If you ask a bunch of James Talarico supporters when they first heard about the 36-year-old Democratic candidate for US Senate, more often than not they will begin to describe a video. It was on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram. It was sent to them by a friend, or a family member—maybe even someone from out of state.
When I dropped by a rally last December, at a shopping center wedding venue on the north side of San Antonio, voter after voter told me a variation of the same story. Fred Spartz heard about Talarico from his son in Spokane, who told him to “get on the internet and look at this guy.” Cindy Padilla found out about him from her daughter, Julie, who saw a speech on TikTok about keeping religion out of schools. Roy Johnson saw a clip of Talarico talking to Joe Rogan, who had invited the state representative and aspiring pastor on his podcast after a sermon about Christian nationalism on a phone in the green room of his Austin comedy club. Almost everyone I talked to, at a certain point, would refer me to one clip in particular. It was an exchange he had with a Republican colleague two years ago. You’ve probably seen it too.
“They were trying to pass this Ten Commandments rule here in Texas,” explained a retired financial advisor named Ron Smith, referring to a new law that requires all public-school classrooms to display Moses’ divine tablets. “But they were doing it on the Sabbath day.”
Rebekah Cessna, the daughter of a Baptist minister from Tennessee, recalled Talarico’s response almost verbatim: “He said, ‘Would you be willing to postpone this so we can respect the Lord’s Day?”” she recalled. She started sending his sermons to her family back home.
“I said, ‘That’s the man I’ve been looking for.’”
In a party grasping for attention and ideas, Talarico has broken through like few others of his stature, by denouncing billionaires and theocrats in the overtly Christian language of a social-justice seminarian. He’s received a shout-out from Barack Obama, and charmed everyone from Ezra Klein to Rogan to the hosts of The View. CBS, fearing the wrath of Trump’s FCC, recently banned his interview with Stephen Colbert from the airwaves. Their straight-to-YouTube sit-down picked up nine million views. The race in Texas represents one of the party’s best pickup opportunities on a difficult Senate map. With President Donald Trump’s approval ratings cratering, Sen. John Cornyn on the ropes, and the scandal-plagued attorney general Ken Paxton waiting in the wings, polls suggest the former public school teacher has as good of a chance of winning a statewide office as almost any Texas Democrat this century—if he can make it to November.
Talarico’s precociousness can also seem like a familiar type. He’s shared advisors with Pete Buttigieg, the polyglot Episcopalian from South Bend who charmed voters twice his age while positioning himself as a champion of the “religious left.” In lieu of business Norwegian, Talarico peppers his sermons and interviews with an eclectic mix of thinkers—Jenny Odell, Dorothy Sayers, the Sufi mystic Hafez. He worked a hard job for a short time, went to Harvard, and ran for office at an alarmingly young age. Talarico’s high school theater teacher asked him for a letter of recommendation. He is humble and polite and talks reverently about his mom. James Talarico is a nice young man.
Many of his fellow Democrats consider Talarico’s faith-based appeal to unity a not-so-secret weapon: Kill them with kindness, and secure a Senate majority that can stop Donald Trump in his tracks. But Talarico is not the only Democrat in Tuesday’s primary with a knack for attention, and his is not the only vision of what it takes to win. A few hours after Talarico finished smiling for photos in San Antonio, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas Democrat famous for her own, more Old Testament exchanges with Republican colleagues, entered the race with a radically different message. Talarico’s style of politics could change the direction of the Democratic Party. But first, the peacemaker will have to prove that he can throw a punch.
Talarico was born in Round Rock, a city of about 100,000 north of Austin, but it would be just as fair to say that he grew up at St. Andrew’s. He has described his biological father as a “21-year-old high school dropout whose drinking problem sometimes led to violence.” After one such episode, when Talarico was an infant, his mother took him to live in a spare room at the hotel where she worked, until they found a home for themselves—a cramped apartment where the only spot for a nursery was a closet.
St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin was a place where the family could start anew. His mother served as a deacon and married Mark Talarico, a church elder. Young James was baptised there, and played Nintendo with the pastor, Dr. Jim Rigby. As he grew older, Talarico taught Vacation Bible School and put on Biblically-themed shows with puppets he made with a friend. (“Jimmy’s Puppets,” or “Juppets” for short.) In a 2018 speech at St. Andrew’s, Talarico described “leaning against my mother as she sang her favorite hymn, ‘Morning has broken,’” and “drifting in and out of sleep, gazing up at the refracted sunlight in the stained glass of the roof.” Of Rigby, he said simply: “He was my dad’s old drinking buddy, he was my mother’s favorite person, and he was my personal hero.”
Rigby was also a rebel, and the St. Andrew’s of Talarico’s youth was ruptured by a series of controversies over the pastor’s social-justice vision. In 2004, he was put on trial by a church governing body for performing dozens of same-sex marriages at the University of Texas. About 150 members quit when Rigby flouted the denomination’s rules and hired LGBT ministers. The church has evolved with the times; when Talarico gave that 2018 speech, an undocumented family whose asylum claim had been rejected was living down the hall.
This knack for challenging authority stemmed from a belief that Christianity had strayed from the teachings of the early church, and been corrupted by moralizers, literalists, and nationalists. People were judging others “by the flesh,” Rigby told me, instead of recognizing their “humanness” as Paul counseled.
“When I heard him preach the first time,” Rigby told me, “I felt I could die—like the torch had been passed and that at least one person understood what I’ve been trying to do.”
Talarico’s sermons and podcast clips are littered with the flotsam of a seminary course catalogue, but they’re suffused as well with what he learned in the pews. His home church is the kind of place where you might think of Jesus as a feminist, and the splitting of the loaves as a parable of wealth—where power is something you’re taught not to crave but to share. Talarico once told an interviewer he had banned the word “troll” in his office because it was “just another way of stripping away each other’s humanness.” Above all, you can hear its influence in how Talarico talks about the relationship between his religion and his politics.
“The powers that be have been taming Christianity, domesticating it, diluting it into something more palatable—pro-war, pro-wealth, pro-white supremacy,” he argued two years ago, in a sermon that’s been viewed nearly two million times. What started as a “countercultural movement” became a “tranquilized, privatized, weaponized religion.”
“When I heard him preach the first time,” Rigby told me, “I felt I could die—like the torch had been passed and that at least one person understood what I’ve been trying to do.”
Talarico has always been the kind of young person, earnest and ambitious, who makes older people melt. In high school, he excelled at debate (“looks good on a college resume,” he wrote in his yearbook) and played Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. At the University of Texas, he was the model of a particular kind of Obama-era idealism. The second tweet he ever sent was about watching the West Wing. He worked on voter registration drives, managed the student body president’s campaign, testified at the legislature about higher-education funding, and put law school on hold for a two-year stint teaching sixth grade with Teach for America.
“A lot of different folks have different opinions about it, and there’s certainly some problematic aspects of the organization,” Talarico said on a podcast in 2022, about the Peace Corps-style program that sends recent college graduates into poor school districts. But the dynamics that make TFA problematic also made it formative: Dropping a white kid from Round Rock into a Mexican-American neighborhood in San Antonio without any relevant teaching experience will not save the world—but he might learn some things about how it works.
On the Facebook page for his language arts class—“Mr. Talarico’s Freedom Zone”—you can catch a glimpse of an energetic and overworked twentysomething, trying to engage his kids. He used the song “Firework” by Katy Perry to show how to diagram sentences, and coached students on how to fill out a red-and-blue map on election night.
“Happy Spring Break, Free Thinkers! I’m going to spend my week relaxing and reading ‘All The King’s Men’ by Robert Penn Warren,” Talarico wrote that April. “The book is about an idealistic politician who becomes greedy and corrupted by success. Comment on this post and let me know what you’re reading over Spring Break!”
Rhodes Elementary has offered, in Talarico’s campaigns, a sort of secular foundation to go with his religious one. He has talked of encountering 12-year-olds “in the 21st Century in the state of Texas who couldn’t read,” and of juggling 47 kids in one class. It was a “radicalizing experience,” he told Rogan, that nudged him toward a career where he could do better by his kids.
After the 2016 election, as he weighed a run for the Texas legislature, Talarico sought Rigby’s advice. He wanted to know if it was possible to be an ethical politician. “He was very concerned that he could still be prophetic,” he told me. “There are compromises that have to take place at that level. He could be prophetic in his speeches, but whenever you’re talking about real power, you don’t get the pure abstractions of good and evil. It’s like you’re negotiating and balancing and trying to do the best of the good and minimize the evil.”
Not long after, when Talarico launched his campaign, he talked about his experience as a teacher and the inspiration he’d drawn from his mother. But he also extended an olive branch. Talarico promised to vote for a Republican speaker, Joe Straus, who had resisted his party’s Christian nationalist faction—a pledge, he noted, that had drawn criticism from one of his opponents.
“He said I was compromising my values,” Talarico said. “Well I’ve got news for him: Compromise is one of my values.”
The essential appeal of Talarico, then and now, is that people see in him something they believe is missing: morality in an age of malice; humility at a time of hubris; an old direction in a new form. “Is it just me or does he have Barack’s smile?” someone asked on Twitter, not long after he launched his first campaign—to which Talarico replied with a .gif of Obama. State Rep. Diego Bernal told the room in San Antonio that his first reaction to meeting his colleague was, “Who is this baby JFK?’” His first floor speech quoted John Steinbeck. “The sense I got was not necessarily that the people of this district wanted something new,” Talarico told a reporter during a live-streamed 25-mile walk across the district in 2018—a replay of an earlier walk that resulted in him throwing up five times, and slipping into a near-comatose state from diabetic ketoacidosis. “I think they wanted something a little old-fashioned.”
“Something is happening in Texas,” the campaign’s social media posts say—calibrated just so, right down to the filters and the stagecraft and the uplifting piano. The vibe feels both undeniably real and deliberate: It’s Morning-has-broken in America. In 2016, Talarico wrote that he was thinking about Robert F. Kennedy’s remarks in Indianapolis in 1968, when the Democratic senator announced the death of Martin Luther King Jr.: “What we need in the United States is not division, what we need in the United States is not violence…but love and compassion towards one another.”
“Earlier today, Republican activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed,” Talarico informed a crowd last October. “Charlie Kirk was a child of God; he was our sibling, our brother.” He urged “a politics of love…that can heal what’s broken in this country.”
Talarico’s precociousness can also seem like a familiar type. He shares advisors with Pete Buttigieg, the polyglot Episcopalian from South Bend who charmed voters twice his age while positioning himself as a champion of the “religious left.”
Talarico won that first race by 2,500 votes in a district that Trump previously carried—one of 12 Democrats to flip seats in the lower chamber that fall, as a blue wave smashed through an overly aggressive Republican gerrymander. Early in his first term, Rigby invited him to speak at St. Andrew’s. Talarico, who would soon begin taking classes at a local seminary, zeroed in on how Trumpism corrodes the soul. But he also challenged how Democrats’ response to it.
Talarico confessed to making “morally compromised decisions” in a “dirty and noble” job. Democratic leaders, he said, had “routinely danced with the Devil”—from Bill Clinton’s mass incarceration and bank deregulation, to Obama’s mass deportations and drone strikes. “Our most progressive candidates still use the same violent and bullying rhetoric that we claim to be against,” he continued. “In a 20-minute interview last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren used the word ‘fight’ once a minute. Our progressive leaders and activists use gun metaphors, war imagery, and dehumanizing language about our opponents all the time.”
“Every time we return hate for hate, bullying for bullying, brutality for brutality, we all become less human,” he said. In his office, Talarico explained, staff were instructed “to avoid violent words or dehumanizing rhetoric”—including “fight, battle, or troll.”
Over the course of four terms in the minority, Talarico has attached his name to a handful of key initiatives, and helped push through a law, inspired by his near-death experience, that capped the cost of insulin. Texas Monthly named him to its list of best legislators during his second term. (It also compared him to “Encyclopedia Brown.”) But his defining influence may be the one you’ve seen—a seemingly endless succession of moments, in which he calmly deconstructs Republican talking points. There was the run-in with Pete Hegseth. The debate about furries. And most famously, l’affaire d’10 Commandments.
Scott Braddock, editor of the Quorum Report, an authoritative source on the doings in the Texas legislature, invited me to think of the caucus’ different members as pieces of a chess board. “Some of the pieces are doers, some of the pieces are talkers, some of them are more to the left, some of them are more to the center,” he said. “Talarico has started as a left-wing talker and he has moved to a more moderate talker.”
This knack for the spotlight has at times grated some of his Democratic colleagues. Perhaps the clearest source of tension has centered on his handling of the caucus’ decision to break quorum. In the first 24 hours of quorum-break last August, Talarico boasted that he’d done 25 interviews from his Illinois hotel room. When I reached out for a story of my own, I found myself talking to a former Buttigieg advisor—hardly the norm for a state representative. Talarico ultimately stayed away longer than almost anyone else. But the quorum-break in 2021, when Democrats tried to block voter suppression laws, was a different story.
In an op-ed he later published in the Texas Signal, Talarico wrote that he spent his days in DC walking around the Lincoln Memorial, contemplating the American idea. The protest, and the exchange he which he asked Hegseth to acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, helped make Talarico a star. But a few hours after taking part in a caucus-wide meeting in DC, Talarico and three Democrats stunned some of their colleagues by returning to the state capitol. Republicans gaveled-in later that day. They “sold us out,” state Rep. Ana-Maria Ramos said at the time. “JUST WOW!” tweeted her colleague, then-state Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Talarico argued that they’d accomplished what they’d left the state to do by raising the salience of voting rights in DC. Drawn out of his competitive old district in the ensuing redistricting process, he moved to a new safely blue district that was majority non-white. The website Talarico Facts, a repository of opposition research frequently cited by Crockett allies, accused the legislator of taking a seat that could have gone to a Black candidate.
It’s a race that can’t be won with mere civility and that Talarico will not advance out of without some adjustments of his own… Democratic voters aren’t feeling so pastoral right now.
Ramos told me that before Crockett entered the Senate race, she’d actually been supporting Talarico. But the manner in which the quorum break ended caused a rift at the time. Afterwards, Crockett—whose media hits during the DC sojourn helped make her a rising star, too—co-founded the Texas House Progressive Caucus with a few dozen other quorum-breakers to offer a more aggressive posture in the legislature.
The dispute gets at a dynamic that Talarico can’t talk himself out of. The talking, in fact, only makes it worse. It is the sense in some corners that there is something a little too neat about his rise. That he is a young man in a hurry, recycling other people’s message. After a digital creator alleged that Talarico had called former Rep. Colin Allred, the party’s 2024 Senate nominee, a “mediocre Black man”—Talarico said he called Allred a mediocre candidate—Allred, accused Talarico of stealing valor from Black Democrats, such as Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who have been modeling progressive Christianity for far longer. Crockett, who said last year she feared the party would close ranks in 2028 around “the safest white boy,” recently attacked Talarico for “running from” his ties to Lis Smith—a former Buttigieg advisor. (Smith has said she has “done some work” for Talarico but is not actively involved in the Senate race.)
There is a familiar bait and switch with a lot of buzzy Democratic candidates—that something about their identity will unlock a prodigal base that has strayed and needs merely to be shown the way in a language they understand. These candidates, as Crockett alluded to, are invariably white and male. They come from not just hometowns but symbols—a Braddock, Pennsylvania; a South Bend, Indiana; a place called Hope. They sing lamentations about lost direction, and then win or lose with the same coalition as everyone else. It’s reasonable to ask whether someone like this has the answers—and why someone like this is always the answer.
Conservative Texas Christians, after all, are familiar with the kinds of teachings you hear in Austin at St. Andrew’s. They do not go to St. Andrew’s, and many of them seem to loathe Austin. The recent evidence suggests many of them would rather dance with the Devil than a church-going Democrat, let alone a seminarian who says “God is non-binary.” Trump does not have the temerity to tell them they are wrong. Talarico, one Republican state representative said on X last fall, “twists [Christianity] to sound sweet to the ears for his own glorification and contorts Jesus to fit a nuanced feel-good justification for sin.”
But if the yearning Talarico taps into wasn’t real, your relatives would not have sent you his videos. For decades, Democrats have longed for messengers, real and imaginary, who can defuse the power of the Christian right. At the apex of the Moral Majority, Aaron Sorkin wrote the West Wing’s Jeb Bartlett as a spiritual foil who quoted Leviticus chapter-and-verse to hypocritical Bible-thumpers. George W. Bush’s real-life successor wrote a bestselling memoir named for the sermon that changed his life. The West Wing, for its part, ended with the only fantasy more persistent than beating a bunch of theocrats at Bible Bonkers—a Democrat rising from obscurity and turning Texas blue.
What’s notable about the wrangling over Talarico’s record is that policy and job performance are largely disconnected from the primary, in a way that feels both new and foreboding. The Democratic Party’s conflicts in 2018 and 2020 were shaped by differences over health care. In more recent years they have been proxy battles over Israel. The state of play in Texas is more visceral: Talarico and Crockett are two candidates, separated by a common algorithm, clashing over what kind of authenticity voters really want.
If Talarico represents a West Wing-style fantasy, Crockett’s style is a bit more, well—you’ve seen those clips, too. Her version of the Ten Commandments clip came in 2024, when she called Marjorie Taylor Greene a “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body.” (That is not in the Paulian Epistles.) Crockett told Vanity Fair after Kamala Harris’ loss that Latino immigrant voters suffered from “almost like a slave mentality” that she considered “insane,” while comparing them to other demographics. (“I’ve not run into that with the Asian community.”) Talarico launched his campaign by standing on top of an old pickup truck in front of a church; Crockett launched hers by smiling at the camera over audio of Trump calling her names.
Republicans have a clear preference. NOTUS reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee helped nudge Crockett into the race last year by commissioning polls that showed her leading prospective primary opponents. In February, desperate to save Cornyn, the NRSC released polling that showed Paxton trailing Talarico head-to-head. Crockett was underwater against both; against Cornyn, it wasn’t all that close. The congresswoman has argued that attempting to peel off Republicans, in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide since the release of Netscape, is unnecessary: “All we’ve ever needed to do was increase voter participation and voter turnout on our side.” (Texas Monthly calls this idea “the biggest lie in Texas politics.”)
But Crockett’s style resonates with a base tired of going high when they go low—that wants a party that will stand up for itself and stick it to ‘em. The Democratic frontrunner, Ramos recently stated, is a “street fighter who will punch the system in the face.” One of the most recent surveys of the primary, from the University of Texas, showed her leading Talarico by double digits.
It’s a race that can’t be won with mere civility and that Talarico will not advance out of without some adjustments of his own. Talarico has been described as a “choir boy” too often to count. He “was always a peacemaker in preschool,” Rigby told me. “This is not a time for sheep, it’s a time for shepherds,” the legislator said in that first race. Democratic voters aren’t feeling so pastoral right now. In San Antonio, he hit upon the themes that shapes his politics: His mother’s strength and his students’ light; corrupt billionaires and false prophets. But if you listened closely, you could detect a slight concession to the kind of politics he once decried—another compromise in a dirty and noble trade.
“They’re comfortable on the coasts and comfortable with the status quo, but there’s something about living in a red state that makes you scrappy,” he said of Democratic leaders.
“We know how to fight.”
