James Talarico Faces Unexpected Obstacle from Within His Own Party

0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Texas Democratic Senate hopeful Representative James Talarico is fighting a two-front war. While he is engaged in a toe-to-toe race against Republican candidate Ken Paxton , the state's attorney general, the congresswoman he defeated in the Democratic primary has said she will not campaign alongside him.

Dallas representative Jasmine Crockett told CNN she has no plans to join Talarico on the campaign trail. "I will be campaigning downballot," she said when asked whether she would be with him.

It was not the first time Crockett had declined to fully endorse Talarico, who polling averages and political pundits have identified as Democrats ' best chance to break the Republican stronghold in Texas.

Newsweek reached out to Talarico's campaign for comment Friday morning.

After losing the primary in March, Crockett called Talarico to congratulate him and endorsed his candidacy. But her concession statement focused on party unity rather than expressing personal enthusiasm, a theme she has returned to repeatedly and that was central to her CNN appearance on Thursday.

Crockett pointed to Beto O'Rourke's 2018 Senate run, when Senator Ted Cruz beat the Democrat by a 2.6 percent margin, as a cautionary example of a strategy she doesn't want to repeat.

"We've tried this where we've got one amazing candidate that's running at the top of the ticket," she said. "Raising all the money, doing all the things, running around the entire state, but it's not enough."

Her alternative, she said, is more about spreading attention to candidates further down the ballot who she said are being overshadowed by the Senate race.

"That'll give something more to voters to make them say, you know what, it may be raining outside, but I gotta go get there because I gotta get there for this person and this person, plus I don't like Trump," she said.

Asked what she is hearing from Black voters about Talarico, Crockett said she does not believe they are particularly excited about his candidacy.

“I don't think that there is excitement,” she said, before complicating the picture. “I don't know that Black voters are practical. So at the end of the day, I don't know that they're gonna have to be the most excited.”

Crockett's endorsement carries extra weight for Talarico because of how the primary played out. She lost to Talarico by about 6 points, 52.5 percent to 46.2 percent, a difference of roughly 144,500 votes out of more than 2 million cast. But Crockett won Black voters by a wide margin.

Yet, Crockett said she expects Black voters to turn out and vote Democrat regardless of how they feel about Talarico. "They are looking at our Black lives," she said. "We have been the target of Republicans . And so I think that those that are paying attention, they're gonna vote no matter what, whether they're excited or not."

A separate TSU poll found that 79 percent of likely Black voters intend to vote for Talarico, compared with 12 percent who said they would vote for Paxton. The same survey found that just 7 percent of Black Texans who voted in recent elections said they were less likely to vote in November because of Crockett’s loss in the Democratic primary.

Talarico's most recent comments on Crockett came in a July 29 interview with theGrio, where he gave a shout-out to Crockett and urged against creating more division within the party.

"If people who claim to be my supporters or who claim to be part of this movement we're building, if they're sincere in that support, then they should be trying to heal divisions, not deepen divisions," he said.

He credited her endorsement in March as a "hard thing to do" and highlighted her downballot work, calling it more than sufficient. "She is doing the work [and] she has done more than enough to help us," he said. "Winning this campaign is my job as the Democratic nominee."

Asked whether he'd asked her to campaign with him directly, he said he'd welcome it. "I would be honored to have the Congresswoman on the campaign trail," he said. "She's one of the most talented campaigners in the country."

That followed a more public moment on July 20, when Talarico used a Houston town hall to rebuke his own supporters for attacking Crockett.

"If you claim to be my supporter, if you claim to be a part of this movement that we are building, please keep Congresswoman Crockett's name out of your mouth," he said, drawing applause from the crowd.

The relationship had already been tested earlier that February, a month before the high-profile primary that caught national attention. Talarico faced allegations that he had privately called former U.S. Representative Colin Allred a “mediocre Black man” while praising Crockett by comparison. He denied making the comment in racial terms and defended the substance of what he had said about her.

"In my praise of Congresswoman Crockett, I described Congressman Allred's method of campaigning as mediocre, but his life and service are not," he said. "I would never attack him on the basis of race."

Texas is a key battleground in the midterms, becoming a Democratic target as Talarico has polled ahead of Paxton in a number of surveys.

A new survey from Texas Public Opinion Research (TPOR) found a widening divide between the two candidates, with Talarico holding a 6-point lead over Paxton, 48 percent to 42 percent, with 7 percent undecided and 1 percent voting for Libertarian Ted Brown.

The poll surveyed 1,000 likely voters from August 21 to 24, 2026, and had a margin of error of ±3.3 percentage points.

That’s Talarico's best showing in the TPOR poll. The Democrat led by 5 points, 45 percent to 40 percent, in July and 3 points, 47 percent to 44 percent, in May. In April, he held a 5-point lead over Paxton, 46 percent to 41 percent.

The state has not elected a Democrat to a statewide ...

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