas-flag shirt and explained that tariffs were ruining everything: “These deep-fried Oreos cost fourteen dollars. They used to cost six.” Talarico acknowledges borrowing from food-price explainers by Zohran Mamdani (halal carts) and the Michigan senatorial candidate Mallory McMorrow (game-day snacks). “You do take inspiration from your peers,” he said. “But the cover is rarely as good as the original.” He soon learned to assert himself. Gina Hinojosa, his deputy campaign manager (no relation to the gubernatorial candidate), told me, “All the D.C. consultants in the world can tell James, ‘Just say, “Groceries, groceries, groceries,” ’ and he’ll say, ‘No, it’s “Healing, healing, healing.” ’ ”
Talarico has weaknesses as a campaigner. His ability to faultlessly memorize speeches occasionally makes them feel canned. (“Introducing yourself thirty million times can get a little monotonous,” he admits.) He sometimes sounds like a graduate student, as when he informed the legislature, “Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.” And his eagerness to connect the dots, to explain that bad thing A is happening because of underlying bad thing B, makes him reluctant to answer a yes-or-no question with a yes or a no.
In conversation, though, his tractor beam is strong. Andrew Mamo, a consultant who prepped Talarico for Joe Rogan’s podcast in July, said, “I told him, ‘Here’s how you can get Rogan to go to the stories you want to tell, your greatest hits—the insulin walk, your bill that prevented police from working with reality shows.’ James said, ‘I would love to actually listen to the guy and see where we agree.’ ” Rogan began the show in his customary posture of sleepy truculence. Then, sensing that his guest was curious and receptive, he gradually began to explain his own beliefs. By the end, Rogan said, “You need to run for President.”
In November, Talarico was scheduled to be the final speaker at the Dallas County Democrats’ annual Johnson-Jordan Dinner, named for L.B.J. and Barbara Jordan. But line dances got danced, liquor got drunk, and the run of show got scrambled. Illinois’s governor, J. B. Pritzker, on hand to receive a ceremonial cowboy hat, ended up delivering a Presidentially curious stump speech. Nearly all the many, many other speakers went long, as people in the audience poked sadly at their overdone steaks. Talarico, who’d stuck to his allotted six minutes, said, “That was the deadest room I’ve ever spoken to.” He wryly quoted Will Rogers: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”
In the end, the liberal firebrand Jasmine Crockett closed the show, rallying the remains of the crowd by declaring, “I need y’all to understand that our fight is bigger than party. I need y’all to understand that people are relying on us to literally survive.” Four weeks later, Crockett declared her candidacy for the Senate.
A forty-four-year-old former public defender who’s in her second term in the U.S. House, Crockett is candid, stylish, and funny. She heaps fluent scorn on her opponents, with zingers that she calls Crockett Clapbacks (and has sold printed on T-shirts). During a committee hearing, when Marjorie Taylor Greene told her, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Crockett fired back with a reference to Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.” She has called Trump “Putin’s ho” and Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, “Governor Hot Wheels.”
Before Crockett announced, she phoned Allred to inform him. Allred, facing an expensive and newly complicated race, dropped out to run for Congress again. Talarico had spoken with Crockett last summer to make sure that she didn’t want to run; if she did, he told me, he probably would not have. A week before her announcement, she asked if he’d run for governor instead. “I told her that my friend Gina is already running for governor, and I would not do that to her at the last minute,” he said, adding evenly, “That’s the standard I hold myself to.”
Both Cornyn and Trump called Crockett’s decision “a gift,” and Speaker Mike Johnson termed it “one of the greatest things that’s happened to the Republican Party.” The politics site NOTUS reported that the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm had texted Democratic voters, urging them to tell Crockett to run. The theory was that she was so controversial she’d be easy to beat.
Democrats seemed to disagree. The week that Crockett announced, a statewide poll showed her leading Talarico by eight points. A contingent of his endorsers switched to Crockett, and for weeks his campaign seemed stuck, stunned. Mamo, the consultant, said, “It feels like the video-game trope where you fight the first boss and win—and there’s a bigger boss on the next level to fight.”
Talarico believes that, because the Texas primary comes early, on March 3rd, and because the state is so important to the electoral map, “the results of this race will determine the course of the Democratic Party.” The problem for the Party is that two of its more promising young politicians are competing for a single spot. Chris Coons, the senior senator from Delaware, told me, “It’s really tragic that two incredibly talented candidates with national profiles are in a primary together.”
Crockett and Talarico take similar positions on most issues; it’s everything else about them that forms a contrast. Crockett is relaxed and improvisational. Her campaign videos range from karaoke jams to Crockett Confessionals—extended clips in which she talks confidingly about the issues of the day. When someone at a campaign stop in McAllen shouted, “Fuck ICE!,” she called back, “Fuck ICE! I like this crowd!”
Though Crockett’s intent differs from Trump’s—he punches down, and she usually punches up—she shares his main-character energy. Critics resurfaced a 2024 Vanity Fair profile in which she said that Hispanics who supported Trump’s border policy had “almost like a slave mentality.” Her full remarks were more nuanced, but rather than clarifying her views she gave the bluntest possible rationale for not doing so: “Donald Trump said he grabbed people by the pussy.” A person familiar with Crockett’s thinking explained, “Decorum and propriety are no longer a priority for Democratic voters.”
Talarico is focussed not on Trump but on the system that permitted his rise: “We’re trying to explore ‘What would a politics built around love look like—not in a trite way, but if you truly believe that every single person, including Donald Trump, is made in the image of God?’ ” Senator Coons said, “The question underlying this race is ‘Are we fundamentally about cruelty, or compassion?’ I personally respond to the tug on the heartstrings of James Talarico, but my gut sense is that, while James fits better with Texas, Jasmine fits better with the moment.”
In November, Talarico told me, “My staff wants a boring race. They don’t want Jasmine to jump in. I want it to be exciting—bring it on!” A week after Crockett brought it on, he looked drained and apprehensive. “Jasmine is Colin on steroids, Colin with a lot more charisma—no offense to Colin,” he said. “She has social-media prowess, and she’s a passionate public speaker. A lot of our advantages are now matched. We had an asteroid hit our campaign.”
A few months after Tamara left her abusive boyfriend, she met a sales manager named Mark Talarico, who married her and later adopted James. Talarico believes that without Mark’s steadying influence, and the guidance of his public-school teachers, he might have ended up like his birth father, “someone whose wild spirit was taken as delinquency.” He told me, “In sixth grade, I was in detention a lot for talking back, talking on the bus, being disruptive. If I thought a rule was stupid, I would say so. So I was kind of a little shit.” He laughed. “I have some of that tendency still—a complicated relationship with authority.”
In seventh grade, seeking to get out of class, he signed up for the school play, “A Christmas Carol.” He got the bit part of Turkey Boy. “I guess I had a loud voice, and people responded,” he said. “A teacher told her class the next day, ‘You’ve got to see “A Christmas Carol” tonight, because Turkey Boy is really good.’ I thought, Wow! That ability to tell a story, even in three lines, translated later to choir, and debate, and the National Honor Society.”
After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, Talarico put in two years with Teach for America, teaching language arts in a poor Latino area of San Antonio. His students sometimes sat on air-conditioners because there weren’t enough desks. One student, Justin, had been abandoned by his mother and kicked out of elementary school for threatening to stab a teacher. Talarico, recognizing a fellow-troublemaker, chatted with him during lunch and after school; they shared a wry sense of humor. “I got the sense that this was a kid who never liked a teacher, and I think he liked me—probably because I liked him,” he said. One day, Justin brought him a wrapped gift: a cup with a snowflake design which he’d bought at a Dollar Tree. “I was on top of the world—‘Who’s going to make the movie?’ ” Then the district eliminated the school’s therapist, who’d been counselling Justin, because of budget cuts mandated by the legislature. Justin started a fight, and Talarico watched helplessly as two coaches carried him out of school forever.
Before long, Talarico left the school, too; he got a master’s from Harvard in education policy, then worked for a nonprofit. But the question of how he could help his former students stayed in his mind. In 2018, he met with his pastor, Jim Rigby, from St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, to discuss whether he should run for the legislature or perhaps pursue the ministry, a boyhood dream. Rigby was a formative influence; Talarico had soaked up his sermons and attended the church’s Bible camp, where he created puppet shows featuring such characters as Awesome Possum and Reverend Skunky. “James wanted to know if he could be a person of integrity and also a politician,” Rigby told me. “I said, ‘If you go into the ministry, you’ll have clarity, but you won’t have power. If you go into politics, you’ll have power but won’t have clarity. You’ll have to work a lot harder to distinguish good from evil.’ ” Nowadays, on Sunday mornings on the trail, Talarico often attends a local church and strolls around happily, eying the pulpit like a home buyer trying a listing on for size.
Talarico believed that if he applied his moral framework to politics he could make local headway against injustice, and wider salvation might follow. Seth Krasne, his campaign manager, argues that his progressive vision feels less unsettling because it comes wrapped in faith: “Religion is a non-scary way to push people into the future, because you’re reminding them, ‘We’ve made this kind of progress before.’ ”
Yet Talarico doesn’t always comfort Christians. He often seems ready, in the spirit of Martin Luther, to nail ninety-five theses to the door of the nearest megachurch. He points out that, though the Bible makes no mention of abortion or gay marriage, it strongly discourages greed. And he argues that the obligation to love your neighbor extends to accepting your neighbor’s faith. “Seth and I talk about how Judaism is Season 1 of the show, Christianity is Season 2, and Islam is Season 3,” he told me. “I’m Season 2—the most violent season. My religion has done more damage to both of those religions than they’ve done to each other.” His view that compassionate Hindus and atheists are more Christlike than some Christians is pilloried by the right; an R.N.C. spokesman recently called it “anti-Christian Christian shtick,” adding, “There isn’t a woke cause that he won’t claim to find buried in the Bible.” Evangelicals dismiss Talarico as a heretic for saying that their religion requires seeking common ground rather than high ground.
Talarico recently told me, “I’m being roasted by the Christian right today. There are 1.7 million views on Twitter of a clip where I talk about my faith. We’re social animals, right? We care what other people think about us—politicians maybe more so. Most people now are never going to know me as a person.” He laughed and said, “I’d like to debate all 1.7 million of them.”
In Talarico’s first campaign for the state legislature, he and a scrappy band of volunteers knocked on ninety-five thousand doors. He won a Trump district by some two thousand votes and took office as Texas’s youngest state legislator. He soon passed laws to reduce insulin co-pays to twenty-five dollars, to allow importing cheap Canadian drugs, and to overhaul public-school spending. He worked with Republicans and amended his bills accordingly. He told me, “I’m always thinking, How would we build a coalition big enough to make whatever dream I’m talking about a reality? I am a politician in that way.”
None of the Republican representatives I contacted would talk with me, perhaps fearing Governor Abbott’s retribution, but three who had recently left the legislature spoke highly of Talarico. Ernest Bailes said, “Legislators on the extreme right may not like what James stands for, but they surely respect him.”
It wasn’t all comity. When Talarico got on the “back mike”—a microphone at the rear of the chamber which allows lawmakers to question a bill’s author—Republicans would gather to stare him down, and Democrats would all but pull out bags of popcorn. He dissected the rationales behind a bill that mandated displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools and another that forbade students to cosplay as animals and use school-supplied litter boxes (a nonexistent problem raised by online conspiracy theorists). He grilled the chair of the House Committee on Public Education about a measure that would ban school-library books that violated community standards.
Talarico: Could “Romeo and Juliet” be banned because it mentions premarital sex?
Brad Buckley: There may be some, whether their own individual value system or their religious beliefs, that could believe that—
Talarico: If your answer is anything other than “Of course not,” then that’s a serious problem.
Buckley: I’m not advised on “Romeo and Juliet.”
Talarico’s colleagues called him “the baby-faced assassin,” and videos of the exchanges were traded gleefully online. Yet nearly all the bills in question became law. In 2021, Talarico grew despondent. “It was the most destructive legislative session,” he said. “There were bills that whitewashed Texas history, that allowed permitless open carry, that extended the abortion ban, and a voter-suppression bill aimed at Black voters.”
To avoid passing the last bill, Democratic legislators took a “quorum break” and went to Washington. “That was when my antipathy toward national Democrats began,” Talarico said. “They had majorities in both houses, but they couldn’t muster the energy for a federal Voting Rights Act. I was very angry, very heartbroken, and thinking that maybe this American experiment of ours is not going to work.” One rainy night, he walked up to the Lincoln Memorial, seeking reassurance. “On my way down, my legs flew out, and I landed on my back and couldn’t breathe. I broke my thumb. I crawled to an Uber, and I decided that if I was going to continue in politics I needed to balance myself out. So I applied to seminary”—which he could pursue while keeping his job, because the legislature meets for just a few months every two years.
It was on that trip that Talarico first reached a national audience. Booked by Fox News to talk about voting laws, he challenged the host, Pete Hegseth, to repudiate the network’s contention that voters who didn’t carry I.D. were threatening election integrity. Then he invited him to “tell your voters right now that Donald Trump lost the election in 2020.” Hegseth blustered, but Talarico stood firm: “Is this an uncomfortable question for you?” He was promptly invited on to other networks.
Talarico endured another period on Calvary when the legislature reconvened last spring. He’d led a bipartisan coalition against Abbott’s repeated efforts to provide vouchers for private or religious schooling—which would reduce the public-school budget. But Abbott and Trump called to browbeat wavering legislators, and by May their insistence had proved irresistible. “There was some yelling on the floor when our caucus began to see that victory wasn’t possible this time, and I took the brunt of it as the coach,” Talarico said. “They felt we didn’t need to keep going with amendments, that it was useless, but I said, ‘Every amendment is an opportunity to point out how bad this bill is.’ ”
Finally, Talarico left the floor for the chapel, despairing. “In Scripture, we feel comfortable with lamentations—Jesus cries out from the Cross, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ ” he said. “It’s in those moments that I feel Jesus’ presence, like a wave of relief. I don’t have an older brother, but I imagine from reading books that it feels like having an older brother who calls you on your shit, who tells you, ‘It’s O.K., you can do this.’ And a few weeks later, on the same day that vouchers got signed into law by Greg Abbott, there were school-board elections across the state, and anti-education boards got thrown out. I felt that we’d won, to the extent that we’d made vouchers very unpopular in Texas.”
It was after the voucher episode that Talarico began telling colleagues he planned to run for Senate. “I ended up thinking my reasons for not running were selfish,” he said. “That I was burned out, that I loved seminary—the serenity, the live oaks, geeking out about theology.” I mentioned that two Democratic colleagues told me they believed he was being guided by divine providence. He blushed and said, “I try to be in the flow of the universe, which for New Yorker readers may be a less creepy-sounding way to understand it than ‘God told me to run for office.’ ”
One chilly morning in mid-January, Talarico stood outside a DoubleTree hotel in downtown Austin, alongside a “CORRUPTION” sign with a red slash through it. Behind him was the state office building where Ken Paxton works. Talarico, succumbing to a little trash talk, slammed Paxton as “the most corrupt politician in America,” argued that the affordability crisis is a direct result of the corruption crisis, and detailed his program for expunging billionaire money from politics. His speech was aimed at five TV cameramen, two newspaper reporters, and a handful of local influencers. There was no one else there.
At Talarico’s campaign office afterward, the mood was light. Everyone loved Paxton’s reactive tweet: “He chose to pull this desperate stunt on the same day I secured a historic agreement, giving over 2 million eggs to Texas food banks.” Eggs? And that morning a poll from Emerson College had Talarico leading Crockett by nine points. She was trouncing him among Black voters, but he was winning with whites and Latinos. The poll was just a data point—subsequent polls had the race even or Crockett leading—but it sustained the team’s optimism.
Antonio Esparza showed Talarico a rough cut of a video from the Paxton event. Social media is the campaign’s first priority, ahead of press coverage and fund-raising: it reaches voters directly, and it spurs donations online.
Frowning, Talarico watched himself saying, “This is how we build a government of, by, and for the people.” Esparza rendered his verdict with a swiping gesture: “I scrolled.”
“Brutal,” Talarico said, and watched some more. “Let’s take out ‘We must.’ That’s a very politician thing to say.” Even as he cut, he lamented the necessity: “I love what we wrote, but everyone’s brain is broken.”
Gina Hinojosa came in and took a look. “Tying affordability to corruption is good,” she said. “Why did we lose it?”
“It took so long to get to the meat,” Talarico replied. Hinojosa looked reproachful. “I’m competing against the cute dog and the shocking accident!” he explained. “I’m worried about people scrolling past because it looks like a politician giving a speech.”
“That’s what you are,” Esparza said, matter-of-factly.
Crockett has built an ardent social-media following by presenting herself as a feisty avatar of resistance. Talarico often suggests that his opponents are more errant than evil, still capable of being redeemed through Sunday-school values and constitutional principle. Esparza said that, in 2023, the team had to decide between two posts for its first TikTok: “One was straight conflict, James back-miking Candy Noble”—the sponsor of the Ten Commandments bill—“and owning her. Everything social media loves. The other was a slow-burn cut of the same exchange that was longer, deeper, and more personal, about his own faith. The team voted, and I lost, so we put the longer one up—and it got six million views. That post spoke to so many people’s frustration about how the religious right has turned religion into an instrument of hate. And the respectful piece was huge. You could see he liked Candy Noble.”
Talarico told me, “A lot of Democrats are doing the conflict thing, and a lot are doing the ignore-the-conflict thing. But I think we’re the only ones doing ‘conflict plus heal the conflict.’ ” How much of that is predicated on nonviolence theory? “All of it,” he said. “Christianity and nonviolence are synonyms, in my book. God takes human form and is beaten and tortured and murdered—and he doesn’t respond with violence. It was probably the most famous act of nonviolence in history.”
A few days later, Hinojosa and J. T. Ennis, the press secretary, prepped Talarico for an endorsement-screening Zoom with the San Antonio Express-News and the Austin American-Statesman. It’s unclear whether such endorsements matter much anymore, but everyone has agreed to pretend that they do.
They ran through Israel, Venezuela, and ICE raids. Ennis considered what Talarico should do if asked about the differences between him and Crockett: “You could say, ‘Look, I encourage you to check our website, because I spell out our positions very clearly, but I can’t really speak to Jasmine’s positions, because she hasn’t laid any out yet.’ ”
“Whoa!” Talarico said, laughing.
“Do it in your James Talarico way, but . . .”
“It’s shady,” Talarico said. “How about more direct? ‘Jasmine and I share a lot of values. I would not have voted to send offensive weapons to Netanyahu. I’m the only candidate in the race who is not taking corporate PAC money. And, if you’re looking for a specific policy, I would sign on to a congressional stock-trading ban.’ ”
As Talarico logged on to the Zoom, he amused his staff by muttering, as if cramming for a test, “Two million eggs, two million eggs.” When he was asked about the candidates’ differences, he gently stressed that, unlike Crockett, he’d flipped a Republican seat: “If you don’t win, you can’t help people.” I’m actually electable. “I say all that while respecting Congresswoman Crockett immensely,” he added. “I consider her a friend.”
Many of the state’s political operatives believe that Crockett would be a less viable candidate in the general election, but Talarico’s campaign has avoided making that argument directly. Instead, he posted a video that welcomed her to the race and reminded his supporters to “always treat Congresswoman Crockett with the utmost respect.”
When the comedians Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers recently discussed Crockett’s chances on their podcast, “Las Culturistas,” Rogers said, “Don’t waste your money sending to Jasmine Crockett,” and Yang said, “I must agree.” Both men were swiftly accused of racism and sexism, and they apologized. Crockett told the Washington Post, “I really do think that the host said the quiet part out loud, which basically was: If a white man couldn’t do it, then why would a Black woman even have the audacity to think that she could?”
The line between acknowledging bigotry and embodying it is blurry. A Democratic strategist told me, “Operatives don’t want to be caught saying stuff like ‘My fear is that a Black woman can’t win in Texas.’ So they say, ‘She can’t persuade, she can’t drive urban turnout.’ ” Operatives—like voters—can succumb to a form of pragmatic bias: perceiving that other people may be less inclined to vote for a Black woman, they may withhold their own support. For his part, Talarico felt that he needed to work harder to overcome Black voters’ skepticism of someone who, on the person-of-color spectrum, sits between a golf ball and cream cheese. “If we win this primary but we alienate Black voters in Texas, it’s not a win,” he told me. “There is no way to flip this seat without Black Texans—period, full stop.”
In November, Talarico had gone to South Dallas to meet with Black leaders, including a prominent pastor and the president of the Black Chamber of Commerce. They didn’t love how he answered the first question, about why he cared about Black businesses (he opened with “I care about all businesses”), or the second, about how he’d invest in South Dallas (“I don’t think anyone is looking for a handout—they’re looking for a hand up”). Cimajie Best, a manager at Dallas Area Rapid Transit, looked around the table and asked, “Are his answers resonating with you?” They weren’t.
Talarico asked the leaders for feedback, assuring them, “You won’t hurt my feelings, I promise!” Leaning in, they told him to lose the “all businesses” language and to act like the puncher Black people need—no offense. (“You’re good!”) Talarico finds his audience as if he were twiddling a knob on an old car radio, his voice growing richer and deeper as he tunes in to the local station and begins to hum along.
Someone asked, “How do you get to that working-class white person that mathematically I know you need without demonizing Black people?” Talarico said that he’d built a coalition in his first race by “finding a new common enemy. I wish human beings didn’t need a common enemy, but apparently we do. So let’s just give them a better enemy than one of us.” At a recent event, he continued, “a few people used the phrase ‘welfare queens,’ which feels like it’s 1985, and I said, ‘The real welfare queens are the fifty-five wealthiest corporations that don’t pay a penny in federal taxes. It’s the billionaires who are literally getting a tax writeoff for flying on a private jet.’ That’s not just a convenient political pivot—that is the actual enemy.” A Washington Post analysis found that, since 2000, federal political giving by the wealthiest hundred Americans has risen a hundred and fortyfold; in 2024, more than eighty per cent of it went to Republicans. Talarico’s first priority as a senator would be passing legislation to limit giving through PACs and super PACs; to forbid federal legislators to trade stocks; and to outlaw gerrymandering. “I don’t mean to dehumanize anyone,” he went on, “but being a billionaire is a voluntary class. If you don’t want to be a billionaire, I have plenty of ideas for how to use that money!” Laughter rolled around the table.
Christian Manuel, a Black state legislator from Southeast Texas, told me, “The thing I love most about James is that he’s not all ‘I’m almost Black because I went to the church barbecue.’ He’s fine being the white guy in the room. Sometimes it seems like he’s clueless about what it’s like to be Black or Hispanic—and then you see him two weeks later, and he’ll tell you what Black business leaders need, or what Asian women are concerned about, and it’s obvious that he was really listening.” Manuel made that observation in November. After Crockett announced her candidacy, he switched his endorsement to her.
As the campaign took shape, Crockett stumped in urban areas, trying to awaken and broaden the base; more than a million Texas Democrats who voted in 2020 stayed home in 2024. Someone familiar with her thinking told me, “The definition of swing voters is changing, from suburban moderates who’d swing between parties to young, urban, low-propensity voters who have swung between Trump and the couch. They’re potentially a blue ocean.” This approach relies heavily on a candidate’s charisma, but, as Crockett observed, “if there was anyone with a recipe—well, they would have already won.”
Talarico believed that the persuadable middle, some twenty per cent of the electorate, was preponderantly young and Latino. One of his showcase events was a rally in the Rio Grande Valley with the Tejano music star Bobby Pulido, who’s running for Congress.
He still hoped for a broader coalition. In January, he and his aides headed down Highway 290 to Houston, to “say hello” at a Black Methodist church. As they brainstormed his talk, Talarico said, “I think we should do an M.L.K. thing.” The holiday was two days away. “A lot of people, me included, are angry that M.L.K. Day gets so sanitized. Everybody who supports the secret police force”—ICE—“will have their office tweet out the obligatory King quote. He’s become the civic Santa Claus.” (Ken Paxton’s office issued a press release declaring that it was fulfilling King’s vision by targeting D.E.I. initiatives.)
Esparza said, “Do you want to tie in ‘Love is not weak’? I’m hearing from so many people who are worried that you’re not a fighter.” They’d auditioned that theme at two rallies, but it was long and messy—four minutes, rather than a ninety-second chunk that would plug neatly into his stump speech. “And is it weird to be a white boy in a Black church talking about M.L.K.?”
As Talarico thought that over, he asked the driver to pull into a Chevron; his fund-raising team wanted him to make a video. He stood near an overflowing dumpster, backlit by a low winter sun filtering through a thicket of hackberry and live oak. Miming holding out his phone, he said, “Seeing this beautiful sunset inspires me to make a fund-raising video.” He tried a few other takes, riffing, “I’m here at the fucking gas station”; “I hope you’ll support this dumpster fire of a campaign”—being the unruly kid on the bus.
Talarico hates everything about fund-raising. Schmoozing wealthy litigators over salmon gougères is not his element; at home, he subsists on ramen. He told me that he especially hates provoking unfounded panic: “ ‘If you don’t donate now, I don’t know what we’re going to do.’ ” I observed that he’d recently made a video about the “tough decisions” his campaign faced. “Those videos perform twice as well,” he said. “There’s a reason I’m compromising my soul. I even get mad at people out there: ‘Why does this gimmick work on you?’ I’ve told the team we can never lie, so they’ve avoided the ‘triple match’ if we haven’t gotten someone to triple match, and the ‘We’re drowning.’ But ‘John Cornyn outraised us’? We did that because it’s true—even if it’s not my biggest concern right now. So it’s disingenuous and manipulative, but not false.” He chucked, darkly. By mid-January, the campaign had raised $14.5 million, its goal for the entire primary.
The two candidates’ only encounter on the same stage, a debate sponsored by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., was strikingly temperate. Talarico and Crockett avoided clashing, focussing instead on making their own case. “I was very proud of how it went,” he told me afterward. In early February, his campaign was outspending hers on TV and digital ads by seventeen to one. Crockett’s campaign, relying on name recognition, was far less visible. Talarico said, “I feel like Muhammad Ali is having an off night, and I’m surprised and happy about that.”
Then a TikTok influencer named Morgan Thompson posted a description of an off-the-record meeting with Talarico, in which she’d expressed her fear that his campaign wasn’t prioritizing Black concerns. She said that Talarico told her, about Crockett, “I signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable and intelligent Black woman.”
Her claim might have languished there—Thompson also expressed suspicions that Talarico’s campaign was responsible for deleting her Instagram account—but Colin Allred saw her post and blew his stack. He released a video in which he said, “We’re tired of folks using praise for Black women to mask criticism for Black men,” and argued that, while Talarico portrayed himself as “saving religion for the Democratic Party,” Raphael Warnock, the Black Baptist preacher and Georgia senator, was already doing that. “You’re not saying anything unique,” he said. “You’re just saying it looking like you do.”
His fiery post made news. In a statement, Talarico said that Thompson had mischaracterized his remark: “I described Congressman Allred’s method of campaigning as mediocre—but his life and service are not. I would never attack him on the basis of race.” He told me, “The whole thing is pretty hurtful on a bunch of levels. But mostly with Colin, because he didn’t call me”—to ask what really happened—“before he took to the internet.”
Crockett responded with a medley of observations. She told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “Have I ever experienced Mr. Talarico say anything like this? Absolutely not.” She added that she hoped “we can focus on the real concerns.” But she told other reporters that Talarico’s statement confirmed Thompson’s account: “Basically, it’s all been agreed it was said.” (“The opposite,” Talarico told me.)
A well-known Texas legislator said, “The whole thing felt very junior varsity, very ‘Nobody’s ready for prime time.’ ” Talarico had the same concern: “I talked with a few people”—Democratic elders—“about ‘How do we keep this from spiralling out of control?’ Because we have a real shot to win in November. This is doable. And they said, ‘It’s three more weeks. Put your head down and get through it.’ ”
Last week, Talarico caught a break: Stephen Colbert interviewed him for his show. On that night’s broadcast, Colbert announced that CBS’s lawyers, bowing to inhibitory new F.C.C. guidelines on political interviews, had resisted airing the segment, so it would run online. As Colbert hyped the censorship controversy, the clip attracted more than eighty-five million views. In the interview, the crowd applauded as Talarico argued that right-wingers were “baptizing their partisanship and calling that Christianity,” and broke into cheers when he said, “I think Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas.”
For Talarico, though, even winning the primary wasn’t a certainty. Before he left Houston, we had dinner at an Italian place and spoke about the tension between politics and other vital matters, such as his self-image. “I have to be proud of my life,” he said. “And I’d much rather be a member of St. Andrew’s than a U.S. senator.” But, I said, you’ve also declared that you must win this election to help preserve our democracy. “Yes,” he said, slowly, “that’s absolutely true, too. Sometimes it feels like those beliefs are in conflict, but I think the stances we can be proud of—that we wouldn’t put out dirt on an opponent if we had it or change positions to win votes—are also the stances that will help us win.”
I suggested that, if the Devil wanted to tempt Talarico, he’d present a way to win by only mildly besmirching himself (a foolproof fund-raising scheme, or a super PAC that did all the dirty work). The Devil would argue that helping flip the Senate would enable him to improve the lives of three hundred and forty million Americans. He would argue, in other words, that a politician ought to practice politics. “The temptation story in the wilderness is exactly that—offering Jesus all the kingdoms of the world,” Talarico said. “And it would be tempting, because I value the cause so highly. But the central belief in my faith is that the means are the ends.” He took a sip of red wine. “If we lose, it would feel not great. But—but!—it’s the belief in the Resurrection, right? The belief that something beautiful would come out of this loss.”
Talarico sees his Senate run as preparation for the ministry. I came to wonder whether he might be what seminarians call a “tentmaker”—someone whose calling lies outside the walls of the Church, like the Apostle Paul, who made tents to support himself. “I think James’s speeches are coming from a deeper place than he realizes,” Jim Rigby, the St. Andrew’s pastor, told me. “In a rally, when James stands up for people and principles, that’s as spiritual as anything in the Church.”
Talarico disagreed. “If you put your faith in a politician, that’s just asking for disappointment.” If he wins, he intends to serve two terms at most. “Power, fame, wealth—they’re like radiation,” he said. “You should wear a hazmat suit, as if you’re going into Chernobyl. You go in, you do your job, and you get out as quickly as you can and go shower.”
Wouldn’t the Devil suggest that two terms won’t be sufficient to fix a country this broken? “I believe we’re at a moment of transition at the end of the Trump era,” Talarico said. “The pendulum swings, and dog-eat-dog periods lead to periods of community—the Gilded Age leads to the Progressive Era, and so on. I believe that we’re part of a movement that will push the country back to service and honesty and compassion.” He grinned boyishly, imagining it. “And then, of course, selfishness and greed and hate and division will probably come back. But I’m hoping we can defeat it for our round, and then I can go back to a small life.” ♦