I mean the headline of this article in three ways.
On Tuesday night, Lone Star State Democrats selected two liberal Austin state representatives, James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, for the top-ballot slots in this likely blue-wave year. And for lieutenant governor, a third liberal Austin state representative, Vikki Goodwin, came in comfortably first but is headed to a May 26 runoff, meaning three of the top four ballot spots could all be held by Austin state reps come the November election. (Yet another liberal Austin state legislator, Sarah Eckhardt, also won the nomination for state comptroller).
For attorney general, Dallas state Senator Nathan Johnson nearly won outright but will also head to a runoff, in turn meaning that all four of the top nominees might be sitting state legislators—folks who carry out their part-time jobs in the capital city.
And, in the race that most of the nation cared about last night, Talarico relied heavily on his home base to secure his win over Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. It’s true that, like Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary, Talarico appears to have been favored by Latino primary voters—he won Bexar County (San Antonio) and the major border counties handily—and it’s likely true that Dems as a whole are strategic to nominate the candidate seemingly preferred by the state’s Hispanic plurality. It’s also fair to say that, outside of Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Greater East Texas, Talarico carried the state map.
But Austin is what really locked down Talarico’s outright, roughly 7 point win Tuesday. As I write this Wednesday morning, more than 90 percent of votes are in and Talarico is up by about 150,000 votes. He carried Travis County (Austin) and neighboring Williamson and Hays counties by a combined margin of about 150,000 votes.
By election night, Talarico’s win felt like the predictable outcome. After favoring Crockett for months, the final polls broke for the Austin state rep, and his fundraising and spending had lapped her. The congresswoman also had unforced errors, recently including Atlantic-gate (which, along with The Colin Allred Incident, I shall leave undefined here for the blissful ignorance of future readers).
Talarico had also received, starting quite early on and for reasons that still feel somewhat opaque, a glowing rising-star treatment from D.C. and New York media. As early as September—two months after Allred launched his later-abandoned Senate bid and three months before Crockett joined the race, which is to say with the field firmly in flux—the aforementioned Atlantic wondered if he was “Texas’s Pete [Buttigieg].” Soon, a New York Times columnist asked: “Is He the Savior Democrats Have Been Waiting For?” And not too much later, the Times’ star podcaster Ezra Klein taped a 1.5-hour delicately delivered softball with the state rep in which Klein mentioned Crockett’s existence one time at the top.
Much of the middle-brow journalistic fluffing centered on Talarico’s religiosity, which was always something both new and not new. As a Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico deploys liberal Christianity with greater regularity and fluency than most Democratic politicians, but there’s nothing really so unusual about being both a Dem politician and a follower of Jesus. Crockett herself came up in Black Baptist churches and is a pastor’s daughter. And as was brought up somewhere amid The Colin Allred Incident, the media treatment of Talarico sometimes seemed to imply that an actual U.S. senator and actual pastor in Raphael Warnock was comparatively less relevant to a conversation about religion in liberalism.
How much the national press’ active intervention or any of the tawdry social media affairs mattered is unclear. Overall, rank-and-file Democratic voters seemed to continue liking both candidates; in the end, Talarico managed to overcome Crockett’s name recognition advantage, assembling a slightly larger and broader coalition.
Although the primary never centered on matters of substantive policy, it found its way into a sort of bizarro left-vs-moderate groove based on vibes and stated intent, with Talarico as the “moderate.” Essentially, he was more even-keeled, and he said he planned to win the sort of voters who will back Governor Greg Abbott in November but may balk at the GOP’s Senate nominee. He also hopes—as much of the press attention hinged on—to persuade Christians to his side (though this was oddly undermined in his longform New Yorker treatment, where he shrugged off the idea that he could persuade Evangelicals, the largest American Christian grouping).
The racially fraught key word here, of course, is “electable.” Talarico was largely granted the label this primary and now gets the chance to test the case. For the record, though, it should be noted that at least until primary night this was almost entirely a vibes-based theory. Talarico likes to tout that he flipped a red Williamson County state House seat in 2018—but in that blue-wave year Talarico’s margin of victory was 9 points fewer than that of Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke in the same district. Talarico also underperformed Joe Biden there in 2020. Come 2022—in the Travis County seat Talarico switched into after redistricting—he once again underperformed O’Rourke.
And, of course, Texas Democrats haven’t won statewide in three decades. For all we know, the prototypical winning Dem here might be the first living soul you can manage to find along a road somewhere in Loving County.
All that, plus the fact that Democrats’ rising hopes this year seem to depend in part on scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton winning the Senate nod on the GOP side of the ledger. On Tuesday, Big and Probably-Not-As-Bad-As-Paxton John Cornyn held his ground better than expected, and the two now head for a May runoff that could go either way—with each surely jockeying desperately for Trump’s still-withheld imprimatur.
And so, Godspeed to us all. Or, as Talarico circa 2021 might put it, “holy mystery”-speed to us all. Or, as I imagine we may soon hear him saying on the campaign trail with Bobby Pulido, in decent gringo Spanish, Dios nos cuide y nos proteja. For November cometh.
In downballot Democratic news, a Houston Congressional fight over age and cryptocurrency is headed for a runoff, as Christian Menefee and Al Green each failed to crack 50 percent Tuesday. (Amanda Edwards pulled about 8 percentage points despite having dropped out.)
Allred, in The Incident’s wake, came in first in a four-way primary for a deep-blue Dallas congressional seat but will need to prevail in a runoff with Congresswoman Julie Johnson, a messy situation created by the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting and Allred’s aborted Senate bid.
U.S. Representative Sylvia Garcia, of Houston, easily fended off a challenge from former state House representative Jarvis Johnson, while Pulido—the Tejano singer-turned politician—doubled up his opponent and won the chance to try to unseat Rio Grande Valley-based GOP Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz.
It was a mixed night for union-affiliated new candidates, who entered the evening as something of a wave with Texas AFL-CIO backing following the recent state Senate victory of labor candidate Taylor Rehmet. Marcos Vélez, a Gulf Coast union leader, came in a distant second for lieutenant governor but did make a runoff with Goodwin.
Jose Loya, a United Steelworkers organizer from the Panhandle, lost his bid for the land commissioner nomination to Bay City Council member Benjamin Flores. LiUNA laborers union leader Jeremy Hendricks came in a very distant second in the race to fill Talarico’s state House seat, but former Texas AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Montserrat Garibay did lead the pack in the contest to represent Hinojosa’s Austin House district and now heads to a runoff.
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