Talarico Wants to Transcend the Pettiness of Modern Politics. Can He?

On Thursday, James Talarico gave his first speech since his commanding victory in Texas’ Senate race. Speaking at a Democratic conference in Denver, he expressed his sincere eagerness to work with Donald Trump. Invoking Lyndon Baines Johnson, he said: “If President Trump wants the same plaques and portraits and busts as L.B.J., we can help make that a reality. We should make the final two years of his presidency the most productive of any presidency in American history, because this moment is so much bigger and so much more important than the red team or the blue team.”

I found this comment slightly jarring. Talarico isn’t the first Democrat to make overtures to Trump: New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has leveraged Trump’s strange affection for him to help the city, and Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan has offered to call universal health care “Trumpcare.” But both Mamdani and El-Sayed address the president with a touch of irony, making clear they know they’re playing to his vanity. Talarico, by contrast, sounded as though he really thought Trump might be willing to help Democrats help the country. How, I asked him afterward, could he believe that?

“We have a president who says he cares about working people,” Talarico said. “We now have a large majority of senators and House members who got elected talking about the needs of working people. So to me, that’s a recipe to get a lot done for the working people in my state and across this country. Of course, it may not work. There’s plenty of reasons to be cynical, but there were a lot of reasons to be cynical about this race in Texas. We said from the very beginning that a little bit of hope is a dangerous thing, and so we’re doubling down on that little bit of hope.”

It was an answer that spoke to a central tension in Talarico’s campaign. He ran as both a fighter and a unifier, winning support from people who’d voted for Trump and from people who wanted protection from him. He’d sometimes tell his team, “You can’t beat them at their game. You have to change the game.” By this, he meant that he’d try to transcend the meanness and pettiness of modern politics. “We needed to adopt a new political consciousness, and that was really around unity, healing and love,” he told me. But it’s an open question how much unity, healing and love is possible in Trump’s Washington.

From the beginning, Talarico wanted to change culture as well as policy. The seeds of his campaign were planted in the spring of 2025, when he was in a dark place. As a state representative, he had, along with his Texas House colleague Gina Hinojosa, led the opposition to Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to use vouchers to divert public money to private schools. In the previous session, a group of Republicans, many from rural areas where public schools are at the center of community life, had joined Democrats to thwart the measure. But after Abbott backed successful primary campaigns against some of the Republican holdouts, school vouchers became law.

“When we lost, he was kind of going through a big psychological crisis,” said Talarico’s chief of staff in the legislature, also, confusingly, named Gina Hinojosa. “Like, how could this possibly happen? It was so obvious that this was bad for Texas voters.”