James Talarico’s Final Sprint
Last Saturday night, at a Día de los Muertos festival in downtown Corpus Christi, Texas, James Talarico jogged up to the stage where a cumbia-E.D.M. d.j. named El Dusty was at the turntable. “Mr. James, what’s good, bruh?” El Dusty, who has a wiry white beard and wore a camouflage-print vest, said, before passing the mike to the Presbyterian seminarian and Democratic candidate for Senate. “Corpus Christi, it is so good to see you,” Talarico, dressed in a blazer and cowboy boots, told a crowd of about two hundred young people dressed as Catrinas and ghouls, before launching into a one-minute speech that mentioned “faith, family, and freedom.” “God bless you, Corpus Christi, let’s go win this thing,” Talarico said. The crowd erupted in cheers, and El Dusty started playing an accordion melody as he rhythmically cut the air with his hand. “Let’s cumbia! Cumbia! Cumbia!” he chanted. Then Talarico was mobbed by selfie seekers, many of them too young to vote.
If Talarico seemed out of place among the retired tías and Mexican goths, it’s because he’s trying to pull off something no Texas liberal has done since 1994: assemble a winning statewide coalition. Since becoming the nominee in March, Talarico has been buoyed by a flood of money (his is the wealthiest Democratic Senate campaign this cycle, having raised more than a hundred and thirty-four million dollars), outsized media attention, and consistent polling showing the candidates within the margin of error. Ken Paxton, the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general and Talarico’s opponent, notched President Donald Trump’s endorsement but has seemingly failed to unify the G.O.P.; many Republicans look askance at his impeachment trial, his estranged wife’s allegations of infidelity, and his corruption charges. Plus, Trump said, “he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.”
Another headwind for Paxton: many voters remain heated over stubbornly high costs, Trump’s war in Iran, and his Administration’s deportation program. A few moments after Talarico got offstage in Corpus Christi, Aurelia Ramirez and John Herrera wandered through the crowd looking for Talarico. Herrera, a twenty-one-year-old curbside shopper and premed student, cast his first-ever vote for Trump, in 2024. It wasn’t particularly controversial in a county that elected Trump by eleven points. “I was going with the grain on that one,” Herrera said. But they’ve both since soured on the President, owing to rising costs and immigration enforcement. “He thinks about himself too much,” Ramirez, Herrera’s grandmother, said as she walked past two rows of low-riders. “Now I said, ‘Well, I’m going to try Democrat and see how things go.’ ”
Will Talarico be the Democrat who overcomes decades of voter apathy—and antipathy toward his party? “Talarico has to do everything,” Tory Gavito, the Austin-based president of the donor network Way to Win, told me. “There is no one single theory of change to win this state. Every type of Texan has to decide, ‘Enough of it, enough.’ ” Lately, Gavito has seen some ads in which Talarico touts that he helped enact the largest property tax cut in Texas history—and she worries that they send the wrong message at a time when young people are struggling to afford rent, let alone purchase a home. “Property tax is a meaningless concept to them,” she said. It’s reminiscent, she said, of Kamala Harris’s attempt, in 2024, to win over independents by campaigning for President with Liz Cheney: voters might wonder what his policy priorities really are. “Even in the state of Texas, where I am paid to pay attention, I don’t know that I can repeat back three things that Talarico is saying over and over and over again,” she said.
In fact, Talarico has an uncanny ability to say the same things over and over again. His memorized speeches sound as if he is reading from a teleprompter, without false starts or stutters—he repeats himself only when trying to speak over the crowd’s applause. Now, in the final stretch, his closing message attempts to cover everything, from the etymology of the word “Texas” to the mythos of Beyoncé and Selena. At his rallies, he compares himself to the Biblical David, preparing for battle; he tells each city he visits, “You are my slingshot.” He also says that, like Jesus Christ, he was called to serve, not to be served. And he also likes to evoke Coach Eric Taylor from the TV show “Friday Night Lights,” telling his supporters, “This is the last play of the last drive.” On the G.O.P. side, Paxton’s attacks on Talarico are caustic enough to make the Democrat’s put-downs (he is partial to a line about how Paxton is like “that one guy” at a bar who sneakily adds his drink to your tab) sound like constructive feedback.
Talarico has avoided having joint rallies with national Democratic figures, including some rumored 2028 contenders, an omission that his surrogates attribute to a desire to focus on Texas rather than on the Party. After a Talarico rally in San Antonio, I rattled names of high-profile Democrats to two women who went to grab a beer near the venue. Would campaigning with Barack Obama help Talarico win in Texas? “Maybe, yes,” one of the women said. Kamala Harris? “Eeeeh,” her friend replied. “Maybe not, maybe not.” “I think George Bush would be great,” the first woman added.
Christian Menefee, a recently elected Democratic congressman representing Houston, told me that Talarico could do just fine without Obama. “That’s a fantastic way to be approaching this—not looking for a savior here at the last minute,” he said. Within the state, Representative Jasmine Crockett, Talarico’s opponent in the primary, claimed to NBC News that the nominee had not reached out to her for campaign appearances. “You know, I don’t view it as significant that James and Jasmine aren’t in a caravan driving across the state,” Menefee told me. “I view it as significant that we are all working together for the same thing.”
If elected, Talarico would, along with Ted Cruz, represent the state with the largest population of Black Americans in the country. After Talarico beat Crockett, Menefee told him that he needed to show up in Black communities, though he cautioned that people would be angry—at him, at previous campaigns, at a Democratic Party that has overlooked them. “When you come and you just sit down and shut the hell up and listen to people, that means a lot to them,” Menefee said. Other lawmakers and activists have expressed concerns that the campaign is not doing enough to turn out those voters. “For a lot of us, it’s, like, Well, how can this white boy, for real, for real, understand this, when he hasn’t been in these situations?” Chas Moore, the co-founder of Austin Justice Coalition, who overlapped with Talarico at the University of Texas at Austin, said. (Talarico’s spiel hasn’t changed much since he was running for student government, he said.) The risk is that “they either vote for him,” Moore said, “or they just don’t show up—which, to me, is a vote for Paxton.”
At a rally in Corpus Christi, staff verified guests by sticking gold stars on them—a callback of sorts to Talarico’s days as a public-school educator. Among the nine hundred and sixteen guests was Mailey Gonzalez, a nineteen-year-old who said Talarico reminded her of her own teachers in high school. Although she was excited about Talarico’s campaign, she said she wished he talked more about health-care issues affecting women, including teen pregnancy. What’s more, “it really worries me that he came here and they’re not gonna listen to him as much—especially with Trump coming down,” she said, referring to an upcoming rally with Paxton. “It’s worrying me that it’s going one place, but then it’s just going to backtrack.”
During the primary, Talarico’s team focussed on reaching Latinos; Chuck Rocha, a Talarico adviser, told me it was the most money he’d seen a Texas candidate spend on Spanish-language outreach and ads in his three and a half decades working in politics. He said the campaign had spent roughly equal amounts on Latino and Black outreach, with a focus on the Rio Grande Valley, an area which is more than ninety per cent Latino.
On Sunday afternoon, Thomas Saenz, a twenty-three-year-old from McAllen who creates life-style content on social media, headed to nearby Weslaco to see Talarico at an event hosted by the national group Voto Latino. A few days earlier, Saenz had been driving up to Fort Worth to see his long-distance boyfriend when he learned of the event, which included a performance by the superstar Mexican norteño band Los Tigres del Norte. Sensing that the event would be huge, he bought an early plane ticket home to try to interview the candidates. (He was unsuccessful in getting an interview with Talarico, and briefly considered sneaking backstage.) Saenz, whose target audience is Latino and Gen Z, felt that Talarico’s name wasn’t very well known in the Valley, compared to Gina Hinojosa or the Tejano musician Bobby Pulido, two Democrats running for governor and for a congressional seat, who also spoke at the concert. “You’d almost think Bobby was running for Senate,” he told me.
Pulido, a centrist favored to win in a conservatively drawn district that encompasses Edinburg and Weslaco, pointed out that if Talarico wins on Tuesday, “it will be because of the Latino vote.” His community, Pulido said, is rejecting extremism—he’s campaigned effectively against both the excesses of the left and the right, and he suggested that Talarico was doing the same. When Talarico came onstage, and addressed his audience of over eight thousand people, he stuck to his more anodyne fare, vowing to reduce the influence of money in politics; he did not mention immigration at all.“Puro 956!” he said, referencing the informal slogan of the R.G.V.
Some forty minutes away, at an event space in Brownsville just yards from the border with Mexico, Talarico’s supporters grew impatient waiting for the candidate. The room was less than half full, with roughly three hundred people; Talarico came onstage around an hour after the event’s start time. As he criticized Paxton for enriching himself in office, Martha de la Garza and her friend Analisa Martinez decided to leave—they’d seen him speak before. Outside, Martinez quickly mentioned how the ICE raids had driven down business at the secondhand store where she works.
“It is ugly here,” de la Garza agreed. She knew people who worked in immigration enforcement, including one of her friends. “He can’t stand it,” she said. “We talked about it over tequila and whiskey, and yeah, he’s fucking livid. His family is upset with him, but he pays for their bills.” Still, she said, he is planning to vote for Talarico. ♦