Texas state lawmaker jumps into Democratic US Senate primary

By Nolan D. McCaskill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Democratic Texas state lawmaker launched a U.S. Senate campaign on Tuesday, challenging a former member of Congress for his party's nomination in a state no Democrat has won since 1994.

State Representative James Talarico, who represents Austin in the statehouse, will face former U.S. Representative Colin Allred, who raised more than $90 million as the party's nominee last cycle against Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz.

“This is an underdog fight,” Talarico said in a statement. “We’re going up against the political establishment, and we’re going up against a lot of money. Big Money is powerful, but it's nothing compared to people power.”

Republicans hold a 53-seat majority in the U.S. Senate and are favored to hold the majority as they have few incumbents up for re-election in states seen as competitive by nonpartisan analysts. Democrats, meanwhile, must defend competitive seats in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire.

Democrats would need to net four seats in 2026 to win a Senate majority, which would require them to win fairly competitive states such as Maine and North Carolina in addition to heavily Republican ones such as Ohio and Texas.

Talarico, 36, has repeatedly gone viral on TikTok, where he has more than 1 million followers, and grew his national profile as he and other Texas Democrats fled the state last month to deny a quorum in the Republican-controlled Texas House, delaying passage of the party's mid-decade gerrymander to create five new Republican congressional seats.

Allred, a former civil rights lawyer and NFL player, was elected to Congress in 2018 after flipping a battleground district. He lost to Cruz last year by more than 8 percentage points but outperformed the top of the ticket, as President Donald Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris by nearly 14 percentage points. Allred launched his second Senate campaign in July, hoping to unseat incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn.

Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court justice and state attorney general, has served in the Senate since 2002. This cycle, however, he faces a tough primary challenger in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a conservative firebrand who was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 but later acquitted by the Texas Senate.

Democrats have been shut out of statewide office in Texas for decades. Former Representative Beto O'Rourke came within 3 percentage points of ousting Cruz in 2018, but subsequent elections have shown O'Rourke's margin to be more of an outlier than a trend.

(Reporting by Nolan D. McCaskill; editing by Scott Malone and Stephen Coates)