From nearly the moment they lost the last presidential race, Democrats have been debating whether their best way forward was to emulate President Trump or counter him.
Governors trolled him on social media, with tactics ripped directly from his MAGA playbook. Senators made the rounds of conservative podcasts, popping into the manosphere that helped fuel Mr. Trump’s political comeback. And ambitious Democrats adopted his pugnacious, sometime coarse political style, peppering their appearances with profanity.
Then on Tuesday, in the heart of reliably red Texas, James Talarico stepped into the melee with an approach that felt old-fashioned but, in 2026, also new.
Mr. Talarico campaigned across the state asking demoralized and divided Democrats to look beyond their anger to welcome their moderate, independent and, yes, even Republican neighbors into their tent.
His message amounted to an audacious bet that in a divided and increasingly violent political era, he could appeal to voters with a call for love instead of rage.
Early Wednesday morning he prevailed over Representative Jasmine Crockett, a firebrand beloved by the liberal base. His victory showed that there was appetite in a party focused on resistance for a more inclusive approach.
The race excited Democrats across Texas and across the nation, breaking records for early voting in a state where the party suffered what even its former chairman described as “devastating defeats up and down the ballot” in 2024. Mr. Talarico powered his win by running up his margins with white and Latino voters, and did notably well in South Texas border areas that shifted toward Mr. Trump in 2024.
“James Talarico has shown what the future of the Democratic Party is,” said Representative Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat and chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, who did not back a candidate in the primary. “Through old-school economic populism, James has brought together a coalition of progressives and independence and conservatives.”
Of course, winning the general election will be even more difficult. No Democrat has won statewide since 1994. Mr. Trump expanded his margin of victory from 9 points in the 2016 presidential election to nearly 14 points in 2024. More than a few national Democrats said they would notch it as a midterm success if they simply forced Republicans to spend money defending a Senate seat their party has held since 1961.
Mr. Talarico’s Republican opponent remains uncertain. The race between Ken Paxton, a hard-charging hard-right attorney general beloved by the MAGA base, and Senator John Cornyn, a four-term incumbent, will be decided in a May runoff. Their line of attack, however, was clear from the earliest hours of Wednesday morning, when Republican strategists rushed to label Mr. Talarico “too radical” for Texas and compared him to comparing him to Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York.
But whether or not he becomes the next senator from the Texas, Mr. Talarico believes his campaign can be a model for Democrats across the country as they try to find their way out of their political wilderness.
For over a decade, Mr. Trump has dominated Democratic politics as their biggest enemy and strongest energizer of their base. Up and down the ticket, Democratic candidates parlayed opposition to Mr. Trump into wins up and down the ticket.
That strategy failed in 2024, said Mr. Talarico, when Democrats lost not only the White House but were locked out — once again — from winning statewide office in Texas.
In his campaign, Mr. Talarico called for a “different kind of politics” that worked to “extend an open hand rather than a closed fist.” His stump speech mentioned Mr. Trump by name only in passing, even as he made clear he disagreed with many of the president’s policies.
“Clearly, our coalition is not big enough, as it stands,” he said, when I asked him last week the message his win would send to the national party. “I want to build something a lot bigger than a 51 percent coalition.”
In primary races across the country, Democratic candidates are waging ideological battles over a host of issues: Israel and Gaza, taxing the wealthy, how to win in a moment their brand is seen as tarnished.
But in Texas, this was a race fought more over style than substance. The ideological and policy differences between Mr. Talarico and Ms. Crockett were minor. But the way they campaigned was strikingly different.
Ms. Crockett established herself as the queen of the clapback, willing to match the insults of MAGA movement. The path to victory, she argued, ran through energizing the young, liberal, Latino and Black voters who are the party’s base.
“When things are falling apart, I just don’t believe that it’s business as usual,” she told voters at a town hall in Fort Worth last month. “People want to know that it is not business as usual and that you are going to go to the max.”
Mr. Talarico wrapped his own opposition in Scripture and optimism for a more compassionate future, rooted in his Christian faith and background as a seminarian. He pushed Democrats to welcome disaffected Trump voters through the language of faith and working-class economic anxiety. His stump speech often ended with a call for voters to embrace compassion and unite in hard times.
“If your heart is breaking, as you watch what’s happening to our beloved country, it means you still have heart,” he told voters at a Dallas country music hall last week. “Resistance starts right here by refusing to mirror the hate, and the violence, and the inhumanity that surrounds all of us.”
It’s a message that some Democrats believe is ideally suited to a unsettled moment in American politics, when Mr. Trump’s popularity is waning but approval ratings of the Democratic Party remain low. Survey after survey show that voters believe the president is focused on the wrong priorities and disapprove of his efforts to impose sweeping tariffs, aggressive deployment of ICE agents and use of the military overseas.
“There’s so many people who are upset, discouraged, fed up with Donald Trump and his administration, and at least through this election, they’re willing to vote outside their typical party affiliation in response,” said Wendy Davis, a Democratic former Texas state senator who mounted losing bids for governor and Congress. “We are served best if we give them an option that they feel is a palatable one.”
Of course, not everyone in the party will cheer Mr. Talarico’s victory. His race against Ms. Crockett inflamed racial tensions among some Democrats in the state. When Democrats and analysts spoke of his “electability,” Ms. Crockett, who is Black, described it as a racial “dog whistle” and her some of her supporters denounced it as coded racism and sexism.
Ms. Crockett promised to support his bid on Wednesday morning. How strongly she rallies her supporters behind him could make the difference in a state that has come to embody dashed liberal dreams. For more than a decade, even as Texas has grown increasingly diverse and urbanized, the state has repeatedly broken the hearts of Democrats who believed the shifting demographics would eventually favor their side.
But in Mr. Talarico, Democrats are hopeful that they have finally found the right messenger to mess with Texas Republicans. One of his challenges in the general election will be persuading Black voters, who polls suggested strongly supported Ms. Crockett, to turn out for him. Mr. Talarcio acknowledged as much during his primary campaign, asking Black voters to make him “their close second choice.”
Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, said that Mr. Talarico’s candidacy offers Democrats their best opportunity in decades to push Texas along the path of battleground states like Arizona or Georgia that were once dominated by Republicans.
“This is the opening, right?” he said. “This could be the break. The flip side of it is, if it doesn’t happen, I mean, what is it going to take?”
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
The post Talarico’s Win in Texas Shows That Nice Guys Can Finish First appeared first on New York Times.
