James Talarico — Texas: The Sling and Goliath
Tarek Abou Ghazala — Editor
A year ago James Talarico was a state legislator barely known outside
A year ago James Talarico was a state legislator barely known outside the Austin area: a former public-school teacher, a Presbyterian seminarian, thirty-six years old. He entered the Senate race in September, then narrowly won the Democratic primary against Representative Jasmine Crockett.
In the opposing camp something stranger happened. In the Republican run-off, Attorney General Ken Paxton — carried by a late endorsement from President Trump — unseated Senator John Cornyn, who had represented Texas since 2002. Paxton had been impeached by the state House in 2023 on charges including bribery and abuse of office, and acquitted by the state Senate. Talarico built his campaign on precisely that, calling the race "the people versus Ken Paxton" and saying, in substance: "I have a legislative record. Ken Paxton has a criminal record."
On the night, the race was called at 10:04 and conceded at 10:20. Talarico told his crowd in Austin that they had "just taken Texas back," that "all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas," and then reached for the oldest image of pushback in the Abrahamic tradition: "The people of Texas, you were my sling — and tonight we brought down Goliath."
It was the first Democratic Senate win in Texas since 1988; the party had not won a statewide office there since 1994.
The value of this win lies not in the seat but in the breaking of a party's monopoly over an entire state for a generation. What is worth noticing is that the push came in two stages rather than one: a push inside the dominant party removed its strongest general-election candidate, and then a push from outside exploited the opening the first had made. The most telling evidence is that Cornyn himself — the man pushed out from within — congratulated Talarico on election night.
This is a face of the law that is rarely noticed: what most weakens a dominant power is often not an external rival but an internal push that sets aside its most electable figure in favour of its most loyal one.
The sling-and-Goliath image nevertheless deserves a caveat. The winning campaign was not a poor one; both sides spent heavily, and spending in the Texas primaries alone was among the highest in the state's history. The more precise statement is that money is a necessary and not a sufficient condition: it produces no push without a cause that moves people, and it does not rescue a candidate trailing a cloud of suspicion.
Limits of this reading
- Vote shares differ by source and by the hour of measurement (about 55% in the Texas secretary of state's returns on Wednesday morning, about 59% at the moment the race was called); we therefore report the fact of the win without a definitive figure.
- The claim that Paxton's nomination caused the defeat is plausible but not established; it is a retrospective explanation that is hard to test, though rating houses did downgrade Republican prospects after he won the nomination.
- One night does not make a state "flipped": the midterm electorate is not the presidential electorate, and the judgement rests on cycles still to come.