Politico reports:

James Talarico launched his Senate campaign in September 2025 just one day before the killing of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk — a coincidence that he now believes set the tone for his whole campaign.

Talarico weighed cancelling the campaign event he had scheduled for that evening; local officials suggested that holding it could pose a security risk. But Talarico went ahead, speaking for just five minutes and using that time not to promote his own candidacy but to eulogize Kirk, calling him “our sibling, our brother,” and “a human being endowed with infinite worth and entitled to unconditional love.”

“I think his murder, his assassination, really shaped the entire campaign,” Talarico told me in a phone interview on Wednesday, the morning after he became the first Texas Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate in 38 years.

Nowhere was MAGA’s smash-mouth politics of name calling and personal cruelty on fuller display this election cycle than in Texas. And no state or candidate delivered a firmer rejection of that kind of politics than Talarico. He ran a positive campaign in the face of smears from Republicans including Vice President JD Vance, who falsely suggested he was gay and had a questionable web browser history, and a conspiratorial stew of posts on X that imagined him at a mental institution in Ohio in October. He even faced death threats.

But through it all, Talarico, a seminarian state lawmaker and former middle school teacher, fretted over whether his fundraising texts were honest and reminded people that his GOP opponent Ken Paxton was a “child of God.” He’s hoping other Democrats will take a similar approach to politics in the campaigns to come.

“The people of Texas, the people of this country, from what I can tell, demanded an end to that politics of division practiced by people in both parties,” Talarico told me. “I really do think the new kind of politics that we forged here in Texas, politics that’s rooted in love, is a model for the Democratic Party, a model for our country moving forward.”

Texans, he said, voted for change and an end to hyper-partisanship. And looking ahead to 2028, Democrats who campaign with that in mind have a good chance of winning the state, Talarico said. [Continue reading…]