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Is it Talarico time in Texas?
James Talarico is running a different kind of campaign than Beto O’Rourke did eight years ago. If the Democratic nominee for Texas’ US Senate seat has visited all 254 counties, he has kept it under wraps. He is not going to skateboard in a Whataburger parking lot or air-drum to “Baba O’Riley.” He is also not going to drop f-bombs or speak extemporaneously about taking away anyone’s guns, although it is his considerable gift to make lines he has delivered perhaps hundreds of times still sometimes sound extemporaneous. Even Talarico’s occasional attempts to moderate past comments come packaged for maximum effect. He is deliberate. He leverages high-value situations to score premium points. He is the person in “Supermarket Sweep” who goes straight for the hair products.
And in his race against Republican attorney general Ken Paxton, Talarico, a state representative and seminarian, has been laser-focused on connecting his opponent’s extremely long list of scandals to what voters are experiencing in their own lives.
Talarico’s faith-based populism has built him a huge following, Mother Jones national correspondent Tim Murphy reports. The message at the heart of Talarico’s campaign is that corruption is a universal story that is crushing the Texas Dream. And people like Paxton are the reason you’re paying more for everything. At a rally in San Marcos, Talarico said that Paxton has increased his net worth while in office by $27 million and now owns 15 homes:
“It’s hard to get 15 homes in a game of Monopoly—I don’t know how Ken Paxton got 15 homes.”
But Paxton is merely a product of a political system rigged to serve a handful of billionaires, Talarico explained. “It’s why so many Texans can’t get ahead, no matter how hard they work; it’s why we can’t afford the basics in this economy. We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.”
Read more at MotherJones.com.
Reporting by Tim Murphy
Video by Peter Berger