This essay is the second installment in a series on the thinkers, upstarts and ideologues battling for control of the Democratic Party.
James Talarico, a Texas Democratic lawmaker running for Senate, was supposed to hold the second rally of his nascent campaign on Sept. 10, the day Charlie Kirk was shot. The horror of the killing shook him deeply, and he thought about canceling. Instead, Talarico retooled his speech to make it all about Kirk’s murder and the algorithmically fueled rancor and contempt deforming American life.
That evening, almost 2,000 people crammed into the sprawling patio of a San Antonio pizza and burger joint called Backyard on Broadway. It was so crowded that before Talarico arrived, the kitchen announced that it had sold out of all its food. There were none of the windup speeches so common at political rallies. Instead, standing inches from the throng, Talarico spoke about Kirk’s death and the atmosphere of hatred suffocating the nation.
“I disagree with Charlie Kirk on almost every political issue, but Charlie Kirk was a child of God,” he said. “There is something broken in this country. Our politics are broken. Our media are broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken.”
Until he began his Senate campaign, Talarico was a part-time seminary student; he still plans, eventually, to become a minister. That evening in San Antonio, he told me, “I really wanted to show up not as the politician, but as the pastor.” In truth, he was a bit of both. People are hungry, he told the crowd, “for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of fear, not a politics of hate, not a politics of violence, but a politics of love.”
Afterward, he announced that he’d stay long enough to speak one-on-one with anyone who wanted to, and a snaking line formed. Some, including a couple of families with young kids, asked him to pray with them.
Talarico is an underdog in the Texas Senate Democratic primary, where polls show him running behind Colin Allred, who challenged Senator Ted Cruz in 2024. That gap might close as more people get to know Talarico; a September Public Policy Polling survey found that among those who had a favorable opinion of both him and Allred, Talarico led by a significant 50 percentage points. But cinching the nomination would be the easy part, given that no Democrat has won statewide office in Texas in over 30 years.
Yet Talarico, a 36-year-old former middle-school teacher and a member of the Texas House of Representatives, is generating excitement far out of proportion to his political prospects. On social media, his videos challenging Republican politicians and conservative dogma, often from a Christian perspective, regularly go viral. In July they earned him an invitation to Joe Rogan’s podcast, perhaps the most coveted platform in American politics, where Rogan encouraged him to run for president. Politico recently reported that Barack Obama was “holding calls with the party’s rising stars”; the article mentioned two names: Zohran Mamdani and Talarico, who’d impressed the former president with his leadership during Texas’ recent redistricting fight.
Writing on X after Talarico announced his Senate run, Rob Flaherty, Kamala Harris’s former deputy campaign manager, called him “the future of the party.” When I asked him to elaborate, he told me, “Democrats are losing ground because we’ve lost our ability to talk to people who have checked out of the system. He represents the kind of hopeful populism that I think is our pathway back — and he does it while having a natural sense of how to get and keep attention.”
In the first three weeks of Talarico’s primary run, a campaign spokesman said, he raised over $6 million from more than 125,000 individual donors. By comparison, when the Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke raised $2.2 million over 45 days in 2018, The Texas Tribune described it as a “massive haul.”
All this enthusiasm may be in part a sign of desperation: Democrats are in the wilderness, eager to latch on to any inspirational figure who can guide them out. But it’s also a testament to the unexpected power of Talarico’s plain-spoken message, which combines Bernie Sanders’s anger at oligarchy with a diagnosis of the spiritual sickness that almost everyone in this country feels.
“The billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats,” Talarico said at this campaign kickoff rally in Round Rock, a city outside of Austin, where around 1,800 people had turned out on a sweltering evening. He was tired, he said, “of being told to hate my neighbor. It’s been more than 10 years of this kind of politics — politics as blood sport, politics as professional wrestling. It tears families apart. It ends friendships and it leaves us all feeling terrible all of the time.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has recently delighted Democrats by showing that he can imitate President Trump’s thuggish, surreal communication style. Talarico, by contrast, is trying to chart a path out of our Trumpian nightmare. His overtly Christian brand of populism might seem like an odd fit for an increasingly secular party, but people are clearly gravitating to it. Even if his race for Senate is unsuccessful, there’s a lot Democrats can learn from him.
Just before Kirk was shot, I was talking to Talarico at Ken’s Tacos, a cheap, unpretentious spot a few blocks from his house in East Austin. As we spoke, a young Black man approached him, delight and recognition on his face. “Are you who I think you are?” asked Ugo Bosah, a 28-year-old insurance broker on his lunch break. “I just started watching your reels!”
Bosah hadn’t known that Talarico lived in Austin, and he hadn’t heard much about his Senate run. He knew him only from social media.
The video that had most impressed him — one that’s been viewed almost 13 million times on TikTok — features Talarico’s exchange with his Republican State House colleague Candy Noble. She’d sponsored a bill, since signed into law, forcing Texas public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Talarico flummoxed her by asking about the myriad ways in which Republicans break the commandments, including by scheduling a vote on her bill on a Sunday, the Christian sabbath.
“What I like is how you’re able to make MAGA look stupid, but you do it in such a nice and polite way,” said Bosah.
Bosah told me he’d followed politics closely when he was younger, but pulled back around the time of the pandemic as public debate became “super divisive.” Talarico’s calm, steady approach to argument impressed him. “Watching him do it in such a noncombative, educated and informative way, with common sense, it’s refreshing,” Bosah said.
Talarico first ran for office in 2018 with the endorsement of Run for Something, an organization that recruits and trains young progressives to seek local office. He was motivated by his stint as a middle-school teacher in a struggling, crowded school in San Antonio, where he’d seen how state cuts to education were harming his students. Talarico campaigned relentlessly, at one point walking the entire 25-mile length of his Republican-leaning district, holding town halls along the way. Worn out at the end of the trek, he was hospitalized and diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. But he was able to flip the seat, and in the State House, he helped lead a successful bill to cap the price of insulin at $25.
Amanda Litman, Run for Something’s co-founder, believes that the secret to his success comes to down to authenticity, an overused word in politics, but an elusive quality. She compared Talarico to Mamdani, another young populist with a talent for social media and an ability to speak extemporaneously without resorting to consultant-crafted pablum. “Not that they have the same beliefs, but they so clearly know who they are and what they believe, so they’re able to communicate that in a way that breaks through in this media environment,” she said.
Seen this way, Talarico’s religiosity functions as a signal that he won’t surrender to political expediency. Consider, for example, how he spoke of Israel’s war in Gaza in an MSNBC interview two weeks ago. “There’s a theologian who said, ‘I screamed at God for the starving children, until I realized the starving children was God screaming at me,’” he said. “And God is screaming at all of us in Gaza as we speak.” In that interview, he promised not to take money from AIPAC. He told me that he favored a pause on the sale of offensive weapons to Israel.
To Talarico, a politics of love is not a politics of passivity; he often points out that when Jesus said “Love your enemies,” it was an acknowledgment that you’d have enemies. Like a lot of young progressives, he argues that the national party has forgotten how to fight. The difference is that he uses biblical references to make the point. Among his favorites is the one where Jesus drove merchants and money changers from the temple in Jerusalem. “It’s time to start flipping tables,” he says in his stump speech.
Now, even the most secular progressives are usually fine with religious rhetoric when it’s used to embroider their own positions. But when Talarico talks about God, he’s often doing something more than that. Talarico is a fierce opponent of Christian nationalism, which melds messianic religion with aggressive American chauvinism. The Presbyterian Church he grew up in, he said, taught him that the separation of church and state is sacred. But he is also troubled by the decline of faith in American life. Though he’s quick to acknowledge the ways organized religion has let people down, he sees a society that’s somewhat lost without it.
At one point during Talarico’s two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Rogan, Talarico said that throughout human history, people have relied on religious structures to make life make sense. “We’re conducting an experiment on humanity in real time of what happens when you take this believing species and rob it of any community to make sense of the world,” he said. “I honestly believe that’s why we see higher rates of anxiety and depression, especially among young people, because they’re growing up in an incoherent universe.”
This is not an argument one typically hears from Democratic politicians, given that the party has become the natural home of secularists. According to the Pew Research Center’s latest religious landscape study, 40 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 30 percent who identify as Protestant. Nearly half of people aligned with the Democratic Party said religion isn’t very important in their lives.
Talarico has encountered voters who are alienated by his constant references to his faith. He sometimes gets emails, he said, from people who say, derisively, “I don’t want to hear about your sky daddy.”
In some ways, he understands where they’re coming from. “There’s a lot of religious trauma in this country,” he said. “A lot of people who have been hurt.” But he told me those messages also hurt him. “My faith is so personal and so foundational for me, and so when my own supporters are like, ‘Shut up about this,’ or ‘Don’t talk about this,’ it’s not a good feeling,” he said. People outside the party, Talarico said, often say they feel that Democrats are hostile to religion, “and I don’t think that’s without merit.”
Yet the growing embrace of his message suggests that many Democrats are eager to hear someone speak in a prophetic register. Perhaps things have gotten so bad in this country that even some of us who don’t have faith ourselves find comfort in listening to those who do.
Talarico, of course, is far from the first liberal to diagnose a spiritual void at the center of our society. The civil rights movement was first and foremost a Christian one; in his 1964 Nobel laureate lecture, Martin Luther King Jr. said rich countries suffer from “a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.” The Black church has long been a wellspring of inspiration and organizing in the Democratic Party, nurturing figures from Jesse Jackson to Barack Obama. Today, the only active clergyman in the Senate is Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia and the pastor of King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Sometimes, listening to Talarico, I was reminded of Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric, as first lady, about the “politics of meaning,” a phrase coined by Michael Lerner, who was then editor of the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun. In a 1993 speech, Clinton, a devout Methodist, framed such politics as an antidote to a pervasive national mood of cynicism, anomie and existential unease. “We lack, at some core level, meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively — that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are,” she said.
Given that we now live in a country in a state of collective psychic collapse, she was probably on to something. But at the time, Clinton was mocked relentlessly for these musings, as she was for almost everything she did. “If she wants to talk about the discontents of her own climb, and the spiritual emptiness she feels, congratulations to her for rare candor,” Jacob Weisberg sneered in The New Republic. “But her yuppie awakening doesn’t mean everyone else is a moral failure.” The New York Times Magazine dubbed her “St. Hillary.”
In the ensuing decades, many others would try to merge spirituality and progressive politics; almost every year of this sad century, it seems, new articles have heralded the coming of a religious left. But liberal Christianity has been in sustained decline, while America’s fastest growing churches tend to be extremely conservative. Fundamentalist religion seems to answer a deep human need for certainty and clear rules for living. And those who don’t need those things often decide they don’t need religion at all.
Yet Talarico has faith that more humane religious cultures can and will be created. The reason he enrolled at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in the first place, he said, was that he was “obsessed” with figuring out how those who share his values can rebuild the structures that give people’s lives meaning.
“Weeds will grow in a garden when it’s not healthy,” he said. “And I think what you see is when there are not healthy alternatives, healthy spiritual communities, whether it’s organized religion or not, then people will gravitate toward something that is more authoritarian by nature. I think that’s been true throughout history. I think it’s briefly true now.” The conspiracy theories that have so infested our politics, he said, are “proof that people are hungry for a story that can help connect all the dots in this very chaotic world.” (“Hungry” is a word that Talarico uses a lot.)
I’m skeptical that Talarico’s approach will win over many people who’d otherwise be drawn to the Christian right. They might agree with his critique of our atomized, disenchanted culture, but not with his theological gloss on social liberalism, including his defense of trans rights, which could be a profound political liability in a state as conservative as Texas.
Last month, Terry Virts, a former astronaut running his own dark horse campaign for the Democratic Senate nomination, released a video featuring Talarico saying, in 2021, that “God is nonbinary,” and arguing against bans on trans people in women’s sports. It showed a clip of one of Trump’s most effective ads from the last election — the one that said “Kamala is for they/them” — and warned that Talarico is vulnerable to the same attacks.
Talarico now says he was being deliberately provocative with the nonbinary line, and that most Christians would agree that God is beyond gender. But if he’s the Democratic nominee, his words will inevitably be used to hammer him.
Citing Talarico’s history on trans issues, the centrist writer Josh Barro published a long essay urging Democrats not to nominate him. He called Talarico “a liberal’s idea of what a conservative might like: A clean-cut young man who’s adept at quoting Scripture in support of a conventional set of liberal policy priorities.”
He’s probably right that at least some of the hype around Talarico stems from a misguided identity politics. Some Democrats, I suspect, view him as a sort of faith whisperer, a man who can translate their ideas into a foreign idiom. But the Democratic voters I spoke to in Texas seemed to feel a much more direct connection to Talarico. They spoke not about how Talarico might appeal to other people, but about how he appealed to them. They were thinking less like political strategists and more like, well, believers.
“He has shown us a different way,” said Rick Benavidez, a 48-year-old software developer I met at the Round Rock rally. Benavidez, who has two sons in college, said he hadn’t been politically involved during Trump’s first term, but the “vastly worse” sequel had spurred him to join his local Indivisible chapter. Even before Trump, Benavidez, who is Mexican American, said that he’d always carried his passport card with him and instructed his kids to do the same, lest they be stopped by immigration agents. “What concerns me now is that it doesn’t matter,” he said. “They can take your passport away. They can still detain you and say that it’s fake.”
Like many of us, Benavidez struggles with anger over the direction of the country. But he’s determined, he said, not to give in to it for the sake of his boys, who’ve already lived through a pandemic and a decade of Trump. Talarico’s vision gives him something to aspire to. “We know that our country is not perfect, but that we care enough and that we love each other enough to reach for something better, is, I think, the story that we need to tell ourselves,” Benavidez said.
In the end, that’s what the most talented politicians do: They tell a story. Liberals have been in crisis in part because they’ve lost theirs, which centered on the inevitability of progress. Obama liked to quote King when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” These words perfectly captured an era of liberal confidence, a sense that the world was moving toward greater enlightenment, greater equality and greater integration. The rapid success of the gay rights movement seemed to confirm this faith; one reason Pride parades became such important civic events is that they celebrated not just the rights and dignity of gay people, but also the triumph of liberal teleology.
Over the last decade, both the world and the worldview that many liberals took for granted have crumbled. The leaders of the future will be those who can craft new narratives. In our current abyss, the religious might have an advantage; they can draw on the oldest stories we have.
Talarico ended his speech in San Antonio by talking about the passage in the New Testament where Jesus says, “Blessed are you who weep.” To him, it’s a statement about the wisdom to be found in grief. “If your heart is breaking right now, it means you still have a heart,” he said. “It means you’re still human. Protect that. Trust that. That is what will get us out of all of this.”
Source photograph by Eric Gay/Associated Press
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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