Like the leaves of a Texas ash in autumn, the Democrats running to win the state are always vibrant and impressive, right up until they fall. By now, this is common knowledge. Yet for some optimistic Democrats, there’s something different about James Talarico.

You might recognize the 36-year-old state lawmaker from any number of viral social-media clips—calmly arguing with Fox News hosts, for example, or discussing his faith on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. The four-term Democrat and Presbyterian seminarian this morning announced that he’s joining the primary race for the Senate seat held by the Republican John Cornyn. In so doing, Talarico has cemented himself as his party’s newest, shiniest 2026 contender.

Talarico stands out for his relative youth but also for his particular brand of long-winded eloquence. He can sound, in some ways, like a southern-style Barack Obama or a Texas Pete Buttigieg. Two years ago, a video made the rounds of Talarico arguing against legislation that would require public-school teachers to hang the Ten Commandments in their classroom. “This bill to me is not only unconstitutional; it’s not only un-American; I think it is also deeply un-Christian,” he told his Republican colleagues in a committee hearing. “And I say that because I believe this bill is idolatrous. I believe it is exclusionary. And I believe that it is arrogant—and those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.”

[From the October 2024 issue: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Democrats hope his emphasis on faith will help Talarico reach across the aisle—something he seems eager to do. In an interview, Talarico told me that wooing voters is like navigating a school cafeteria. “You sit at the table where people want you to sit,” he said, and “it’s our job as elected leaders” to show voters that they’re wanted. This, Talarico says, is why he spent two hours talking with Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump in 2024. “You need to run for president,” Rogan told him by the end of the show. “We need someone who’s actually a good person.”

National Democrats see promise, too. Party leaders, including former White House adviser David Axelrod and California Governor Gavin Newsom, have shared videos of Talarico speaking on the Texas House floor. Even Obama himself reportedly called Talarico to praise him for his leadership when Democratic state lawmakers in Texas broke quorum in August. Talarico has “the ‘it’ factor,” the Texan Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha told me. When it comes to persuading Trump-curious voters to reconsider, Talarico “brings lots of weapons to the arsenal.”

Former Representative Colin Allred is already in the primary race, and to beat him, Talarico would need to overcome Allred’s fundraising advantage and statewide name recognition. Even if he does that, he still has only a glimmer of a chance at being the first Democratic senator elected in Texas in 37 years. But a glimmer has always been enough to fuel the desperate dreams of Democrats. And some of them see Talarico not just as the best shot for winning Texas—but as a model for how the party can win back the voters it lost to Trump.

In modern American political discourse, Democrats have mostly ceded the topic of religion to Republicans. But the party could learn from Talarico’s example, some Democrats told me. “Talking about faith openly, talking about family, talking about things that bring us together,” Rocha said, is what Democrats “have to get back to if we want to have success in the long term.”

Talarico often preaches at his Presbyterian church in the Austin suburbs, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA), a mainline Protestant denomination. A video of one of his 2023 sermons continues to circulate on social media. Christian nationalists “have co-opted the son of God,” Talarico tells his congregation in the clip. “They’ve turned this humble rabbi into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fearmongering fascist. And it is incumbent on all Christians to confront it and denounce it.” But Talarico doesn’t just talk about his faith; he uses it to articulate his political beliefs. All of Talarico’s political positions, he told me, stem from the command that Jesus gave his followers “to love God and love neighbor.” Democrats have plenty of policy ideas, he said, but they need to do a better job of communicating to voters “what values underpin those policy proposals.”

[From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

Talarico is comfortable criticizing his own party. On Rogan’s show, he said that Joe Biden’s biggest problem wasn’t his age; it was his “ego” and “inability to step aside and let someone else do the job.” But age is definitely a factor in Talarico’s own appeal; on TikTok, the Millennial lawmaker has amassed 1.2 million followers, and clips of his floor speeches, rally remarks, and sermons regularly receive millions of views and likes. When I asked Talarico how Democrats can best move forward after the party’s major losses last November, he chided me gently. “We should embrace this time in the wilderness,” he said. “It’s where new leaders and new movements come forth.”

Talarico clearly hopes to be one of those new leaders. It helps that he has a good backstory. Raised by a single mother in Round Rock, Texas, near Austin, Talarico attended the University of Texas at Austin and got a master’s degree at Harvard. He spent two years as a middle-school English teacher in a poor school district in San Antonio before leaving to lead a Texas nonprofit focused on math education. (In addition to his duties in the state house, Talarico works at an Austin-based education consultancy.) His teaching experience was his main motivation for entering politics, Talarico told me, and in 2018, at age 29, he flipped a district that had been held by Republicans since 2002 to become the youngest politician in the legislature.

He won the seat, north of Austin, first in a special election and then in a general one, with his victory resulting from a 13-point swing toward Democrats. “I ran a different kind of race” than other Democrats who’d tried the same, he told me. Long before Zohran Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, Talarico walked 25 miles across the district (and, after almost falling into a coma, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes). He held on to the seat again in 2020, before Republican gerrymandering spurred him to run in a safer Democratic district nearby in 2022. Still, Talarico said, “I know how to win a tough area.”

Talarico has been a reliable progressive in the state legislature; he introduced legislation to cap insulin co-pays, and he helped draft a major overhaul of Texas school spending, both of which were signed into law. He also left the state during two quorum breaks, including last month, when he and dozens of state Democrats flew to Chicago in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to derail Republican gerrymandering plans. Like his former colleague Representative Jasmine Crockett in 2021, Talarico became the unofficial spokesperson of the moment. “My party has never gerrymandered in the middle of a decade at the request of the president of the United States, nor would we,” he told the Fox News host Will Cain in a clip that was widely shared on X. Later, Talarico asked, “If Republican policies are so popular, why would they need to redraw these maps?” Cain abruptly ended the conversation.

Sometimes, Talarico can sound like a progressive populist in the vein of Bernie Sanders. In interviews—with me, with Rogan—he likes to say that he thinks of politics as “top versus bottom” rather than “left versus right.” Like Sanders, he also tends to rail against the influence of billionaires in politics. But other times, Talarico scans as more ideologically ambiguous. In our first interview, Talarico didn’t mention the president until 30 minutes in, and only after I’d asked directly. “I get why people voted for Trump,” he told me. They find his straightforwardness refreshing, he said, “and I find it refreshing at times.” But Trump promised his supporters two things: lower prices and less corruption, Talarico told me. “Obviously he’s done the exact opposite,” he said, and now, voters might be looking for those things elsewhere.

[Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?]

This is where Talarico sees an opening for his candidacy—as well as a line of attack that has been available to Democrats but that, at least so far, many have struggled to pursue.

The problem for Talarico is that every Democrat who’s recently envisioned a path to victory has lost. In 2018, there was Beto O’Rourke, the Democrats’ great counter-hopping hope, who came close but ultimately failed to take down Senator Ted Cruz. Two years later, it was M. J. Hegar, the female combat veteran who lost to Cornyn. Last year, Allred, the biracial NFL linebacker turned lawyer turned U.S. representative, ran ahead of Kamala Harris in Texas, but couldn’t defeat Cruz.

A recent poll shows Allred eight points ahead of Talarico, a tighter gap than one might expect between a battle-tested former congressman and a relative newcomer. Still, Allred will be tough to beat. He’s got all the scaffolding in place from his 2024 campaign, including a statewide fundraising apparatus (last year he raised nearly $100 million). In an interview, Allred told me that this year, he hopes Democrats can keep their focus on working people. For too long, he said, Democrats have “been perceived as being too online, too elite, too disconnected from the lived reality that most folks are facing.” He said he’ll campaign on rising costs, as well as Republicans’ recent cuts to Medicaid. When I asked about Talarico’s entrance in the race, Allred didn’t comment about Talarico directly, but pointed to his own success outperforming Harris by more than five points statewide. “I’m a proven fighter,” he said.

Some Democrats wish Talarico would stay out of the race. “I admire James tremendously,” former Texas Representative Wendy Davis, who has endorsed Allred, told me. But he’ll lose the primary, she said, and “then he’s going to be that guy who once had a megaphone and gave it up for a losing race.” Talarico could have challenged Governor Greg Abbott instead, or run in one of the five revamped congressional districts Republicans are creating with their new district map. “It’s always sad” when two talented politicians are in the same primary race, Matt Angle, a Texas Democratic strategist, told me. On the plus side, he has “some sense of comfort that we can win with either one.”

To win, Talarico would have to become much more well known in Texas—and find a way to raise many millions of dollars, because state-media markets are astonishingly expensive. Unlike Allred, Talarico has never experienced a spotlight this big—or been on the receiving end of a Republican dirt-digging operation. Already, Talarico is facing criticism for accepting thousands of dollars from a PAC associated with Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, after Talarico had repeatedly decried the influence of money in politics. (“Just like the gerrymandering fight, I am not willing to unilaterally disarm,” Talarico said when I asked him about this.) Given that Talarico is, as Rocha put it, “the whitest white guy I’ve ever seen,” he might also struggle to build the diverse coalition of support necessary to win the state.

[Read: The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition]

A few unknown variables could complicate the picture; both O’Rourke and Representative Joaquin Castro are reportedly considering jumping into the primary. Any of these Democrats will have a tough shot in a general election. But strategists from both parties predict that if Attorney General Ken Paxton beats Cornyn in the GOP primary, Democrats might have a better chance, given Paxton’s overall unpopularity. Paxton currently leads Cornyn in the polls.

Right now, Talarico is relying on Texans’ desire for someone new. People I spoke with used words like boring and milquetoast to describe Allred, and some Democrats are fearful that his candidacy might invoke for voters a general sense of “been there, done that.” Given their party’s historically low approval rating, this is precisely the vibe that Democrats are hoping to avoid.

There’s nothing like the rush of falling in love with a candidate for the very first time. And Talarico knows this. “The country is looking for a reset,” he told me. Right now, even facing the very longest of odds, he’s hoping Texans will trust him to provide it.

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