Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico is projected to win Tuesday’s election to the U.S. Senate, CBS and NBC report, an astounding defeat for Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton after a race that can be best summed up as a colossal self-own by the GOP.
Talarico’s victory means Democrats just flipped a seat in the Senate, bringing them a step closer to taking back the majority.
A four-term state legislator, Talarico had the odds stacked against him in his Senate bid: The 37-year-old Democrat was running in a deep red state that President Donald Trump won by nearly 14 percentage points in 2024. Texas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly 40 years, and if Talarico had to go up against the Republican currently in this seat, longtime Sen. John Cornyn, there’s a good chance he would have lost.
But Trump helped push out Cornyn in the GOP primary, saying he wasn’t loyal enough and endorsing Paxton, a MAGA acolyte. Senate Republican leaders pleaded with the president not to do this since Cornyn, a 22-year senator, was a safe bet compared to Paxton, a deeply flawed candidate previously impeached by his own party on 20 counts of abuse, bribery and corruption, and later indicted on three felony counts of fraud. Trump blew them off.
Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and former middle school teacher, took the gift of being paired against Paxton and ran with it. He consistently led in the polls, centering his campaign on corruption and democracy. The GOP scrambled to try to save Paxton, dumping tens of millions of dollars into his race and resorting to gross smears to try to emasculate Talarico.
Trillionaire and Trump buddy Elon Musk even tried to buy this race, spending a whopping $158 million to boost Paxton’s chances.
It didn’t work.
By the end, some in Paxton’s own camp didn’t seem to want him to win. His campaign was plagued by leaks of audio recordings of him talking about Trump dragging him down, and of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott “struggling” in his campaign. Despite his endorsement, the president was taking shots at Paxton, too.
“He can be a pain in the ass sometimes, I’ll be honest,” Trump said last month.
In his victory speech late Tuesday, Talarico said people should “always bet on the underdog,” and that his Senate win is for “every underdog who’s been counted out and left behind. This win is for every Texan who’s ever wondered if anyone is listening. I heard you, we heard you, and tonight the world hears you.”
He vowed to be a senator for all Texans, even those who didn’t vote for him, and said billionaires are trying to divide them when they’re really not so different from each other.
“They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same,” Talarico said. “They want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them. The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom.”