Black voters were upset with James Talarico. What he did about it could decide the Senate.: James Talarico had a problem, and he didn’t need me to tell him what it was. The unassuming state lawmaker had beaten U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in a Democratic Senate primary that their supporters had turned nasty, even as the candidates mostly stayed above the fray.
Now here he was months later, a white man needing to endear himself to Black voters still raw over what happened on the way to Crockett’s loss. Worse, they had grown even more disenchanted by what they considered a lack of outreach from his team since he’d won. And they didn’t see his campaign spending any money to try to make it right.
Crockett gave him a lukewarm endorsement but wouldn’t give him the time of day, much less campaign with him.
The Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas had Talarico as the general election choice of 67% of the state’s 3 million Black voters. In a long-red state with 19 million registered voters, that was nowhere close to the kind of overwhelming support from that demographic it would take for him to defeat state Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee.
As we walked in the middle — not at the front — of hundreds of people taking part in Opal’s Walk for Freedom, the symbolic 2.5-mile Juneteenth march that Dr. Opal Lee had turned into a Fort Worth institution, there could be no doubt about it: James Talarico had a problem.
And he could not have seemed less bothered by it, despite the rain.
Texas Senate candidate James Talarico meets voters and participates in the Opal’s Walk for Freedom event in Ft. Worth, TX on June 19, 2026.MS NOW
“It’s nice to show up to things and not have to be the center of attention,” he told me. “To just be there as a supporter, as a cheerleader. Because I feel like that’s kind of the spirit we have to get back to in our politics.”
You get used to answers like that the more time you spend around or listening to Talarico. It’s a tone that often feels out of place in today’s aggressive politics. It’s the tenor of a man who has been a seminarian and… https://www.ms.now/elections/black-voters-james-talarico-texas-senate