In a conversation with MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas, Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico made clear he doesn’t much care which Republican emerges from the state’s primary runoff. As far as he’s concerned, Ken Paxton and John Cornyn are, in his words, “two sides of the same corrupt coin.”
Prior to the election results came in, Meiselas had Talarico walk through both scenarios — a Paxton nomination backed by Donald Trump’s direct endorsement, and a Cornyn nomination carrying the weight of an incumbent senator who spent months publicly auditioning for Trump’s approval only to be passed over. Talarico was happy to oblige, but his framing was consistent either way: the real opponent isn’t a name on a ballot. It’s the billionaire donor class he says has captured Texas politics for decades.
On Paxton, Talarico didn’t mince words. The attorney general, who was impeached by his own Republican colleagues and has faced a long-running federal indictment, represents what Talarico calls “illegal corruption,” the kind where a public official uses his office to directly enrich himself and his donors. That, Talarico argued, is the visible rot of a system that has been failing ordinary Texans for fifty years, one in which mega-donors purchase politicians who then rig the rules of the economy in their favor.
Cornyn, Talarico said, is a different but arguably larger problem. Where Paxton’s corruption was flagrant enough to trigger an impeachment from his own party, Cornyn’s has been conducted entirely within the law, which makes it no less destructive. He pointed specifically to Cornyn’s vote on “the big, ugly bill,” the sweeping Republican budget reconciliation package that strips health coverage from millions of Texans and cuts nutrition assistance for low-income families, all while delivering another round of tax cuts to the wealthiest donors. Cornyn cast what Talarico described as the deciding vote. “He committed an act of corruption of the highest order,” Talarico said, “and it’s why neither he nor Ken Paxton deserve the honor of representing this great state.”
Then Meiselas asked the bigger question: whether Texas itself is actually changing. An eighth-generation Texan whose family has been in the region since it was still part of Mexico, Talarico said flatly that he has never seen anything like what is building around his campaign.
He described rallies drawing tens of thousands of people from Beaumont to El Paso, from Amarillo to Brownsville, and the telling moment that keeps repeating itself at the end of those events is when attendees approach him to quietly confess they’ve never voted for a Democrat before. The secrecy of it, he noted with some amusement, is as if they’re “in the witness protection program.” But they keep showing up. His campaign says 45,000 volunteers signed up to knock doors, make calls, and send texts. Grassroots fundraising has shattered records, all without a dime from corporate PACs. Instead, donations are coming in at five, ten, fifteen dollars at a time.
Meiselas raised the Republican attack lines already in circulation, including attempts to brand Talarico as culturally out of step with Texas by labeling him a vegan, a claim Talarico said is simply false, though he treated it mostly as a gift. “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment,” he said. “If all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances.”
More importantly, both men agreed that the political ground has shifted beneath the Republican Party in ways that the usual playbook may not be able to paper over. Talarico described the Trump voters in his own personal orbit — family members, friends, neighbors — who cast their ballots in 2024 expecting lower costs, an end to foreign entanglements, transparency on the Epstein files, and a genuine draining of the Washington swamp. A year in, he said, they’ve watched prices climb under Trump’s tariff policies, seen new military conflict rather than de-escalation, watched the Epstein files stay sealed, and observed the swamp expand rather than drain. The disillusionment, he argued, is real and spreading.
His strategy is to speak directly to those voters — not to shame them for 2024, but to offer a different path forward. His pitch is economic and direct: lower costs, higher wages, tax relief for working people, and a government that stops writing rules designed to benefit the donor class. He wants to unite Texans across the divisions that donor-funded politics has spent decades deepening, cut through the culture war distractions, and end what he called thirty years of one-party rule in the state.
He closed by noting his campaign is leading in every public and private poll conducted in Texas. By his account, it is the first time a Democratic Senate candidate in the state has held a polling lead. A Democratic win in Texas would be absolutely seismic. We’ll be following this race every step of the way.
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