Texas Again
One thing is clear today. We’re about to take back Texas. To the billionaires who have taken over our state and taken over our country, your unchecked power is coming to an end.
With those words, James Talarico claimed victory over Jasmine Crockett in a hotly contested Texas Democratic Senate primary. Talarico won the contest convincingly on Tuesday, besting Crockett by six points.
He ran a grassroots campaign centered on uniting a broad coalition of voters around a common desire to take back power from an overclass that maintains control by dividing us. On Tuesday, that message garnered over 1.2 million votes.
It is worth paying attention to Talarico’s approach, because it is a pitch-perfect response to Trumpism driven by a strategy that can be replicated by Democrats nationwide. “People across the political spectrum are hungry for a new kind of politics,” he said. “Not a politics of fear, not a politics of hate, not a politics of division, but a politics of love.”
But to bring about that kind of politics requires knowing your enemy, and this is where Talarico doesn’t hold back:
There is something broken in America. Our economy is broken. Our political system is broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. And that’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.
The billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same because our unity is a threat to their wealth and power. So they divide us on an hourly basis by party, by race, by gender, by religion, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets. They are closing our schools, they’re gutting our health care, they’re raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves.
The real fight in this country is not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom.
We are about to find out if Talarico’s top-versus-bottom politics can deliver Texas to the Democratic party for the first time this century.
This is no longer as crazy an idea as it may have seemed before Tuesday’s primary.
Exactly one month ago, I wrote about the importance of Texas to the Republican party and the potential that thirty years of party dominance in the state could crumble under the weight of MAGA governance.
The occasion was a special election for a state senate seat in conservative Fort Worth that swung 32 points to the Democrats from Trump’s performance there in 2024.
When we dig a bit deeper into Tuesday’s primary results, we find evidence to suggest last month’s special election could indeed be a harbinger of a new day for Texas Democrats.
Let’s look at why.
