James Talarico, a Democratic state representative and seminary student who scored a prized appearance on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year, is entering the race for the Senate seat held by GOP Sen. John Cornyn.
Talarico, widely seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party, will first have to win what is likely to be a competitive and potentially costly Democratic primary against former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL player who was the party’s Senate nominee last cycle.
The winner will then face the winner of a likely even more costly and nasty GOP primary between Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the general election. Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas in three decades, but the party is hopeful a Paxton victory in the GOP primary could give them a shot in what is shaping up to be a favorable midterm political environment.
In his launch video and in an interview with HuffPost, Talarico framed his bid around upsetting a political system he said was controlled by billionaires and rigged against working people.
“The biggest divide in our country is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom,” he says in his launch video. “Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other so that we’re not looking up at them. The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power. So their social media algorithms and their cable news networks tear us apart.”
