James Talarico’s record in the Texas Legislature has been a tale of two Talaricos.
There’s the Talarico who flipped a competitive state house district around Austin and arrived in the Capitol in 2019 as a 29-year-old, a Democrat preaching bipartisan cooperation. There, he accomplished things by working with Republicans, including 39 bills that became law with his name on them.
Then there’s the Talarico who was a vocal progressive fighter, especially after Republicans redrew his district lines, pushing him to run in a liberal Austin area. Voters there cheered as he fought unsuccessfully against religion in public schools and in favor of transgender rights.
The first Talarico earned accolades even from some of his Republican colleagues in the Legislature they dominate. The second, which helped catapult him into the national spotlight, is being used against him in his run for U.S. Senate.
Mr. Talarico has tried to balance his two political identities throughout his four terms in the Texas House, according to a New York Times review of his record and interviews with more than a dozen current and former legislators. Even as he worked against partisan bills pushed by the Legislature’s conservative majority, the review found his ability to work with Republicans to pass laws stayed largely consistent.
In his Senate campaign this year, Mr. Talarico has emphasized the bipartisan side of his record. Seeking to prevail in a state that President Trump won by nearly 14 points in 2024, he has toned down his criticism of Republicans and distanced himself from some past remarks, saying they “missed the mark” or were “cringe-y.”
His campaign literature no longer refers to him as a progressive.
“I worked with both Republicans and Democrats who wanted to get things done for Texans,” Mr. Talarico said in a statement. His campaign provided written answers but did not make him available for an interview.
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former legislators, Mr. Talarico was described as a driven and disciplined lawmaker who used his oratory skills to amplify the message of his party.
This week on “The Daily,” The Times’s podcast, Mr. Talarico said Republicans in the Legislature forced him into a position when he “had to fight back against that extremism.” He said his viewpoint on partisan politics has changed.
“When I first ran for office, I thought of it as left versus right,” he said. “I’ve now come to see politics as not left versus right but top versus bottom.”
Mr. Talarico has led his opponent, attorney general of Texas Ken Paxton, in nearly every recent poll, including with many independents. But to succeed on Election Day, he must win over at least some Republicans. To reach those voters, he has pointed to his record in office.
Madison Cercy, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paxton’s campaign, rejected the suggestion that Mr. Talarico had a record of bipartisanship.
“Now that he needs Texas voters, he’s scrubbing his website and pretending to be a moderate,” Ms. Cercy said. “Calling a radical a moderate isn’t a fair reading of his record.”
The Record in Austin
In one of his first speeches to the Texas House, Mr. Talarico urged lawmakers to put party aside.
“This next session shouldn’t be about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party,” Mr. Talarico said in 2019, weeks after winning election. “It should be about chasing a vision of what this state can be.”
During his nearly seven years in office, Mr. Talarico’s name appeared on more than 500 bills. More than three-quarters of the bills he wrote with other lawmakers had at least one Republican author or sponsor.
As a lead author, he passed laws to cap prekindergarten class size and help inmates earn high school diplomas. After a man died during the filming of a television show, he worked with Republicans to prohibit police departments from entering into reality TV agreements.
As with most Democratic bills in the Republican-controlled Legislature, his progressive measures largely went nowhere. He championed bills requiring diversity officers in public schools, legalizing marijuana and addressing climate change.
Few aspects of Mr. Talarico’s legislative record have proved as contentious as his positions and remarks on transgender issues, which Republicans have made a prominent line of attack.
Mr. Talarico — and nearly every other Democrat in the Legislature — unsuccessfully opposed bills restricting transgender athletes’ participation in youth and college sports. He also voted against legislation banning gender-transition care for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
Mr. Talarico described God as “nonbinary” during one debate on the sports bill and said there were six sexes in another.
“Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes — in fact, there are six,” Mr. Talarico said in 2021, during a committee debate, before listing chromosomal variations associated with intersex people.
Now, as a Senate candidate, Mr. Talarico is attempting to revise some of those remarks. He now describes the statement that God is nonbinary as intentionally “provocative.” Although he voted against the treatment ban, he emphasizes that he supported an amendment to the bill to restrict surgeries for minors.
In September, in an interview on Fox News, Mr. Talarico said he opposed transgender athletes playing in girls’ sports if it endangered safety or fairness. His campaign said this view on athletic participation predated his run for federal office, but it did not provide examples of when he expressed this opinion before this year.
“There are not six sexes,” Mr. Talarico told Fox News. “There are two.”
On “The Daily,” he said it was Republican lawmakers, not him, who “were obsessed with talking about trans issues, were obsessed with talking about people’s private parts.”
“It’s not like I ran for the Legislature to talk about these things,” Mr. Talarico said.
Even as he found himself on the losing side in legislative battles, Mr. Talarico displayed a talent for sharp oratory and withering lines of questioning that drew attention.
“He will excoriate you like you’re Satan himself and then, three seconds later, act like he’s your best friend,” said Tom Oliverson, the chairman of the House Republican Caucus, who sponsored the 2023 ban on gender-transition care for minors.
“I like James on a personal level,” he added. “But there is a lot of performative theater that is James Talarico.”
A Bigger Stage
The shift in Mr. Talarico’s public profile that would help make him a national progressive figure began in the summer of 2021.
Democrats in the Texas House, including Mr. Talarico, objected to new voting restrictions pushed by Republicans. They left the state to halt the proceedings and went to Washington seeking a national spotlight.
From the nation’s capital, at just 32 years old, Mr. Talarico emerged as a de facto spokesman for Texas Democrats. He appeared on national television and once sparred with Pete Hegseth live on Fox News, when Mr. Hegseth, now the defense secretary, was a host.
Upon returning to Austin, Mr. Talarico found himself targeted in a new way. In the process of redrawing the state’s voting maps, Republicans moved his district’s lines to make his re-election all but impossible.
To remain in the Texas House, Mr. Talarico opted to run for an open seat in the liberal enclave of Austin, where his parents lived.
The move set off a change in how he presented himself.
Mr. Talarico’s website no longer described him as “a proud Democrat who works with Republicans.” Instead, it cast him as “the most effective progressive at the Texas Capitol” who was “fighting back against Republican extremism.”
“I think the Republicans have created a monster,” Mr. Talarico wrote about himself on Facebook that fall, after acknowledging that being drawn out of his district had been “tough.”
Joe Moody, a longtime Democratic lawmaker and early mentor, said the experience of getting “burned” during redistricting shaped Mr. Talarico’s future political path. He won the 2022 election easily.
“His voice got a lot louder after that happened,” Mr. Moody said.
When lawmakers returned to Austin, Republicans put forward a slate of new hard-line conservative bills on everything from education to L.G.B.T.Q. rights. In response, Mr. Talarico spent the next two sessions as a vocal opponent of these measures, including bills restricting books in public-school libraries and further limiting abortion access.
Mr. Talarico’s spokesman, JT Ennis, argued that such opposition to Republican priorities was not inherently partisan.
“Calling out extreme legislation that a majority of Texans oppose,” Mr. Ennis said, “is bipartisan.”
Still, Mr. Talarico found issues on which to team up with Republicans. He joined Republican lawmakers to fight high prescription-drug prices and create a new state commission “to promote lasting marriage” and “two-parent households.” He worked on laws to combat opioid overdoses with Republican state senators, including Angela Paxton, Mr. Paxton’s wife.
“James has strong progressive values,” said Erin Zwiener, a Democratic state representative who was first elected the same year as Mr. Talarico, “and he’s eminently practical.”
In partisan rankings of lawmakers by Rice University based on their voting record, Mr. Talarico usually fell just left of the middle among Democrats. Despite being in a more liberal district, he passed more laws during his second two terms, The Times analysis found.
Among his colleagues, Mr. Talarico stood out as something of a grind. When fellow Texas lawmakers invited him out for drinks, he’d usually decline, colleagues recalled. “Did you ever go to school with someone who carries a briefcase?” said Dan Huberty, a former Republican state representative. “That’s him.”
Before entering politics, Mr. Talarico spent two years teaching sixth-grade at a San Antonio public school. Building on this experience, he later worked with rural Republicans to oppose using public funding for private school vouchers.
“He and I have some philosophical differences,” said Gary VanDeaver, a rural Republican lawmaker. “But that didn’t mean we couldn’t work together on some good public education policy.”
Mr. Talarico made his Christian faith central to his arguments against socially conservative bills. In 2022, he enrolled at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
The following year, Mr. Talarico criticized a bill requiring the Ten Commandments in public schools as “un-American.” In 2024, he gave a sermon against Christian nationalism, and said it was “perverting my faith.” His remarks caught the attention of the podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed Mr. Trump that year.
Mr. Talarico appeared on Mr. Rogan’s podcast in July 2025. In a subsequent conversation with Vice President JD Vance roughly a year later, Mr. Rogan said Mr. Talarico had made “a really good point” and that requiring the Ten Commandments in public schools was “not the right way to do it.”
When a Ten Commandments bill came up again in 2025, Mr. Talarico asked its Republican sponsor why debate was scheduled on the mandatory day of rest in the commandments.
“You’d rather tell people to follow the Ten Commandments than follow it yourself?” he asked. A video of the exchange has collected 1.6 million likes on his TikTok account. The bill passed anyway.
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