What would Jesus do? The Texas teacher pledging to restore the faith of Democrats

In a county that Donald Trump confidently won by 12 points on his march back to the White House in 2024, hundreds of curious Texans defied the bitter cold and crammed into a hotel ballroom last week to see the young man hailed as a Democratic saviour in the Lone Star state.

James Talarico, who is running to topple veteran Republican senator John Cornyn, is not your ordinary Democrat. The 36-year-old state lawmaker with the choirboy countenance of a young Ron Howard sports black cowboy boots and drives a Chevy Colorado pickup. A former middle school teacher, he now combines his political career with training to be a Presbyterian minister.

While Trump and his Maga movement have draped themselves in an aggressive brand of Christian nationalism, Talarico uses Bible verse in support of pro-choice abortion policies, gay marriage and progressive healthcare and tax systems. At ease on social media, with 1.5 million followers on TikTok, that liberal Christian populism has singled him out as a rising star who could challenge the GOP’s assumed monopoly on faith.

“My concern is the members of Congress who are quoting scripture and then violating the teachings of Jesus every day – who are not feeding the hungry, who are not healing the sick, who are not welcoming the stranger,” Talarico told The Observer after last week’s town hall in the port town of Corpus Christi in Nueces county.

“We need more legislators who are going to act like Jesus, whether they’re Christians or not… We need those values in our political discourse again.”

Talarico gained nationwide attention last year when he led an exodus of Texas Democrats who fled the state in a bid to block Republican efforts to redraw the congressional map and carve out five extra seats ahead of the midterm elections in November. From a tiny hotel room in Chicago he gave scores of media interviews to liberal and conservative outlets alike.

When Democrats conceded defeat and returned to Texas, Talarico picked a new fight, denouncing a Republican bill that forced public schools to display the Ten Commandments. Videos of him calmly admonishing GOP colleagues attracted millions of views on social media. A spirited debate on faith and politics with Joe Rogan saw the admiring podcaster urge Talarico to seek even higher office.

“You need to run for president,” Rogan told his guest. “We need someone who is actually a good person.”

In the Senate primary, Talarico faces congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, 44, a former civil rights lawyer and another young star who has built her own reputation on Capitol Hill with fearless attacks on Trump and his Republican allies. The race promises a clash of styles that has energised Texas Democrats, raising hopes that the party can galvanise growing unhappiness with Trump to break the GOP stranglehold on the state.

Talarico knows that Democrats have been here before. The party has not won a statewide race in Texas for 30 years.

“Texas has broken our hearts many times,” Talarico acknowledged in Corpus Christi. But he insisted that November represents “the best shot that we’ve had in 30 years to end one-party rule in Texas”.

Hopeful Democrats see parallels with the 2018 midterms during Trump’s first term, when another relative unknown, Beto O’Rourke, gave Republican senator Ted Cruz a scare with an energetic campaign, falling just short by 2.5 points. With Trump’s approval rating once again in freefall and a mounting backlash against his immigration crackdown and stewardship of the economy, Talarico hopes to succeed where O’Rourke failed.

A Democratic bastion for a century after Reconstruction, Texas turned red under Ronald Reagan and has remained under Republican control ever since. The state has not voted Democrat in a presidential election since backing Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Democrats still hold the major cities, while Republicans dominate in rural counties. To have a hope in November, Talarico or Crockett must take back the suburbs and the majority-Latino districts along the Mexican border that O’Rourke won in 2018 and that shifted to Trump in 2024.

The Corpus Christi event came two days after ICE agents gunned down Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, and Talarico opened his remarks with a passionate indictment of the violence and terror in Minnesota.

“ICE shot a mother in the face. ICE kidnapped a five-year-old boy. ICE executed a man in broad daylight on our streets. It is time to tear down this secret police force,” he said, to cheers.

He called for homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to be impeached and for “these masked men” to be hauled before Congress “so the world can see their faces”.

He paid tribute to Pretti’s effort to shield another protester in the moments before he was killed.

“That is what real courage looks like. Not hiding behind the mask, not shooting a man in the back and not lying to cover it up,” Talarico said. “In a country run by cowards, be like Alex Pretti.”

But he was equally damning of the “spinelessness” of Democratic leaders in Washington, who have spent the first year of Trump’s term in timid soul-searching, unsure of how to resist the president after their humbling 2024 defeat, to the growing fury of the party base.

“We have to have a Democratic party that remembers how to fight for people,” Talarico said. “It’s no wonder that people don’t trust the national Democratic party.”

That criticism chimes with the frustration among Texas party officials, who have complained for years that their national leadership fails to support candidates with the resources needed to compete in a state of this size.

“The cavalry is not coming,” said Texas Democratic party chair Kendall Scudder, who urged the leadership in Washington to “look in the mirror” and offer a bold vision to voters, rather than tepid opposition to Trump.

“We were the party for the working class and the little guy and for poor people and somewhere along the line we became the defenders of the institutions,” Scudder said. “If Democrats remain these milquetoast moderates who negotiate away the things that are important to people, then people will continue to lose trust in them.”

That disappointment has only strengthened the calls from supporters for a new generation of candidates. The buzz around Talarico has drawn inevitable comparisons with Zohran Mamdani, the young Democratic socialist who rocketed from unknown assemblyman to New York mayor last year.

Among retirees and generation Z students alike last week, there was palpable excitement to see the young star. Bringing Talarico onstage, a former county judge compared him to two other beloved Texans, Lyndon Johnson and Matthew McConaughey.

“I’m super hopeful because Talarico and Crockett are very promising candidates. They’re both experienced, and they both have a passion that we haven’t seen before from the Democratic party in Texas,” said Katherine Strain, a 24-year-old estate agent. “The younger generation are getting their voices out there, which is great.”

The race has underscored the fragility of the Democratic coalition in the wake of 2024, however. Polls show Talarico leading among white and Latino voters, while Crockett holds a commanding advantage among Black voters, with the two locked in a dead heat. A tense Democratic primary was ignited on Monday, with Talarico forced to defend himself against allegations of racism, accused by a TikTok influencer of calling a former opponent a “mediocre Black man”.

Republicans are wary of Talarico, but remain confident that both he and Crockett have weaknesses and will struggle to unite statewide support, whoever wins in March.

“He’s young, he’s dynamic, a very good speaker, very politically savvy, but he does just come across as very young and more progressive,” Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist in Texas, said of Talarico. “In a general election, I still think the favourite has to be the Republican.”

Republicans have their own concerns, though. Cornyn, 74, looks set to lose his primary race against Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, 63, who is himself dogged by scandal, including a 2023 impeachment for bribery and an acrimonious divorce.

Republicans were stunned by a special election for a state Senate seat at the weekend, which saw the Democratic candidate win by 14 points in a conservative district outside Dallas. Trump took the same district by 17 points in 2024.

Trump distanced himself from the result, dismissing it as a “local Texas race”. But the defeated GOP candidate, Leigh Wambsganss, admitted the Democratic victory was a “wake-up call” for Republicans in Texas and nationwide.

Scudder insists that the Democratic party offers a contrast to voters wearied by decades of Republican “radicalism” and “grift”.

“You don’t have a high-profile primary with two well-funded candidates who are superstars of the party unless you have a state that’s in play,” he said. “The odds are against us, of course, but previous elections don’t vote, polls don’t vote. We’re going to throw down and fight in every corner of Texas.”

Photographs by Harmon Dobson/ZUMA Wire/Alamy, Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Wire, Alamy, Bob Daemmrich/Texas Tribune via AP