[1]Talarico for Texas





John —



This is not the update we wanted to share, but you deserve full
transparency. We just got out of a budget meeting, and the truth is we
fell short of our projections last week.

We decided we had two options. We could take the hit and make cuts, or we
could increase our goal for this week and try to make up the difference.

We’re giving this race our all, so we went with the latter. But it means
we need a really big fundraising push this week — especially before the
FEC deadline on Wednesday.

[ [link removed] ]If you can afford it, will you chip in $5 or whatever you
can spare to our campaign today?

We know there’s a limit to what folks can give, and we don’t expect people
to give every time we ask. Not in the slightest.

But we have a strategy for what it will take to win — and we know the
budget it requires. It’s ambitious, but so is flipping Texas.

Ken Paxton and his super PACs are sparing no expense in Texas. They’re
spending over $30 million a week against us.

We don’t have to match that dollar for dollar, but we cannot afford to get
completely crushed by dark money.

[ [link removed] ]If you want to take back Texas and the Senate majority, please consider
making a donation to help us cover last week’s budget gap. James doesn’t
take a dime from corporate PACs, so grassroots donations are critical.

If you've stored your info with ActBlue, we'll process your contribution
instantly.



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Team Talarico



[ [link removed] ]'New York Times: In Texas, Talarico Inspires a Recurring Blue-Tinted
Dream In the go-big-or-go-home collective consciousness of Texas, no
ambition is deemed too reckless, no daydream too wild. Save perhaps one.
It is the idea, fantastical to many as it is irresistible to others, that
the Democrats will win a statewide race in Texas for the first time in 32
years. According to the latest New York Times/Siena University poll of the
race for U.S. Senate, James Talarico, a 37-year-old state legislator seen
by national Democrats as one of the breakout stars of this cycle, is ahead
of his Republican rival, Ken Paxton, the state’s scandal-plagued attorney
general, by six points. The poll was conducted from Sept. 21 to Sept. 30.
A survey from mid-September, the ReconMR/Siena Research Institute poll,
also showed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Gina Hinojosa, four
points ahead of the three-term G.O.P. incumbent, Greg Abbott, the most
dominant political figure in Texas. Cue the fluttering heartbeats. Cue, as
well, the eye-rolls. Given how thoroughly Republicans have dominated the
state, and how the hopes of Democrats have repeatedly crashed, some Texas
pollsters remain skeptical. “At some point, you do get conditioned by all
that’s happened in the past,” said James Henson, the director of the
University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project. “I mean, you look
at the trends and you have to admit that something’s going on. But you
still don’t want to believe your lying eyes, because you’ve been burned
for so long.” Mr. Henson was referring to the perennial spectacle of
much-ballyhooed Texas Democratic aspirants face-planting against the Lone
Star State’s red wall. First came Tony Sanchez Jr., the swaggering and
self-funding Laredo oilman whom Gov. Rick Perry dispatched in 2002 by an
18-point margin. Next was the state senator Wendy Davis, who attracted
worldwide attention for her filibuster in the Texas Legislature against an
anti-abortion measure but whom Mr. Abbott demolished by 20 points in 2014.
Finally, the El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke came up 2.6 points short of
defeating Senator Ted Cruz in 2018 but then suffered a 10-point loss to
Mr. Abbott four years later. Even with the awareness of such humiliations,
Democrats find themselves maintaining that 2026 could, at long last, be
the year. President Trump’s deep unpopularity and the prospect of a blue
wave could, they insist, extend into the state he won by nearly 14 points
in 2024. According to a September survey conducted by Texas Southern
University, Mr. Trump is seven points underwater in Texas. Mr. Talarico
has run an energetic and well-financed campaign, while Mr. Paxton has
staged far fewer public events and has had to rely on outside groups to
fund an attack-ad blitzkrieg against his Democratic opponent. Mr. Abbott,
meanwhile, has outspent Ms. Hinojosa by a 10-to-one ratio, yet has been
unable to build an insurmountable lead. “People have vastly underestimated
Gina,” said Ms. Davis, now a political consultant and a senior adviser to
Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, an advocacy organization. “Dollar for
dollar, she’s running the best statewide campaign we’ve ever seen.” Such
optimism stands in defiance of the political axiom that Texas is where
idealistic Democrats go to be mugged by reality. The party’s demise there
is not a product of ill fortune, Mr. Henson said. “Governor Abbott has
built an impressive election machine that has benefited state-level
Republicans again and again for a decade and a half,” he said. “And the
Democratic machinery here is almost nonexistent.” A ‘Hollowing-Out’ I have
written about the politics of my native state at regular intervals for
more than three decades. After watching the Democrats’ century-long rule
in Texas come to a decisive end with Gov. Ann Richards’s loss to George W.
Bush in 1994, I saw the party descend into atrophy in which failure begot
more failure. “The 30-year drought has done a lot of things,” said Luke
Warford, the chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party and the
founder of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund. “It’s kept donors on
the sidelines, which makes a lot of potentially good candidates not run
because there’s no belief they can win. And it also makes a lot of really
talented staff leave to find better-paying work in true battleground
states.” The Democratic Party has no counterpart to Mr. Abbott, and hasn’t
since 1993, when Senator Lloyd Bentsen moved to Washington to join
President Bill Clinton’s cabinet. Its weaknesses are even more glaring
farther down the hierarchy. In recent elections, as many as one-third of
state races have gone uncontested by Democrats. One-fifth of the party’s
county chairs and two-thirds of its precinct chairs have been left
unfilled. Until last year, the state party had a negative operating
budget. As the veteran Democratic consultant Matt Angle observed, “There’s
been a hollowing-out of the party.” Still, those of us who recall the
satisfied sense of invincibility among Texas Democrats after roughly a
century of one-party rule have detected similar signs of overconfidence
among the state’s ruling party. The party’s rightward tilt, increasingly
forceful with each legislative session, reached its apotheosis in March,
with Mr. Paxton’s primary victory over the more moderate Republican
four-term incumbent, Senator John Cornyn. Mr. Paxton, a close ally of Mr.
Trump’s, was impeached by the Republican-controlled State House (and later
acquitted by the State Senate) in 2023 over allegations that included
bribery. He was also accused by his wife of adultery. Mr. Trump endorsed
him anyway, all but guaranteeing his landslide primary triumph over Mr.
Cornyn but in the process testing the allegiance of center-right Texans.
In similar fashion, the Texas G.O.P. is in danger of losing many Latino
voters who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 after years of siding with
Democrats. “We adopted a lazy way of campaigning that bit us on the ass,
and we’ve learned from that,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “Now it’s the Republicans
who’ve gotten really lazy and complacent and comfortable.” Signs of
Republican Overreach Simply spending one week driving through the vastness
of Texas, as I did in September, is all it takes to appreciate an underdog
party’s uphill battle. The state’s 32 million residents are spread across
20 media markets, many of them distinct ecosystems, from the urban colossi
of Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to the oil patch of the
Texas Panhandle to the Latino-dominated borderlands of the Rio Grande
Valley. “When national donors are deciding where to invest, they look at a
place like Iowa, where $5 million can fully fund a race,” said Katherine
Fischer, the director of the Texas Majority PAC, which was established by
the liberal philanthropist Soros family. “That’s why Texas is always at
the bottom of their list. It’s just so damned big.” Reaching so many
markets presents a daunting challenge for an upstart candidate like Ms.
Hinojosa, a state representative from the border city of Brownsville.
“There’s still 20 percent of the electorate that doesn’t know who I am,”
she said in an interview in mid-September. To date, Ms. Hinojosa’s
campaign has said that it has raised about $20 million. For his part, Mr.
Talarico spent about $30 million earlier this year to introduce himself
statewide as a man of Christian faith and a member of the Texas House with
a record of supporting bipartisan legislation. Since that time, however,
Mr. Paxton and his associates have invested more than $100 million in an
effort to redefine his opponent as “radical” and “weird,” with ads that
quote from remarks Mr. Talarico made several years ago (and later
renounced) suggesting that “God is nonbinary” and that there are six
biological sexes. Mr. Paxton and his allies have at times questioned Mr.
Talarico’s manhood and even his Christianity, an effort to jolt the
sensibilities of a state prone to mythologizing godly and masculine
archetypes. “How they’re negatively defining Talarico is kind of a
bank-shot way of saying that he’s not a true Texas conservative,” Mr.
Henson said. Whether money can overwhelm conditions on the ground is the
riddle looming over the Texas races. In the border city of Laredo, which
Mr. Trump won in 2024 — the first time a Republican had done so in over a
century — signs of buyer’s remorse are evident. Arrests by Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agents in Laredo were higher in July than in any other
American city. Mr. Trump’s erratic trade policies have further created
instability at the city’s port of entry. While acknowledging the economic
concerns that many border residents share, Adrian Zapata, a business
executive in the health industry who voted for Mr. Trump in 2024, said in
an interview that the negative ads against Mr. Talarico were resonating
with some of his family members. “They see Talarico as an ultraliberal,”
he said. “They’re done with the ‘they/them.’ They’re going to vote for
Paxton just because of that.” As for Mr. Zapata, “I’m not ready to vote
for Talarico,” he said. “But I don’t like Paxton. He’s never done anything
for South Texas, and his personal and business dealings have hurt him a
lot with folks down here.” There is a similarly muddled electoral picture
in the cattle country of deep West Texas adjacent to Big Bend National
Park. Mr. Trump and Mr. Abbott have aggressively championed a border wall
and artificial intelligence data centers, both of which threaten to
disrupt the region’s pastoral ethos. A coalition of more than 200
landowners has sued the federal government over the border wall, while
other residents have circulated a petition to protest the construction of
a new data center near Fort Stockton. George Johnson, a cattle feed
operator in Alpine, waved off such concerns, saying: “Folks worrying about
data centers were also worried when the internet got started. It’s
Talarico who scares me to death, him and all that socialist talk.” Others
in this largely conservative region harbor the view that Republicans have
failed to make good on their promises. Thaddeus Cleveland, the Republican
sheriff of Terrell County, said that both he and his county had voted for
Mr. Trump in 2024, but added, “Everything he campaigned on, we’re seeing
the opposite of, like going to war.” Sheriff Cleveland predicted that the
negative campaign ads by the Republicans would not factor as significantly
into the votes of his neighbors as “the price of groceries and gas, which
are compounded here because we’re so far from everywhere else.” But it is
in purple Tarrant County, dominated by Fort Worth, where the party could
pay the price for having potentially overestimated its mandate from the
voters. Conservative leaders have cut funds for nonprofits that aid
at-risk children, subjected school library books to right-wing litmus
tests and eliminated free bus rides to polling stations in poor
neighborhoods. “The far-right leaders here have implemented Project 2025
on a county level,” said Alisa Simmons, a Democrat and county commissioner
who is running to unseat the conservative county judge, Tim O’Hare. In an
early sign this year that area Republicans may be out of step with Tarrant
County’s constituents, a Democratic aviation machinist and union leader,
Taylor Rehmet, defeated Leigh Wambsganss, a well-funded Republican
Christian activist who led the conservative takeover of several metroplex
school boards. He won by 14 points in a January special election for a
State Senate seat covering a region that Mr. Trump won by 17 points in
2024. A ‘Gradualist’ Theory Which party prevails in Texas is a complicated
riddle. Historically a low-turnout state — it ranked second to last in the
2024 election, ahead of only Arkansas — Texas held a primary in March that
saw nearly one in four voters showing up to the polls, a modern record for
midterm participation, with Democrats slightly outpacing Republicans. A
few factors could conspire to thwart a blue wave in Texas. As of 2020,
straight-ticket voting is no longer possible in the state, which could
impact the mostly Democratic urban counties where that practice has
frequently been used by voters in past elections. Texas is one of only
eight states that lack universal online registration, while voting by mail
is also highly restricted. In January, Mr. Abbott turned over the state’s
list of approximately 18.7 million registered voters to the Trump
administration, and 1.2 million of them have subsequently been put on the
“suspense list” because their addresses have not been verified. The recent
shuttering of nearly one-third of Tarrant County’s polling sites by its
Republican-controlled county commission is particularly worrisome for
Democrats. “The reason we’ve lost these statewide races in the past is
because we’ve never gotten enough out of Tarrant County to overcome the
margins in rural Texas,” Ms. Davis said of the turnout. “If we don’t get
it to 53 or 54 percent this November, it’s game over. James and Gina can’t
win.” But the state’s Republicans have reasons of their own to be fretful.
Partly because of the recruitment efforts of the Texas Majority PAC and
Blueprint Texas, a down-ballot candidate support organization co-founded
by Ms. Davis earlier this year, the Democrats are fielding a full slate in
all 150 state races for the first time in a half-century. Though many of
these aspirants face long odds, their presence on the ballot could
energize the Democrats in predominantly conservative regions who have not
bothered to turn out in the past. “If we win on Nov. 3, most of those
names running down-ballot in really tough areas like East Texas and the
Hill Country and the Panhandle will be responsible,” Mr. O’Rourke said.
Mr. Henson added that while he remained skeptical about Democratic
enthusiasm being sufficient to carry the day for Mr. Talarico, he also
doubted that a last-minute avalanche of negative ads would prove decisive
for Mr. Paxton. “At a certain point, there’s diminishing impact once you
get past an absurd level of spending,” he said. Rather than project a
winner in November, Mr. Henson said he felt more comfortable embracing a
“gradualist” theory, one in which Texas does not become blue overnight,
but instead competitive. “Even if Talarico loses by a Beto-like margin,”
he said, “the next cycle is a presidential election, where Trump likely
won’t be popular and Democratic turnout will be higher. So there are
reasons for Texas Democrats to be optimistic.”'



 


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