Democratic nominee James Talarico is getting national media attention, but the real story is sky-high voter turnout, even amid GOP bids to suppress balloting
Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico at a March 2 rally in Houston
(Danielle Villasana / Getty Images)
Texas has now been home to the most expensive general election Senate campaigns in history. Spending in 2018’s contest between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz was just over $100 million; Cruz’s battle with Colin Allred in 2024 topped $160 million. And now, it’s seen the most expensive Senate primary election in history, as the combined spending on advertising along among the major candidates this year soared to $125 million—and it’s not even over.
The primaries on Tuesday decided the Democratic candidate in that cash-swamped contest, state Senator James Talarico. At the moment, the Republicans are headed to a runoff between Attorney General Ken Paxton and incumbent John Cornyn. Talarico’s boyish charm and ability to practice Bible-verse judo with conservative Christians already helped him wrangle the tens of millions he needed to surge ahead of Representative Jasmine Crockett for his place on the November ballot. With a marquee race in the offing, no matter who wins the Republican berth, another record-setting race is guaranteed.
But after getting their hearts broken by Allred and twice by O’Rourke, whose losing race for governor in 2022 was just as pricey as his Senate run, liberals are justified in asking if they should not just spend elsewhere but also lower their expectations. Is the dream of a state-wide Democratic win (elusive since 1994) as insubstantial as barbeque smoke, as full of bullshit as the King Ranch?
What if I told you Texas is as full of potential for Democrats as an Austin yard in early March? Whether it’s milk thistle weeds or Saint Augustine, there’s something growing there; it just needs to be tended. This week, after all, saw an even more important record than mere spending broken: Turnout. More than 2 million Democrats voted in the primary, the most in a midterm primary since 1970 and only a little short of the votes cast in the primary for the 2008 presidential race. Based on those numbers, one Republican pollster has already predicted that Democrats will add 480,000 voters to their turnout in the fall, saying “this is a code red alert for Texas Republicans.”
Now that Crockett has conceded to Talarico, the party is set to surge into the fall with the most favorable conditions possible: an electrified base, a battle-tested general election candidate with his former foe converted to an asset, and a Republican flame-throwing freakshow run-off sure to turn off all but the most steroid-pumped red-hat bros.
The national media magnified the flashes of bitterness that both parties’ races threw off. Paxton is a genuinely vile person who can be separated from trumpeting his achievements in oppression only by opportunities to commit more subtle offenses. He is very popular with the GOP base, however, and has eagerly exploited the thin slices of daylight between Cornyn and the far right. One Paxton ad featured an AI-generated video of the senator two-stepping with Crockett, a reference to the two acknowledging their work together on some bipartisan issues.
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For his part, Cornyn (a traffic cone with cowboy boots) pointed to Paxton’s historically significant trail of known crimes and adultery. In 2023, Paxton became only the third sitting Texas official to be impeached by the state House, though he was acquitted by the Texas Senate on 16 charges, including ones related to a donor hiring Paxton’s mistress in order to curry favor with him. Paxton’s soon-to-be-ex wife, a state senator herself, was in the chamber for testimony. Thank God the flavorless Cornyn offloaded the juiciest attacks to a campaign aide—Ted Cruz’s former chief rat-fucker, Jeff Roe, who can really make this stuff sing in ads: “It’s voting time, so let’s cut through the bulls**t. Crooked Ken Paxton cheated on his wife. She’s divorcing him on biblical grounds, so now Paxton’s wrecking another home, sleeping around with a married mother of seven.”
Cornyn dropped over $44 million airing Real Housewives-level slime against Paxton, while Paxton tore into Cornyn as a incompetent fossil. Unless Trump makes good on his promise to endorse “soon” and the challenger acquiesces to the president’s demand that “the candidate that I don’t Endorse to immediately DROP OUT OF THE RACE,” there is plenty more of that to come.
Serious pundits largely focused on the sniping between Talarico and Crockett. And why not? They are both attractively tenacious, social-media-native politicians who set themselves up to battle over who could better make the case against Trump; that their spirits overflowed into friendly fire is to be expected. The ugliest moments had to do with accusations that Talarico used Crockett’s race as a proxy for electability.
Talarico has denied the explicit allegations. It is undeniable, however, that race played a factor in his win. It played into many possible latent motivations of voters, who could be either explicitly racist or just trying to vote strategically. Republicans did not make too much of a secret that they felt more confident in running against an outspoken Black woman.
Ironically, GOP fuckery may have helped inadvertently push the race toward Talarico. Most notably, FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s interest in forcing comedy and lifestyle shows to adhere to the “equal time” rule led to CBS shutting down Stephen Colbert’s interview with Talarico. In the 24 hours after Colbert publicized the interference and ran that interview on YouTube, Talarico raised $2.4 million.
Likewise, the Dallas County GOP’s commitment to screwing with election accessibility surely wound up redounding to Talarico’s benefit. Crockett was expected to do well in the area, which includes both her congressional district and the second-largest population of Black people in the state. But last year, the county Republican Party maneuvered to force residents to cast primary votes in their local precincts rather than anywhere in the county (which is the practice in almost every other county in the state).
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On Election Day, polling places reported that between 50 and an astonishing 90 percent of voters had to be diverted from the station they originally reported to. This undoubtedly hurt Crockett’s totals; early in the day, analysts marked the low turnout as a sign that she might not pull through. A county judge okayed a move by both Crockett’s and Talarico’s campaigns to extend voting hours after the fiasco became obvious, only to be shut down after Paxton (wearing his attorney general hat) took the issue to a compliant Texas Supreme Court. Why would the GOP block a process that could give them the candidate they wanted? It’s clear that they weren’t thinking that far ahead—they were operating on the muscle memory of a state party dedicated to assuring that the act of voting seems as arduous and futile as possible.
Tuesday night saw an understandably skeptical Crockett imply that she would not concede and would sue to count the ballots cast after 7 pm. But after Talarico continued to run up margins around the state, Crockett’s concession came Wednesday morning, along with a promise to throw her energy into electing the party’s nominee.
She will be a gift to Talarico’s November campaign and to the rest of the state Democratic ticket. She was undoubtedly a near-equal partner in generating the excitement that led to the overwhelming presence of Democrats at the ballot box, especially among Black voters. Even with all the shenanigans pulled by the Dallas GOP, more Democrats voted in the county’s primary this week than in 2024, 2022, or 2020. That turnout doesn’t disappear when Crockett concedes. We have not seen the last of her , neither in this campaign or a campaign to come. Many would like to see her pop the smirk off Ted Cruz’s face come 2028.
Talarico’s margins, a disappointment for Crockett, are also part of the good news for Texas Democrats at large. He drew substantial victories in counties with the state’s highest shares of Latino voters, reversing the drift of Latinos toward Trump in 2024.
On Wednesday, Trump took some time away from ballroom designing and war planning to state that intent to step into the Texas fray: The primary, he bleated, “cannot, for the good of the Party, and our Country, itself, be allowed to go on any longer.” But his endorsement would not necessarily cheat Democrats out of the spectacular and expensive sideshow a Cornyn-Paxton run-off would otherwise provide. The Atlantic reported the rumor that the recipient of Trump’s thick-fingered love tap would be Cornyn.
The prospect of Trump rejecting the ebulliently vicious Paxton—a man who has positioned himself as Trump’s man in Texas for a decade—in favor of Cornyn and his slightly less obsequious support of the MAGA agenda is itself sublime. But feast on this: Trump would also be turning his back on the one man in the country as hungry to turn an election into a revenge tour as he was. Cornyn is a cardboard box filled with Senate Leadership PAC money. Paxton is a feral raccoon with nothing to lose. He may not have as much cash on hand as Cornyn, but he has even fewer scruples and a history of bleeding opponents out over long campaigns.
What’s more, a Trump endorsement of Cornyn means that both Paxton and Cornyn own Trump, for better or for worse. Who has “worse” on their bingo card? I have “worse.”
Trump’s endorsing Paxton may be unlikely but it could be the GOP’s best-case scenario. Cornyn might be willing to shuffle off stage rather than be humiliated by Texas’ crookedest rodeo clown, and that would at least save Republicans some money in the short term even if polls show that a Paxton-Talarico showdown gives Democrats the best shot at turning their 30 years of bad luck around. After all, “best shot” at this point only means they are just about tied.
To anyone who wants to see the Senate flip, the deadlock between the obvious goon and the fresh-faced former school teacher and seminary student feels like both a promise and a threat. After all, O’Rourke raised hopes sky-high; running against Cruz in 2024, Colin Allred seemed like the real deal. But if you’re cynical, you don’t understand Texas.
There is no one more resolute and optimistic than a modern Texas Democrat.
When I tell people who know my politics that I live in Texas, they sometimes say, “I’m sorry.”
I’m not.
There are reasons to leave, and if you’re reading this, you probably know them (abortion access, voting rights, guns, climate change…). If I had a trans child, I would try to move. But for most of us, leaving is neither an option (jobs, family, the housing market) nor that appealing. We have work to do. That work is paying off, too. This year, Democrats fielded a candidate in every state and federal race on the Texas ballot, the first time in modern history that either party has done so.
Imagine what it takes to run as a Democrat in a county that has elected Republicans by a margin of more than 80 percent for four cycles in a row. There are 20 of them. There are over 50 more where the margin is in the 70s. Imagine getting up every day, knowing you’re going to lose and then doing it anyway. Imagine that across the whole state.
Liberals outside the state and Republicans in it insist that leftists in Texas are the outliers—that we’re the ones who should leave or don’t belong. But we’re the ones who keep fighting even when the numbers say quit. We’re as Texan as it gets.
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