Talarico Wants to Transcend the Pettiness of Modern Politics. Can He?

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMichelle GoldbergNov. 14, 2026, 7:00 a.m. ETCredit...Mark Peterson for The New York TimesOn Thursday, James Talarico gave his first speech since his commanding victory in Texas’ Senate race. Speaking at a Democratic conference in Denver, he expressed his sincere eagerness to work with Donald Trump. Invoking Lyndon Baines Johnson, he said: “If President Trump wants the same plaques and portraits and busts as L.B.J., we can help make that a reality. We should make the final two years of his presidency the most productive of any presidency in American history, because this moment is so much bigger and so much more important than the red team or the blue team.”I found this comment slightly jarring. Talarico isn’t the first Democrat to make overtures to Trump: New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has leveraged Trump’s strange affection for him to help the city, and Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan has offered to call universal health care “Trumpcare.” But both Mamdani and El-Sayed address the president with a touch of irony, making clear they know they’re playing to his vanity. Talarico, by contrast, sounded as though he really thought Trump might be willing to help Democrats help the country. How, I asked him afterward, could he believe that?“We have a president who says he cares about working people,” Talarico said. “We now have a large majority of senators and House members who got elected talking about the needs of working people. So to me, that’s a recipe to get a lot done for the working people in my state and across this country. Of course, it may not work. There’s plenty of reasons be cynical, but there were a lot of reasons to be cynical about this race in Texas. We said from the very beginning that a little bit of hope is a dangerous thing, and so we’re doubling down on that little bit of hope.”It was an answer that spoke to a central tension in Talarico’s campaign. He ran as both a fighter and a unifier, winning support from people who’d voted for Trump and from people who wanted protection from him. He’d sometimes tell his team, “You can’t beat them at their game. You have to change the game.” By this, he meant that’d try to transcend the meanness and pettiness of modern politics. “We needed to adopt a new political consciousness, and that was really around unity, healing and love,” he told me. But It’s an open question how much unity, healing and love is possible in Trump’s Washington.From the beginning, Talarico wanted to change culture as well as policy. The seeds of his campaign were planted in the spring of 2025, when he was in a dark place. As a state representative, he had, along with his Texas House colleague Gina Hinojosa, led the opposition to Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to use vouchers to divert public money to private schools. In the previous session, a group of Republicans, many from rural areas where public schools are at the center of community life, had joined Democrats to thwart the measure. But after Abbott backed successful primary campaigns against some of the Republican holdouts, school vouchers became law.“When we lost, he was kind of going through a big psychological crisis,” said Talarico’s chief of staff in the legislature, also, confusingly, named Gina Hinojosa. “Like, how could this possibly happen? It was so obvious that this was bad for Texas voters.”Talarico began to think about running for higher office to do something about it. Around that time, he was invited on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and the buzz generated by that interview also seemed to be pushing him toward a new campaign. But he was still unsure, so Hinojosa, the chief of staff, bought some easel paper and markers to make a pros and cons list.Chief among the cons, she said, was Talarico’s desire to spare his parents and girlfriend the spotlight. Talarico was also in seminary school and didn’t want to put it on hold. He spoke about neighbors of his who were at odds over politics, accusing each other of stealing their yard signs. As a pastor, he told Hinojosa, he could work on healing his community.Then they turned to the pro side. “If you do this, you could do that ‘love thy neighbor’ message for the entire country,” Hinojosa remembered telling him. “You can start that healing process for the entire country.”Had any sophisticated political observer been watching them, the idea of starting a campaign as crusade for neighborly kindness probably would have seemed like a sweet, naïve fantasy. But Talarico and his team, many too young to be corroded by cynicism, mostly hewed to that original vision. Astonishingly, it worked. Talarico won by 12 points in a state Trump had carried by almost 14. His coattails helped flip every statewide executive office in Texas and the legislative chamber in which he once served. Gina Hinojosa, his former fellow state representative, was elected governor. The other Gina Hinojosa will be Talarico’s chief of staff in Washington.“I remember when everyone, including people in my own party, told me winning Texas was impossible, and we just won by double digits,” Talarico told me. “So I guess I’m in the mood to do impossible things.”Those around Talarico insist that his overtures to Trump is not the same as squishy centrism. They say we can expect him to be forceful in opposing Trump’s mass deportation regime, his war and his corruption. Talarico’s 29-year-old campaign manager, Seth Krasne, pointed out that on the trail, “he spoke about ICE abuses with a tremendous amount of moral clarity. And that will remain true.” After his victory, Talarico added his “I Voted” sticker to the Houston memorial of Lorenzo Salgado, a father of three killed by ICE this year. With his Denver speech, then, he wasn’t expressing an accommodation to Trump, but a willingness to eschew partisanship and use whatever levers of power are available to him to make his constituents’ lives better.Talarico and those around him talk a lot about rejecting binaries, including the one between standing up to Trump and working with him. (Talarico once said that God is nonbinary, and though his opponents tried to use those words against him, Krasne joked that the line could have been the campaign’s unofficial motto.) “We’re under no illusion that we are in a post-partisan United States,” said Hinojosa. “But the goal is to get to a place where we see how much we have in common.”So he’s going to Washington with a hand extended to the president who called him “this transgender” and the vice president who hinted that he was a sex criminal. “I really do believe that the key to saving the American experiment is loving our enemies,” said Talarico. “How do we love each other through our disagreements? How do we remember each other’s humanity? How do handle each other with more care?”As it happens, my former colleague Ross Douthat, interviewing Trump for “60 Minutes,” asked the president whether he could bring himself to love his enemies if it were the price of entering heaven. Trump, who if nothing else is capable of moments of frankness, said no: “I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.” The contrast with Talarico is instructive, and it demonstrates the paradox at the heart of his appeal. His outreach to Trump can be read as moderation, but it’s also a tacit rebuke of Trumpism.Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. Related ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT