When James Talarico was born in Round Rock, Texas, in 1989, Democrats controlled both chambers of the Texas statehouse. A reformed frat boy named George W. Bush was still a few years away from becoming governor.
Thirty-seven years later, Texas is solidly red, with Republicans holding both U.S. Senate seats, the governor’s mansion and the State Legislature. But after winning the Democratic Senate primary in March, Mr. Talarico has a chance to become the first Democratic U.S. senator elected in Texas in his lifetime. Not because the state’s Democrats suddenly have their act together, but because the party has a perfect candidate to run against: the right-wing warrior Ken Paxton.
Mr. Paxton — who just defeated the incumbent, John Cornyn, in a G.O.P. runoff — is known as a scoundrel. In 2023, he was impeached by the state’s Republican-controlled House on corruption charges (but was acquitted by the State Senate). Last year, his wife — herself a state senator — filed for divorce, accusing him of having an extramarital affair.
Combine that with a midterm election year in which President Trump’s coattails look shorter than they once did, and Mr. Talarico has the best chance a Democratic Senate candidate has had in years.
Over the past decade, the Texas Republican Party deftly navigated the rise of MAGA. It retained the backing of wealthy business interests in the state while expanding its support with middle- and working-class voters. In particular, it has drawn Mexican American voters from the Rio Grande Valley into the Republican coalition. But the party is weaker than it seems.
Because Republican primaries, not general elections, frequently decide who is in power in Texas, politicians like Mr. Paxton often need only the votes of about 3 percent of the population to ultimately win office. That’s made it a lot easier for Republican politicians to drift to the right of Texas’ broader electorate.
Consider, for example, the issue of abortion: The average Texan is conservative when it comes to reproductive health care, but not as conservative as Mr. Paxton, the state’s attorney general. According to a 2025 poll, 83 percent of Texans think abortions should be legal in cases of rape or incest; 82 percent think abortions should be legal to preserve the mother’s physical health; and 84 percent think abortions should be legal if doctors determine that a fetus will die before or not long after birth. By contrast, in 2023, Mr. Paxton went to great lengths to try to prevent Kate Cox from getting legal approval to terminate her pregnancy after she found out that her fetus had a fatal genetic condition.
This kind of ideological gap exists not only between Mr. Paxton and many Texas voters, but also between him and other Republicans. The bitter primary battle between Mr. Paxton and Mr. Cornyn deepened a divide between Texas’ chamber-of-commerce-style Republicans and the harder-right MAGA faithful. Mr. Paxton got Mr. Trump’s endorsement at the 11th hour. Wealthy donors spent tens of millions trying to help Mr. Cornyn, to no avail.
All this leaves an opening for a candidate like Mr. Talarico — a member of the Texas House of Representatives who blends progressive ideas with an overt embrace of his Christian faith. The question now is whether Texas Democrats can take advantage of it.
Millions of Texans have spent decades in a no man’s land between a Republican Party that caters to its primary voters and a Democratic Party that won’t meet them where they are. Mr. Talarico has a chance to offer them a politics that’s both Democratic and Texan.
His most direct path to victory runs through college-educated voters, who are more likely to vote than those without college degrees. If Democrats can turn out these voters, particularly in places like Dallas and Austin, destinations for many prosperous transplants, they’ll increase the chances that he’ll prove recent polling right and eke out a narrow victory.
But there are limits to appealing to those voters: What plays in some precincts won’t always fly in the rest of Texas. Adopting the priorities — and the language — of college-educated suburban voters has alienated some voters in other key constituencies. It’s one of the reasons Texas’ growing Latino electorate hasn’t saved Democrats, as some people in the party once hoped.
Mr. Talarico, to his credit, has taken pride in campaigning in parts of Texas that Democrats previously all but conceded. He acknowledges that he hasn’t always made headway with skeptical voters, but he and other Democrats will need that willingness to take the fight into Republican territory to gain ground in 2026 and beyond.
A version of this approach has already worked for Republicans. In 2016, Mr. Trump lost by wide margins in several majority-Latino counties along the U.S.-Mexico border. No doubt, following that race, there were political consultants who told Republicans that it wasn’t worth their time trying to win new voters there. But a few forward-looking Republicans noticed something: Evangelical churches, long a core component of their coalition, were gaining popularity among traditionally Catholic Tejanos.
With evangelical voters as a focus, local Latina conservatives began building their party the way a pastor builds a church: They knocked on doors. They offered people a sense of belonging. They said Democrats were taking Latino voters for granted. And in 2020 the South Texas borderlands from Laredo to Brownsville moved sharply to the right.
One key to winning those districts was economic populism. The party tailored its message to focus on inflation and other bread-and-butter issues, and then reaped the rewards in 2024.
Mr. Talarico can use a comparable model to expand the Texas Democratic coalition.
Whatever happens, Texas Democrats will need a message that fits their state. Recall that what brought Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign so close to beating Senator Ted Cruz — he lost by just 2.6 percentage points — was that it was authentically Texan despite his popularity with liberals around the country.
Mr. O’Rourke visited all 254 Texas counties. He worked around liberal interest groups and the dysfunction of the state Democratic Party. He took in plenty of out-of-state money without adopting an out-of-state voice. He talked about gun safety without demonizing gun owners.
It was when he ran for president and started sounding like a standard Democrat, telling gun owners, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” that he began to struggle.
In 2022, Republicans hung that quote around his neck and he got walloped by double digits. Mr. Talarico, take note.
Jack Herrera is a former Los Angeles Times national correspondent and a former Texas Monthly senior editor.
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