Welcome to Power Players, The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take an in-depth look at the key figures in American politics as the US reshapes itself and the world.
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Texas, the Lone Star State, home to nearly 10 per cent of the US population, has long been the ruby-red crown jewel of the Republican electoral map – and a tantalising target for Democrats, who dream of turning it blue. Recent history is full of much-hyped Democrats who fell short in their races for Senate seats, including Beto O’Rourke. This year, though, Democrats think they may finally have a winner on their hands – a man who you probably hadn’t heard of 18 months ago.
James Talarico is an unusual challenger: a Christian progressive who argues that the Republican right has betrayed the faith it claims to defend. He is running against Ken Paxton, a Trump-backed Republican weighed down by scandal. With polls giving Talarico a narrow lead, Democrats are daring to hope that his combination of progressive politics and religious conviction can finally break through. It would be a humiliation for Trump, too, in the most iconic of red states.
It wouldn’t be quite right to say that before last summer James Talarico was a nobody. In 2018, the state lawmaker and former teacher had become, at the age of 29, the youngest member of the Texas House of Representatives. By last year, he had won re-election three times, entered a Presbyterian seminary, authored a host of bills and accumulated almost a million followers on TikTok with his videos on politics and faith. But none of that compared to the lightning rise that followed, which has made the lawmaker into one of the brightest young stars in the Democratic Party.
Talarico has never carried himself as a moderate. Instead, he distinguished himself early with a style that married staunch progressive beliefs with mild-mannered rhetoric rooted in his Christian faith. He argued, for instance, that the militant Christian nationalism of the modern Republican Party wasn’t just bad for the country – it was bad for Christianity as well. Some of his early viral moments came during his high-profile stances during church-and-state fights, as when he opposed a 2023 Texas bill mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in state classrooms.
It was Joe Rogan, host of the most popular podcast in the world, who really put Talarico on the map. Rogan, who is based in Texas himself, was shown a video of Talarico speaking by a friend and invited him on the show.
A Rogan interview, with its enormous cross-partisan reach, is an alluring prospect for any American politician. But it is also a daunting one: The conversational hours-long episodes are far too long, wide-ranging and discursive for politicians to stick to the safe territory of their campaign-approved talking points. By any measure, Talarico crushed the appearance. “James Talarico, you need to run for president,” Rogan told him two hours in.
What he decided to run for was US Senate. He ended up in a hard-fought primary against another insurgent, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a firebrand whose tirades against GOP officials and lawmakers had earned her a legion of Democratic fans online.
The outsider versus outsider primary between Talarico, who is white, and Crockett, who is black, was long, expensive and racially charged. Crockett had come into the contest with the greater national name recognition, but it was Talarico who proved the better fundraiser and organiser. He ultimately beat Crockett by about six points.
Talarico could comfort himself that if his race was ugly, it was nothing compared to the one across the aisle – a race that pitted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Trump, against powerful incumbent senator John Cornyn.
Paxton was an extraordinarily weak candidate: uncharismatic and controversy-ridden, his wife had filed for divorce on “biblical grounds,” alleging adultery, and his own party had impeached him for one of his many corruption scandals (though the Texas Senate later acquitted him of the charges).
What was in his favour? For one, he had been a leading player in the legal fight to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 presidential election. He managed to parlay Trump’s distrust of Cornyn as “establishment” into a presidential endorsement. And he earned the invaluable reputation among the Maga base as a “fighter” for the cause.
After Paxton trounced him in the primary, a furious John Cornyn made no secret of his belief that Paxton was a weak enough candidate to put the seat in serious jeopardy.
But Talarico is not without problems of his own. Like most candidates, he has tacked hard to the centre for the general election, talking about the importance of strong enforcement at the US-Mexico border and coming out against biologically male trans athletes playing in girls’ sports. Yet, he has a long record of far more aggressive rhetoric on a number of culture-war issues, some of which risk particular offence to religiously conservative voters precisely because they are couched in the language of faith: “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between,” he memorably said during a debate on the House floor in 2021. “God is non-binary.”
He was also frequently outspoken about trans issues. Asked on a 2023 podcast to name something he loves besides his family and friends, Talarico named “the trans children who showed up yesterday at the state capitol to advocate for their humanity”.
Talarico has tried to distance himself from such comments, saying that “there are some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret”. But he has argued that these culture-war shibboleths are a distraction from the real issues in his race: “Ken Paxton is intentionally clipping my cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption.”
Still, Republicans have tried to make comments like this the centrepiece of their campaign against “Tala-freak-o,” leaning into them in a series of lurid ads making ample use of AI: AI Talarico in a dress singing about how he wants to change “the gender of all of your offspring”, AI Talarico in operating-room scrubs, enthusiastically preparing to perform a sex-change surgery on a little girl. And they’ve darkly suggested that Talarico’s stated love for trans children might be something sinister. Vice President JD Vance has repeatedly said he “wouldn’t want to see” Talarico’s search history. There’s a desperate, greasy, spaghetti-at-the-wall feeling to these attacks.
If Talarico falls short, it won’t be hard to construct a narrative why: Texas is still a red state, and he may simply prove too progressive for its voters to accept. But we just may be getting a perfect storm the other way. Can Talarico’s progressive faith break through to Texas voters? Or will Republicans succeed in making that very faith the thing that dooms him? The answer to that question could determine whether 30 years of political history are upturned and a Democrat snatches the ruby-red jewel of Texas from the Republican crown.