You can tell how well the Talarico campaign thinks last night’s CNN town hall went by how promptly they added one million clips from it to their Instagram, so everybody could see. Y’all, he’s good at this.
James Talarico’s opponent Ken Paxton has been famously a giant coward about debating him, so obviously there was no Ossoff-style beatdown last night.
But that’s not quite Talarico’s style anyway. (Though we still would absolutely enjoy seeing what Talarico would do in that format. We think he’s more than up to the task.)
Instead, last night, Talarico was with the voters, specifically Republicans and independents who probably really really really really really don’t want to vote for Ken Paxton, because he’s a criminal and a scumbag, but they need to find out if Talarico is going to force Jesus to have sex genders during third period. (The crowd was evenly split between Republicans, Democrats and independents.)
It was co-hosted by those Jubilee people — you know, every time there's a “One nice person surrounded by 20 anti-abortion lunatics!” or “One fascist surrounded by 20 normals!” thing? That’s Jubilee — so hooray, they did something of value for once.
“I am tired of us being divided into teams: Left versus Right, blue versus red, urban versus rural. Because the truth is we're all on the same team,” he said.
He then asked people to raise their hands if they have an elderly family member who needs care; if they’ve ever worried about how to pay for things these days; if they know what student loans and medical debt are like; and so forth.
“So do I,” he kept saying.
“Those big money interests, those social media platforms, those cable news networks, they want to divide this team. Imagine what we could do if we did it together. Imagine who we could take on in this country if we did it together. As one team, we are unstoppable.”
So that is why they are afraid of him.
Here is Talarico talking about why he recently went to Ohio to get transgender surgeries in a mental institution while dying repeatedly.
He said you’re supposed to stay home when you have the flu and not get other people sick. (WOKE.) But he did note how Paxton and the inbreds who love him let their conspiracy theory freak flags just fly when he got sick and worked from home for a few days:
TALARICO: These false claims got millions of views online. And this is an example of what I call the rage economy. Conspiracy theorists can post anything they want on the internet. They get clicks. The billionaires who own these platforms get rich. We all get angry, and nobody's life gets any better. Conspiracy theories don't put food on the table. They don't put gas in the tank. They don't actually improve our communities.
Do people in Texas want food and gas and better communities? Oh, they do? Huh.
It was interesting watching Talarico engage with the social conservatives in the room, the right-wing Christians, since so much of the campaign has been Republicans saying his Christianity is fake because he doesn’t embrace the conservative Christian gospel that Jesus died on the cross so that fags and trans kids might burn in hell.
Why, he once even said that God is non-binary, which directly contradicts the thousands of Bible verses about God’s dick.
He directly addressed that in this clip with a conservative Christian white woman. Note how he admitted he was being provocative with the God being non-binary thing, while not remotely taking it back.
TALARICO: We as Christians, you and I are both members of the body of Christ, you are my sister in Christ, and it’s OK if you and I have disagreements about our interpretations of scripture, or certainly about political and policy topics. That should be encouraged, not discouraged, and we can do that as we’re called to do in scripture, do it with love.
And so I actually want to clarify a few of the things that you said, because I know that this has been used in attack ads all over the state. You know, the first comment, about God not being defined by gender, when I said that I was being provocative, and I want to admit that, and come clean about that.
But I think what I was saying was not controversial theologically. The idea that we can’t define God using human categories. Not only did I say that, but the late Charlie Kirk said that. The late Pope Benedict said that.
Ohhhhhh shit, he reverse Charlie-Kirk-ed everybody! With a slice of dead Nazi pope on the side!
That’s what you get for making your campaign about God’s penis, Ken Paxton.
Here’s an exchange that’s getting a lot of attention, about abortion. He’s tailoring his message, obviously, because he’s talking to a severely anti-abortion Catholic woman, a professor from Fort Worth. But note how he goes about it. He has this way of almost demanding that people join him in arguing in good faith, which we find interesting.
Talarico had earlier said, correctly, that the Bible is “silent on abortion.” This woman’s interpretation, however, was that the Ten Commandments say “Thou shalt not kill,” and somehow this applies to blastocysts. This is a good time to remind readers that we are not the audience for this. Texas voters looking for any permission structure they can find to vote against Ken Paxton are the audience for this.
First, Talarico met her where she was, saying that if he agreed with her that abortion is murder — he doesn’t — then he wouldn’t support it. He said, “it’s OK that you and I come to different conclusions” about the theology, and even later expressed eagerness to talk about it with her further.
And then he pivoted to Texas’s dangerous, murderous total abortion ban, which is leaving people to die in emergency room parking lots from sepsis, because doctors are scared to provide any care that could fall under the umbrella of “abortion.” He referred to 10-year-old girls who need abortion care, and he called it “abortion care.”
“I think you and I agree more than we think we do. Again, the theological debate is interesting, and you and I should grab a coffee or do a podcast, and I would love to get into that, but as a policymaker, I’m always like how do we solve the problem, how do we get better outcomes? And that’s what you want too!”
What was she going to say? “No, I do not want better outcomes, because I am a total monster”?
At one point, he said, “if we treat this issue as a public health problem and not a culture war problem, then we can actually make progress together.” He talked about reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. (This is one of the tells of whether somebody truly has a moral problem with abortion or whether they just want to control people’s bodies and sex lives. If they don’t support reducing unplanned pregnancies, then they are just sicko forced birth perverts.)
We’re not the audience for this, again. But his audience was across from him, and she was genuinely smiling by the end of that interaction. (Afterward she said she might even reconsider her vote.)
He said GRRR TEXAS BORDER AARGH things, because he’s running to be the senator from Texas, saying he’d stand up to Democrats if they try to do anything funny with the border. He said he doesn’t support abolishing ICE, because again, he’s running to be the senator from Texas. But then he tempered that with flaming progressive sentences like “We don’t want federal agents murdering our neighbors before our very eyes.” He noted that Trump’s ICE is a “secret police force” of “masked men in unmarked vehicles, coming through and terrorizing our communities.” He specifically referenced the ICE murder of Texan Lorenzo Salgaudo.
TALARICO: I think about Lorenzo Salgaudo, who was our fellow Texan, he lived in Houston for 35 years. As a construction worker, he sent his three boys to college. His oldest is a public school teacher. His middle son is an engineer. His youngest is still in school. Lorenzo Salgaudo embodies the American dream, he’s exactly the kind of person we want in this country. His three boys called him el mundo entero, the whole world, and they watched as their whole world died in a video posted on Facebook. Lorenzo Salgaudo was a child of God, endowed with infinite worth. Lorenzo, our fellow Texan, deserves justice, and that’s exactly what I’ll fight for in the US Senate.
So that’s what he had to say about that.
He made very Texas sounds about protecting oil and gas jobs, saying, “I will stand up to my own party if they mess with our oil and gas industry,” he said. But he also said he would stand up to Republicans when they try to fuck with renewables.
You notice how good he is at just refusing to accept the notion that any Texas voters are his enemies, or even that people are as opposed to each other as they think they are on these issues?
Obviously, we will hold him accountable when he’s in a position to legislate, and if he starts throwing people under the bus, we’ll get his ass. But it appears he may have divined the secret sauce to getting elected statewide as a Democrat in Texas, at least at this juncture. You’ll note he’s not doing it by acting like a garbage human like Joe Manchin or John Fetterman.
Here’s one more, about data centers. “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” Hits even harder when you consider who his opponent is. And he mentioned that: “We have an opportunity in this race not just to defeat the most corrupt politician in Texas, we have an opportunity to defeat this entire corrupt system.”
In the third quarter, James Talarico raised $64 million, more than any Senate candidate in history. He is ahead in just about every poll. We don’t want to say he’s going to do the thing, because it’s not over until it’s over — Ken Paxton might introduce a secret weapon, like more of his famous sex appeal or integrity! — but we think he’s going to do the thing.
What would that be like in six years if Talarico was in Jon Ossoff’s position and Texas had just had a Democratic senator for six years, asking to be re-elected? The answer to that question is what keeps every Republican strategist and politician up at night.
OPEN THREAD.
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Harry says;
Are you trying to tell me that I’m the pet?!
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-361558112?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
The thing I respect about Talarico is that he says the right things even if they are uncomfortable to hear. He *shouldn't* have to be a lockstep Democrat because, let's face it, none of us agree with every single Democratic position. But neither does he try and "balance" that by playing into Republican hands with things like girls in boys sports or other "culture war" bullshit. He's smarter than that, and I think/hope/pray that Texas recognizes this and votes accordingly.