Talarico’s Challenging Road Ahead

Texas Democrats’ promising Senate candidate must deliver on his theory of change.

In Texas’s open Senate primary last Tuesday, Democratic hopes of “flipping” the Lone Star State soared to their highest level since former Representative Beto O’Rourke polled within the margin of error in his unsuccessful bid to topple Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2018. Turnout for the Democratic winner, state representative James Talarico, and the runner-up, Representative Jasmine Crockett, surged above ballots for the leading Republican candidates, despite widespread reports of voters being turned away at polling stations in Dallas and Williamson counties due to recent changes to voting rules by local Republicans.

The enthusiasm gap between the parties startled political observers, as did Talarico’s six-point margin over Crockett. Though Talarico entered the race months before Crockett, the self-styled MAGA antagonist was perceived to have some strong advantages. Crockett was (and remains) a rising star capable of energizing Democrats who have demanded much more combative leadership since Trump’s return to office. She had already built a strong social media following due to her flair for “clapback” interactions with Marjorie Taylor Greene and other hard-right figures, while her blunt primetime speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention had catapulted her into the limelight as one of the Democrats’ most prominent younger black voices.

Talarico, meanwhile, came across as comparatively restrained—and perhaps a bit over-rehearsed, at least in the beginning. A Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico foregrounded his Christian faith and spoke solemnly about a “politics of love” that might transcend America’s existential tribalism. That seemingly “unpopulist” posture made the press susceptible to halfhearted attempts to draw an ideological distinction between him and Crockett. Talarico’s outreach to independents and disaffected Republicans was associated with “moderation,” whereas Crockett, presumed to grasp what the base wanted, was depicted as the progressive “firebrand.”

That distinction always felt artificial. On the surface, the contest between Talarico and Crockett was mainly a contrast in style rather than policy positions or ideology. It was not a Lone Star reprise of Mamdani vs. Cuomo or Bernie vs. Hillary. Upon closer inspection, however, the contest did reflect two different theories of how to strengthen the Democratic coalition. In a state that has perennially frustrated the party’s ambitions but which remains the key to Democrats ever achieving an FDR-style majority, Democrats have had to learn the hard way that possessing “star power,” which motivates the base, is only part of the battle. As in the Midwest and the purple states of Georgia and North Carolina, the more essential piece of the puzzle is figuring out how to expand the coalition’s geographic range and finally attenuate the Republican grip on smaller cities and towns.

The results laid bare Talarico’s keener understanding of the challenge before Democrats. Crockett’s strategy leaned heavily on appeals based on identity and her persona; it essentially boiled down to a belief that a candidate with enough charisma could still mobilize the “rising American electorate” of younger minorities by fanning outrage over Trump’s record. Talarico approached the electorate differently even as he aimed to exploit his own “authentic” viral moments. Bereft of a bulwark equal to Crockett’s support among black voters in East Texas, Talarico instead treated the primary as a test run for the general election. By necessity, he waged a less hyper-partisan campaign that focused on voters alienated by contemporary politics and upset over spiraling costs.

The strategy paid off impressively while disproving the confused narrative that Talarico was the conciliatory moderate of the two. As the primary entered its final stretch and the strength of his ground game in Latino enclaves became apparent, Talarico had the air of an insurgent with the rhetoric to match. “We already have class warfare in this country,” he rejoined to a skeptical attendee of one of his town halls, underscoring, “it’s the billionaires waging war against the rest of us.” Within a matter of months, the boyish 36-year-old—tougher and shrewder than his neighborly demeanor conveyed—had added his own touch to a message embraced by Democratic insurgents from Maine to Montana.

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Last Tuesday’s results suggest that Democrats in tough environments don’t have to make a false choice between a positive and patriotic “big tent” pitch and economic populism. They likewise indicate that in a state that has undergone as many rapid changes as Texas, Talarico’s message of compassion and renewal holds promise against a bilious and caricature-laden GOP that has come to resent the very demographic and cultural transformations induced through its obsessive pursuit of economic growth. Nevertheless, exuberant Talarico supporters wishing to savor this moment know the sense of unstoppable momentum will be short-lived. Although the Republican nominee has yet to be determined—a runoff election between incumbent Senator John Cornyn and state attorney general Ken Paxton, his far-right challenger, is scheduled for May—Talarico faces the same array of challenges that has vexed Democratic candidates the past three decades.

As a young white progressive, he must decisively mobilize culturally moderate and religious Latinos who theoretically lean left on economics but have repeatedly failed to leverage their demographic weight at the polls; maximize turnout among all segments of the black community, from the urban machine and new black entrepreneurial class to struggling service workers; harness the growing electoral power of Asian and South Asian Texans; and—no less crucial—cut down Republicans’ lopsided margins among rural, blue-collar whites. In short, Talarico has seven months to fulfill his wager that he can realign the Texas electorate—and do so by transforming working-class expectations of what Texas politics can deliver.

Doing all this simultaneously will be an extraordinary lift. Talarico can be fairly certain to run up the score with affluent liberals and the more economically insecure parts of the Brahmin left, as his resounding margin in Austin illustrates. And his striking ability to turn out Latinos has cast aside the initial impression he was the Sun Belt’s answer to Pete Buttigieg—quick-witted and skilled at countering right-wing talking points, but with limited traction beyond the ranks of college-educated whites. Yet even in the event that the scandal-tarred Paxton ends up being his opponent—thus boosting his chances with moderates—Talarico faces an uphill battle when it comes to flipping precincts in Republican-leaning Tarrant and Williamson counties and deepening the faint blue hue of Fort Bend, key urban areas in which Democrats must dramatically overperform and best Joe Biden’s short-lived gains from 2020.

The path is all the more daunting given Talarico’s uncertain-at-best standing with black voters, whose sense of urgency in this election will be especially critical to Democratic tallies in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and Jefferson County. At over four million residents, Texas has the largest share of black Americans in the country, fueled in part by migration after the Great Recession and, later, Covid. Although this influx has arguably made black Texans more heterogeneous in their cultural outlook and economic interests, they form, as in Georgia, the bedrock of the Democrats’ urban base and establishment, making a strong alliance with Crockett and other local black leaders vital to Talarico’s chances.

How much ground Talarico needs to make up is anyone’s guess. Crockett readily endorsed him after the results came in, but the primary had taken a sour turn in early February when former U.S. Representative Colin Allred, following the claims of a content creator, accused Talarico of calling him a “mediocre black man.” Talarico strongly denied the charge, insisting he had only characterized Allred’s failed bid to unseat Cruz in 2024 as underwhelming. But a wave of online sniping among influencers and other informal campaign surrogates ensued, briefly creating the impression Talarico was mistrusted by black activists. While the fallout seems limited, the black electorate has become less predictable in recent years, with turnout surging when Barack Obama and Joe Biden headed the Democratic ticket and declining when Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were the standard-bearers. At the end of the day, Talarico's team must find a way to obtain more than 89 percent of the black vote—the share O'Rourke was estimated to have won—even if they are banking on unprecedented turnout among Latinos and young people.

Different aspects of Talarico’s biography and political identity could make it all come together. His religiosity could attract older black and Latino voters, who tend to be churchgoers, while his steadfast cultural liberalism is bound to generate a strong get-out-the-vote effort among other core Democratic constituencies. And his story of his mother’s determination to provide him a good life after leaving an abusive relationship with his birth father may well stir voters otherwise weary of liberal platitudes about resilience and hope.

Then again, Talarico’s basic fidelity to identity politics—at bottom, not meaningfully different from Crockett’s—could undermine his overtures to working-class independents and wavering Trump voters. He has pointedly cast MAGA’s cultural priorities as focused on the “wrong one percent” and enjoined his audiences to train their ire on the monied interests distorting American democracy. But Texas is still Texas: it skews to the right, despite its overflowing sociocultural and political contradictions. In what has been the epicenter of America’s culture wars over immigration, gender, guns, and abortion, Talarico may soon come up against harsh limits in his attempts to defy polarization and extend a hand to those who don’t agree with progressives on every issue.

Yet, as daunting as the odds are, Talarico’s campaign has concrete reasons to be optimistic. The blowback from ICE’s abuses and rapidly declining consumer sentiment, likely to worsen as the escalating war with Iran spikes energy, food, and shipping prices, may well spark the rebellion against the state’s MAGAfied establishment that eluded past Democratic challengers. Latinos who fueled Trump’s four-point improvement in 2024 over his 2020 victory in the state are now swinging toward Democrats because of the administration’s draconian and increasingly unpopular deportation regime, including in the Rio Grande Valley, where anxiety about border crossings, crime, and inflation had contributed to Trump’s stunning gains with traditional Democrats. The mounting cost-of-living crisis, meanwhile, has diminished Texas’s allure as a high-growth state with a middle-class-friendly housing market. Rents and utilities are up sharply in several metros while construction has slowed due to the chill sweeping through the immigrant-dependent sector. The explosion in data centers, moreover, has raised alarm over the demand placed on local water supplies and the state’s notoriously vulnerable energy grid, spreading grassroots opposition that transcends partisan loyalties. Together, these conditions may allow Talarico to close the deal and burnish, in turn, the new Sun Belt populism that has strengthened his voice.

Talarico, of course, knows he cannot depend on a perfect storm to yield an upset. Republicans are determined to consign Democrats to permanent minority status across Texas and the South, and the national Democratic Party, through endless fumbles and sins of omission, has done vanishingly little to stop them. Talarico will thus have to fight for every last persuadable vote—and not shrink from the onslaught his adversaries are preparing. The question, then, that should animate Talarico’s team as he forges ahead is whether they can continue to build something bigger than a proxy referendum on Trump’s record—and leave behind a movement primed for the battles to come. His fellow insurgents, near and far, are counting on it.