| | | | BY PHILIP ELLIOTT
Senior Correspondent, TIME | LUBBOCK, Texas—The audience at Covenant Presbyterian sits in silence, transfixed by the seminarian at the pulpit. James Talarico is speaking at a deliberate pace and with a practiced cadence, nimbly mixing the Gospels of Matthew and Luke with an avowed progressivism and references to current-day political tyranny and Christian nationalism. While delivering a sermon about secularism, he dashes in the merits of religious diversity and suggests that the Pentagon brass post "turn the other cheek" in their war-planning rooms. And Talarico is doing this in West Texas, in a county that Donald Trump won by 40 points. | "If your heart is breaking as you watch what's happening to our beloved country, it means you still have a heart," the 36-year-old state representative and U.S. Senate candidate says. | I am in the back pew, the only reporter watching this former teacher command a crowd of a few dozen congregants with nary an empty row, shortly after becoming the subject of the kind of national media attention other campaigns would murder for. Stephen Colbert turned Talarico into a household name after alleging CBS was blocking him from airing his interview with the rising Democrat. "Donald Trump is worried that we're about to flip Texas," Talarico said in the interview, which was posted to YouTube and quickly drew almost 9 million views. The attention helped him rake in $2.5 million in donations in 24 hours and 4,000 new volunteers. | At the Lubbock church, Talarico is providing a masterclass on how a Democrat can link faith, culture, and politics together in a way that makes sense. A secularist at heart, he asserts religion and politics should never meet lest both be corrupted. His credibility in making that argument is baked into his biography, having led the opposition in the Texas House to state-manded displays of the Ten Commandments in public school. | "Jesus never commanded me to love my religion," he says as if making a confession. "America is not a Christian nation. It is a nation where you are free to be a Christian or a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Jew or a Muslim or a Sikh or an agnostic or an atheist. America was started by religious minorities fleeing religious persecution. That's the promise of America: a multiracial, multicultural melting pot." | He adds, "It's a promise that we are still struggling to fulfill today." | Talarico is locked in a fierce primary for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate against Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a 44-year-old civil rights lawyer and former public defender whose zest for sharp-elbowed partisanship is catnip to those in her party looking for a fighter. Both are hoping to break a three-decade dry spell for Texas Democrats in statewide races—the longest such losing streak in the nation for either party. But only Talarico has a strategy to win over the state's on-the-fence independents in a year when enthusiasm for the potential Republican nominees seems particularly lackluster. | "I'm not saying that Republicans are not welcome, because the fights that I'm waging, they are for everyone," Crockett said on Feb. 20 during a church visit in The Woodlands, a community near Houston. "But I also think that it is truly only fair to the Democratic base to double down and say, 'I am a Democrat, and I am going to fight for those principled things like raising the wage,' which, again, helps everyone." | Most public polls have shown Crockett in the lead, including one released Wednesday that had her up by double digits. (Talarico's campaign says it was seeing polls showing him several points ahead even before the Colbert flare-up.) The prospect of a Talarico nomination has Republicans in Washington worried. One GOP lawmaker keeping a close eye on the midterm map summed up his view in five words: "She can't win. He can." | Talarico isn't the first candidate to mix topics typically avoided in polite company. But he's doing it in a way that some in his party see as meeting the moment better than any politician in the country, giving his us-vs-them populism a fresh authority through his religious bonafides. At the Lubbock church, he dings lawmakers for trying to legislate morality while extolling Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show and bashing Wall Street boardrooms' greed. | "My faith is central in my life. It's why I'm in public service, and I want to tell the people that I seek to represent why I'm doing this," the on-academic-leave seminarian tells TIME. "In our tradition, there is a deep suspicion of concentrated wealth and power. Jesus had his most searing critiques directed toward the powerful and the wealthy." | It's populism and piety, the proletariat and the Pharisees all rolled into a Texas-sized operation that's now under a national microscope. Perhaps more meaningfully, the message is the antithesis of a contrived political pitch or a hectoring sermon. For his growing set of admirers, it instead carries perhaps the most powerful force in American politics: authenticity. | | | Talarico does not hew to political language that has gone through the consultant mill. He's a former middle-school English teacher through Teach for America who picked up a master's at Harvard and now is a student of the cloth. He does not lack for charm, competence, or confidence. The comparisons to an early Barack Obama or Pete Buttigieg are easy to see but also a bit off; he is less arrogant than Obama, more willing to take a two-by-four to the monied 1 percenters than Buttigieg. It is obvious to see why he was cast to play Danny in a high school production of Grease. | Talarico emerged as a political candidate in 2018 when, at age 28, he won a seat in the state Legislature by fewer than 2,500 votes. In that campaign, he seized the spotlight for walking the entire 25-mile length of the district, joining the state House as its youngest member that session. In office, he largely focused on issues facing young people like his former students, including medical bills and voting rights. But it was his opposition to requiring Texas schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms that introduced him to a national audience, including manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan who told him he should seek the White House. | In his race against Crockett, Talarico has adopted some of her plain-spoken jabs and found ways to dress-down his high-minded theological theses. But where Crockett can at times seem like she's going for shock, Talarico goes for empathy. | "You know why our politics sucks right now? It's not any one politician. It is the system itself," Talarico says a few hours after church at a public rally in Lubbock. "Think about who owns the social media algorithms that keep us all angry and divided. A handful of billionaires have redesigned our politics for their own profit. … It is professional wrestling—and I like professional wrestling, but not in politics. They want us to keep scrolling." | But he comes back to his sermon in short order. "Politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors. And we should treat each other a lot better than this," he says. "Not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of love." | Texas has been one election away from turning blue for ages. Recent Senate hopefuls M.J. Hegar and Beto O'Rourke and Colin Allred all seemed to be shiny recruits who oxidized in short—and really, really expensive—order. But this fact remains: the last Texas Democrats to win statewide did it in 1994. The last one to win a first term in the Senate came to power more than a half a century ago. | Talarico is drawing attention not only for what he's saying, but who's turning out to hear him say it. There's a clear cross-over appeal. Moderates and conservatives shuffle through quietly, hoping to blend in. | When I ask Talarico about his choice of venue in Midland—the George H.W. and Barbara Bush Convention Center, minutes from the former first couple's former home—the candidate sticks with the unity driving his DNA. "President George H.W. Bush, regardless of what you think about his policies or his party, he served this country with honor and with distinction and with integrity, both in our armed forces and in public office," Talarico says. "I think we need that in both political parties now. We need servant leadership, people who are committed to the people, not just enriching their donors." | And the crowds are getting larger; the former Democratic Party chair in Midland says Talarico's numbers surpass even the large crowds she saw during O'Rourke's high-profile run against Senator Ted Cruz in 2018. "Beto never had this," Cathy Broadrick says. | | O'Rourke's 3-point loss to Cruz that year is a decade-long high-water mark for Texas Democrats in statewide races. It's why even those excited about the party's chances this year try not to get too excited. "I love James Talarico," medical student Blake Billings, 23, tells me after the Lubbock sermon. "He's a good representation on what religion should be." Then, he adds, almost as if to tamp down his own blooming optimism, "But, look, this is still Texas." | Could 2026 be the year the dryspell for Texas Democrats finally ends? Trump is bleeding support and Sen. John Cornyn finds himself in the political fight of his life. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who most strategists see as less formidable in a general election, is polling ahead of Cornyn, and Rep. Wesley Hunt is drawing just enough support to force that primary into a likely runoff in May. Trump has remained atypically neutral, telling allies all three candidates are his friends. That unfolding intra-family fight is messy, to put it mildly, but one that Democrats are relishing. | Talarico says the GOP infighting essentially gives Democrats a two-month grace period to unify and rebuild war chests. "They're going to be even weaker after a bloody Republican primary that goes to a runoff. And so we're going to have a head start," he tells TIME. | Talarico wants to use that window to take advantage of an eroding Republican brand in the state. "Democrats just need to get out of their own way," says April McElroy, a 52-year-old Talarico fan from Midland. "This is the first candidate since Beto that has me excited. For Texas, he's our best hope. I like Crockett, but she's a tougher sell." | Talarico is leaning into that idea of inclusion, hard. "This campaign is rooted in a fierce aggressive kind of love because in my experience, when you extend an open hand rather than a closed fist, you'll be surprised by who takes that hand," he says. "If you hate politics and you've never voted before, you have a place in this campaign. If you have voted for Democrats but you're tired of Democrats always folding, you have a place in this campaign. And if you voted for Donald Trump, but you are fed up with the extremism and the corruption in our government, you also have a place in this campaign," he says at his Lubbock rally. | The applause is more than polite. It's a revival. | | | Texas is the first major primary of the midterm cycle. Both parties will be watching closely and anxiously on March 3, awaiting any hints about where the electorate will be later this year, as the entire U.S. House and roughly a third of the U.S. Senate is on the ballot. Since Trump came back to power, Democratic candidates have won or overperformed in 251 out of 281 races, according to the Democratic National Committee. | Still, in conversations with strategists steeped in the state's politics, almost everyone offers the same shrug as to whether Texas is really in contention this year. There's too much uncertainty given the unsettled mood among rank-and-file voters. If Democrats stand a chance to get lucky in Texas, what does that say about actual swing states like Michigan, New Hampshire, or North Carolina? | | Many Democrats fear they may be watching a once-in-a-generation opportunity to flip Texas slip through their hands. Crockett is a Squad-styled firebrand whose campaign has banked its entire strategy on driving up turnout in Black neighborhoods of Dallas and East Texas. It may deliver success in a Democratic primary, but longtime Texas political observers see it as a recipe for disaster in a head-to-head against the eventual GOP nominee. The math simply doesn't math. | "Now, I'm not saying that this moment is easy, but at least y'all know exactly how I operate in this moment on the federal level," Crockett told supporters in Fort Worth on Feb. 19, part of her tour of North Texas. "You know who I am. You know how I get down." Crockett is also running an unusually stripped down primary campaign—she doesn't have a campaign manager and only started running broadcast ads on Super Bowl Sunday. | Even before Colbert's incursion, the primary has been filled with drama, much of it online. Talarcio has tried to quell the outcry from a TikTok influencer who said Talarico had dismissed Allred, who had been running for the Senate seat before ceding the race to Crockett, as a "mediocre Black man." Talarico claims he was misquoted, but has said Allred had been running a mediocre campaign. The two have since spoken and it's clear to just about everyone that the chat did not go particularly well. | Then there's the controversy sparked by celebrity podcasters Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, who dismissed Crockett's Senate bid as pointless. "Don't waste your money sending to Jasmine Crockett, do not do it. You're going to waste your money," Rogers said in a post that went live on Jan. 7. In response, Crockett and her allies lit the kindling and launched allegations of naked racism and sexism. I mention to Talarico the rumors flying around here that Talarico bribed the podcasters to wade into the race. | "I would think that if I had paid them, I would've gotten them to talk about me a little more," Talarico laughs between rallies. (He adds that only knows of Yang because of his turns in the Wicked franchise. "I didn't know who Matt Rogers was. No offense to Matt Rogers.") | Strategists in both parties suggest Crockett's strengths with primary voters are the same reasons she can't win in November. To be sure, both Democrats have fat oppo files filled with past statements that wouldn't be hard to weaponize. Talarico has said God is non-binary, does not support capital punishment in a state that leads the nation in executions, and rejects religious freedom exemptions to avoid vaccinations. Crockett called Greg Abbott, the wheelchair-using leader of her state, "Governor Hot Wheels" and is a constant subject of derision in the right-wing echo chamber. It might not be enough to match the dirt on the GOP field, but, boy, can it distract, especially when millions of dollars are put behind it. | As Talarico heads into his final weekend before the primary, he refuses to go negative, or significantly shift the message that got him running in the first place. | "Sometimes, I wonder what Jesus would do if he visited the U.S. Capitol. I think he would say, Depart from me," Talarico says, quoting from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount during his own sermon back in Lubbock. "Or I was hungry and you cut my food assistance. I was sick and you kicked me off Medicaid. I was a stranger and you deported me and my family. And then I think he would flip over their fancy desks and demand that we take care of all our neighbors, especially the least of these." | From the crowd, a murmur of Amens rises. | "Sometimes we religious people are more concerned with the afterlife than this life, but Jesus said, On earth as it is in heaven. Can we imagine poverty in heaven? Can we imagine bigotry in heaven? Can we imagine a war in heaven?" | It may be just as improbable that Democrats can summon the imagination to think they might, finally, have a prayer in Texas. | READ THE STORY » | | | | |
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