Democratic Senate candidate for Texas James Talarico held a town hall as part of his campaign in DeSoto, Texas, on Monday, 20 July. A clip of the event has been generating a lot of discussion online.
Some outlets plainly phrased it as Talarico endorsing reparations. He did not explicitly come out in favour of reparations payments to black Americans; however, the phrasing he used did not rule out such measures either.
Here is what James Talarico has stated in reparations verbatim:
‘Restoration, repairing past harms is part of my faith tradition. It’s part of the values I was raised with. And it’s exactly why we need a lot of the policies we’ve been talking about here. To invest in black communities, to invest in black Texans. Whether it’s tuition relief, whether it’s home ownership grants, whether it is baby bonds to ensure that we are helping to build that generational wealth. We have to correct the injustices of our past.’
So, this is not an endorsement of direct, freely usable reparation payments to black people in Texas. However, it is fair to say that Talarico is open to prioritizing black people in his state in government-funded programmes, and views the historic injustices of enslaving black people in the United States as justification for it.
This is viewed by most as an effort by Talarico to reach out to black voters. In the Democratic primary in March, he defeated Jasmine Crockett, one of the most prominent black Members of Congress at the time, in a highly contested race. Crockett has thus far refrained from endorsing her party’s Senate nominee, and even claimed that the election process was ‘racist’ against her.
Talarico and his team are aware that this could hurt his performance with black voters in the general election in November.
Can Texas Go Blue for James Talarico?
President Trump won Texas by 13.8 points in the 2024 presidential election. That is a major improvement in the Lone Star State from his past two elections: in 2016, he won by 8.99, and in 2020, he won by 5.58.
So why are Democrats feeling hopeful once again about turning the second most populous state in the Union blue?
In 2018, in the midterms during President Trump’s first term in office, they got quite close in the Senate race. GOP Senator Ted Cruz defeated his Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke by just 2.56 points.
However, in the past two election cycles, the state has moved further to the right.
The broader national political environment also appears less favourable for Democrats than it was in 2018. That year, Democrats won the national popular vote in the House of Representatives elections by 8.6 percentage points. Currently, they lead Republicans by 5.2 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. At no point since President Trump returned to office has the Democratic lead matched its 2018 margin; the party’s largest advantage has been 8.1 points.
Talarico’s supporters also laud the fact that in the primary election in March, Democratic turnout outnumbered the Republican turnout: 2.319 million people voted in the Democratic primary, while 2.166 million voted in the Republican primary. Back in 2018, 1.549 million people voted in the GOP’s primary, and 1.042 million voted in the Democratic primary.
However, supporters of the Republican candidate Ken Paxton point to the primaries in the 2008 presidential election. Then, when another high-profile black candidate ran, Barack Obama, the turnout on the Democratic side outnumbered that of the Republicans by more than 2:1, 2.875 million against 1.362 million. Yet Republican John McCain ended up carrying Texas by 11.75 points, even though he lost the presidential election by a wide margin.
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