“Yes—” Talarico said, nodding.
“We’ve been trying that for fifty years!” Rawlings said.
“Sure, yep—”
“I just care about winning.”
“We have to win,” Talarico said. “Democracy is withering on the vine.”
“I wouldn’t even use the word ‘Democrat.’ I’d just say, ‘I’m a Texan who can beat Ken Paxton!’ ”
“That’s great advice.”
Rawlings’s tutorial zeal seemed to derive equally from the existential stakes of the race and the candidate’s evident need of guidance. Talarico, clean-cut, clean-shaven, and wearing one of his three white J. C. Penney dress shirts, looked like he’d just finished his paper route and was eager to shovel the church’s walk. During the ten-o’clock service, he greeted two dozen parishioners who lined up to meet him. Rawlings shook his head at how long Talarico took with each baby proffered for approval. “He hasn’t learned to maximize his touches,” he said. “But he’s authentic.”
Talarico told me later that he didn’t intend to take Rawlings’s advice about positioning: “I’m not a huge fan of being against someone. Ken Paxton is a symptom, not the disease, and so is Donald Trump—they are the products of a broken system. A campaign based on love is more durable than one based on fear.”
On the trail, Talarico invokes his mother, Tamara, as love incarnate. When he was seven weeks old, Tamara left his father, an abusive alcoholic, and moved into an empty room at a residential hotel where she worked as a sales assistant. She was determined to raise her son in a healthier environment; Talarico’s applause line is “My mom showed me that true love doesn’t tolerate abuse.” Yet even Tamara is mystified by her son’s relentless urge to repair. “I’ll tell Jimmy I’m annoyed at one or both of my sisters, and he’ll always start with ‘You have much more in common than you have differences,’ ” she told me. “We’re regular people—we’re judgy and icky. And he’s so reasonable. He won’t trash-talk. And that’s very annoying, because some people need trash-talking.”
After a rally in Wichita Falls—hard-right terrain—Talarico and four members of his campaign staff were driving south, workshopping themes for a talk the following night. Talarico fills the Notes app on his phone with quotations from such theologians as Richard Rohr, Dorothy Day, and Gustavo Gutiérrez, along with his own ideas, and he and his aides sift it for usable nuggets. “Is there a ‘Love is strong’ riff?” Talarico wondered. “ ‘Hate doesn’t lower anyone’s electricity bill’?” He has a knack for love-and-hate antitheses: “Christian nationalists walk around with a mouth full of Scripture and a heart full of hate.” It’s this rhetorical gift which made Obama call him a “really talented young man.”
“We’ve never done ‘What if Jesus went to the U.S. Senate?’ ” Antonio Esparza, who runs Talarico’s social media, said.
“ ‘For I was hungry and you cut my food stamps,’ ” Talarico said, recalling a line from a draft.
Esparza was having second thoughts. “The whole thing is about weeping, though,” he said. “It’s not fire.”
Talarico laughed and said, “The whole campaign is about weeping!” His blood-sugar alarm went off; in his first campaign, in 2018, he canvassed the length of his district on foot, felt so woozy that he went to the hospital, and discovered that he has diabetes. A staffer noted that it was time to take insulin, but he said, “It’s fine,” and went on thinking. He tends to ignore urgent beeps—from his glucose monitor, his gas gauge, his alarm clock—because he dislikes being rushed. His staff often has to yank him out of his ranch house in Austin to get on the road.
Talarico is remarkably consistent onstage, but in private his affect fluctuates. When he bolts Kraft Mac & Cheese without chewing because he enjoys the “liquid tubes” feeling of childhood, or when he gets defeated by airline luggage tags—“The sticky thing is complicated!”—he resembles Dennis the Menace. More often, though, he calls to mind Robert Caro, as when he passed by Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, and gave staffers a disquisition on the aftermath of J.F.K.’s assassination. (“It’s why the Dallas Cowboys becoming ‘America’s team’ and the show ‘Dallas’ were so important—Dallas had to shake the cloud that had hung over it.”)
