James Talarico made his first public appearance in nearly 10 days on Friday, showing up at a music festival in downtown Austin to shake hands, greet supporters and put to rest what had been days of speculation about his whereabouts and well-being.
In a short interview with The New York Times, Mr. Talarico said that he had been sick with “a nasty case of the flu” and had been “at home sick in bed.”
“Everybody should get the flu shot,” Mr. Talarico said before heading off to greet festivalgoers at Austin City Limits in Zilker Park, as music swirled from a nearby stage.
He said he had more events planned over the weekend in Dallas.
Mr. Talarico last held an in-person campaign event on Sept. 29, at a fund-raiser in New York City, his second there in two days. A day later he appeared virtually before a Hispanic business group, conducting his talk from a hotel room. He had come down with a cold, he told the audience, which he had intended to speak to in person.
His opponent in the Senate race, Ken Paxton, has been hammering Mr. Talarico over his absence for days, suggesting that Mr. Talarico was hiding some underlying problem that he did not want to divulge. On Wednesday, at a rally with President Trump, Mr. Paxton led the crowd of thousands in a chant: “Where is James Talarico?”
Mr. Talarico’s campaign said for days that the candidate has been recovering from the flu, and that he would return to the campaign trail this weekend. A spokesman for the campaign, JT Ennis, said that Mr. Talarico had held “more than 100 public events” and shaken “tens of thousands of hands” before getting sick.
In the interview on Friday, Mr. Talarico said there was no truth to any rumors that were spreading on the internet about his absence, including one that he had been receiving some sort of mental health treatment. “Just a reminder not to believe everything you read on the internet,” he said.
Mr. Talarico spent about 15 minutes greeting people at a sign for the music festival, and stopped to pose for photos as he moved about the grounds.
The Talarico campaign has maintained a steady presence on social media and in emails to supporters, masking the candidate’s absence from live events. Still, Mr. Talarico’s absence from public events — or even in any private fund-raisers via video — caused even some of his supporters to worry.
Mr. Paxton and his Republican supporters reveled in the moment, creating “missing posters” and demanding that Mr. Talarico pose for a photo holding a newspaper with the date visible to prove he is OK.
“Still no proof of life,” Mr. Paxton’s campaign wrote in an email blast on Friday. “Texans are still asking one simple question: Where’s Jimmy?”
During his last public appearance, before the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, Mr. Talarico explained that he was concerned about spreading his illness.
“I was starting to feel under the weather a few days ago,” he told the audience. “Last night it got so bad that I went to the urgent care here in Dallas and I was diagnosed with the flu and so I’m running a fever and I’m at my most contagious right now. I guess I’ve been shaking too many hands on the campaign trail. And so I want to keep everybody safe and you know, if I was passing on this illness to somebody and got someone’s grandmother or someone’s baby sick, I couldn’t live with myself. So I thought the best thing to do was to put safety first and put everyone’s health first.”
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