James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, invoked the mythological grandness of his native state when he told a crowd in El Paso this week, “Our musicians are so iconic, they only need one name: Willie. Beyoncé. Selena.”
Improbable as it might seem, the once-obscure 37-year-old state representative and former middle-school teacher with the choirboy face has entered an elite pantheon himself.
A little more than a year after Mr. Talarico began his candidacy, he has become a marquee political persona, and not just in Texas. His race, which could become the most expensive in the history of nonpresidential campaigns, may well decide which party controls the Senate.
The Democratic candidate’s celebrity has thrown Republicans into a panic, prompting the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to donate an unheard-of $158 million to groups that support Mr. Talarico’s G.O.P. opponent and the state attorney general, Ken Paxton.
A smooth orator and prolific fund-raiser, Mr. Talarico has cast his upstart campaign in biblical terms. He is David, the corrupt political system exemplified by Mr. Paxton is Goliath and in whatever city he happens to be in, he declares, “You are my slingshot.” He has run a largely mistake-free campaign, although the flu took him off the trail for nine days.
He has consistently drawn overflow crowds, many of whom wear T-shirts declaring themselves to be “Talafreakos,” first deployed by Mr. Paxton as a term of derision. Last Tuesday, an estimated 4,000 people turned out in Lubbock — an extraordinary number for a Democrat in the ruby-red city — while Mr. Paxton was campaigning with President Trump less than three miles down the road.
In Texas, these count as remarkable feats for a Democrat. But because it is Texas, such accomplishments may still not be enough for victory.
“I think James has at most a 50 percent chance of winning,” said Luke Warford, the chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party. “Which, look, in Texas, that’s phenomenal. If you told me a year ago a Democrat would have a coin-flip chance of winning, I’d be doing backflips.”
People close to Mr. Talarico’s campaign privately echoed Mr. Warford’s assessment of the race. A New York Times/Siena University poll in September and a CNN/SSRS poll conducted Oct. 20 to 27 showed Mr. Talarico ahead by 6 percentage points, but other recent public surveys show him either tied with Mr. Paxton or within the margin of error with a 2-point lead. The candidate’s internal polls match those tighter surveys, people close to Mr. Talarico said, and may not be fully capturing the sentiments of rural conservative voters who support Mr. Trump.
There is plentiful evidence the race could go either way. During the homestretch of Mr. Talarico’s campaign, from deep-blue regions (San Antonio, Laredo, the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso) to steadfastly Republican terrain (Midland and Lubbock), Mr. Talarico’s bursting-to-capacity crowds made it possible to imagine that he could flip a statewide race for the first time in decades. Just as ubiquitous were signs his efforts could fall short.
A major obstacle facing Mr. Talarico is the avalanche of attack ads funded by Mr. Musk, in which the candidate is portrayed as a far-left extremist. At a stop one afternoon at the Bexar County Democratic Party headquarters in San Antonio, Mr. Talarico assured volunteers that their door-knocking work would surmount Mr. Musk’s efforts, saying, “The political science is very clear: TV ads don’t make much of a difference.”
But three days later, one of Mr. Talarico’s supporters who attended the Lubbock event, Rebecca Murrow, begged to differ when a reporter asked whether the attack ads were having an impact among people she knew. “Oh, you better believe they are,” she said.
A friend standing next to her, Luke Anderson, concurred, citing his mother as one example of a person who could not bring herself to support Mr. Talarico after viewing the ads.
Still, Ms. Morrow added, “It makes me proud to be supporting someone who’s trying to change their minds, no matter how hard it is.”
‘One of Y’all’
Mr. Talarico’s barnstorming tour, “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts,” is named after part of the motto of the film and TV series “Friday Night Lights,” about Texas high school football. The candidate frequently recites the lyrics of Lyle Lovett, the Texas singer-songwriter. His omnipresent footwear is not-too-shiny Lucchese cowboy boots, primarily made in El Paso. In short, Mr. Talarico has made one thing abundantly clear in every campaign appearance: He really wants you to know that he’s a Texan.
Flashing his Lone Star credentials as an eighth-generation native son is a tacit acknowledgment that the pale and slightly built pastor-in-training does not personify the Texas swagger the way the state’s political titans of yesteryear did, among them former Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush and former Govs. Ann Richards and Rick Perry. (As it happens, Mr. Paxton was born in North Dakota and spent some of his youth in California, though his party does not seem to hold that against him.)
The “I’m one of y’all” references also constitute a self-normalizing effort to make up for what Mr. Talarico now terms “cringey” remarks he uttered several years ago about God being “nonbinary” and his belief that there are six biological sexes.
While those earlier statements live on in attack ads, Mr. Talarico has provided little in the way of new material for his opponent’s ad makers. He is self-disciplined, stays on script and comes off as more the seminary student he once was than the kind of fire-breathing populist fashionable in the Trump era. He wears the same youthful, Texas business casual uniform every day: a tailored blazer, a crisp white dress shirt, jeans and those cowboy boots.
Although he talks to the local media, of late he has declined all interviews with the national press, including The New York Times, on the grounds that those engagements are less likely to win votes. He travels aboard his “Talarico for Texas” R.V. with a small inner circle of young aides rather than outside political consultants. At events, his volunteers distribute signs that have his name on one side and “Love Thy Neighbor” on the other.
Projecting himself as a conciliator has helped win support from more than two dozen current or former state Republican officeholders, not to mention two relatives of Mr. Bush: his brother Neil and his daughter Barbara. A source close to Mr. Talarico’s campaign confirmed that members of the family had reached out and that the candidate has been in touch with them. That said, the Bush name no longer means what it used to in Texas, and it remains to be seen if Mr. Talarico’s throwback appeal for a kinder, gentler political culture can prevail amid a pugilistic zeitgeist.
In Hostile Territory
Mr. Talarico’s trip to Lubbock pointed to the subtext of his campaign. No matter what the polls say, in Texas the underdog is by nature the Democrat. Mr. Talarico does not have the luxury of focusing his efforts on the deep-blue urban areas of the state. He is obliged to find votes everywhere he can, even in hostile territory.
In both Midland and Lubbock, Mr. Talarico’s advance staff had to scramble to find bigger places that would accommodate his crowds, then made sure to post those images on social media. Talafreakos living outside Texas contrasted what they saw with Mr. Paxton’s lackluster gatherings and asked the inevitable question: With these crowds, how can we possibly lose?
Few if any of the roughly 600 Midland Democrats standing in line for Mr. Talarico’s event suffered any such illusions. “Our Talarico lawn sign is the only one for blocks around,” said Linda Jordan, 78, a Democrat. “The neighbors don’t talk to us much.”
Tamara, a 43-year-old Midland Democrat who declined to give her last name, said of her neighbors that “there’s no changing their minds” and that her energies were instead focused on persuading her husband to vote for Mr. Talarico. She suspected, she said, that he had voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, though “he still won’t tell me.”
Mr. Talarico’s allies acknowledge that for him to win, he will need to maximize turnout in Latino-heavy communities. But Democratic Party officials said in interviews that while knocking on doors in both San Antonio and El Paso, they encountered abiding loyalty to Mr. Trump and an aversion to Mr. Talarico, particularly among Latino men. In downtown Lubbock this week, a long line of the president’s supporters waiting to get into a Trump rally included numerous Latino men, many of them wearing “Make America Great Again” caps.
Mr. Talarico’s surrogates are now couching their sense of urgency about the Latino vote in comic appeals.
In San Antonio, the actress Eva Longoria exclaimed: “Tell everyone! Tell your ex-boyfriend!” In El Paso, the city’s congresswoman, Veronica Escobar, beseeched a group of volunteer canvassers, “By all means, harass your family and your friends.”
In the end, people close to Mr. Talarico acknowledge that though Mr. Trump’s popularity has waned in Texas over the past two years, enough of his supporters remain to determine the outcome in Mr. Paxton’s favor, assuming they choose to back him.
In a last-ditch effort to split Republican loyalties, the Talarico campaign recently authorized the state party to send out mailers featuring a quote from a Texas woman: “I voted for Trump, but I cannot vote for Ken Paxton.”
Standing in line while awaiting Mr. Talarico’s arrival in Midland, Javier Soto, 59, said his father was among the many Texans who had supported Mr. Trump throughout the years. “But he says it’s time for a change,” Mr. Soto said.
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