Rep. James Talarico: Texas Democrats’ ‘Beto’ O’Rourke 2.0

OPINION:

Many Texas Democrats heaved a huge sigh of relief on March 3, thinking they had dodged a political bullet when state Rep. James Talarico defeated unhinged, far-left U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for their party’s U.S. Senate nomination.

Compared with Ms. Crockett, Mr. Talarico comes across as mild-mannered and moderate.

Yet in the three-plus weeks since the party primary, Mr. Talarico, 36, has gone from what Democrats saw as their best shot at winning a statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1990 to what is shaping up as the second coming of Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, their previous failed “great white hope.”

Just as Mr. O’Rourke masqueraded as a moderate when he ran for U.S. Senate in 2018 and for Texas governor in 2022 (losing both), Mr. Talarico’s own words will surely prove to be his Senate campaign’s undoing.

In a video that Texas Republicans began sharing online last week, the Austin Democrat called for more vegan diets, supposedly as a way to curb global warming.

“We have heard — I think, heard more and more — issues of animal welfare. I think, not just because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s the moral thing to do, but also … necessary to fight climate change. It is now existential that we try to reduce our meat consumption,” Mr. Talarico said at a 2022 fundraiser for the Texas Humane Legislation Network.

“I am proud to say that our campaign [for the Texas House of Representatives] has officially become a nonmeat campaign,” he added. “We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”

In a barbecue-loving state known for sprawling cattle ranches, Mr. Talarico should expect a red-meat Republican campaign ad branding him as “all hat and no cattle,” so he hastily circulated a photo of himself gnawing on a hickory-smoked turkey leg.

It will be a much heavier lift for Mr. Talarico to distance himself from some of the many other things he has said or written that range from the outre to the outrageous:

• In an October 2021 social media post that one wouldn’t ordinarily expect from a onetime Presbyterian seminarian, he declared: “In my faith, God is nonbinary.”
• At an April 2021 Texas House committee’s hearing on a bill to prohibit biological males from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, Mr. Talarico stunned the bill’s sponsor by asserting: “Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.”
• In a 2020 tweet about what he called the “virus of racism,” he wrote: “White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go — through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms — like a white hood or a Confederate flag — to be contagious.”
• After the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Mr. Talarico moaned, “More than half our population became second-class citizens. Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the State. And nothing is more un-Christian.”
• Just last week on a March 19 podcast, when asked whether he would vote against now Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, he said, “I would be a ‘no’ on any potential secretary who is not willing to tear down this secret police force [i.e., U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and replace it with an agency that’s actually focused on public safety.”

Even in the absence of such decidedly un-Texan — and well outside the mainstream — views, Mr. Talarico would face an uphill battle.

The last time a Democrat won a statewide election in Texas was more than 35 years ago. In 1990, state Treasurer Ann Richards won the governorship, beating a gaffe-prone Republican nominee who blew a large lead in the polls.

Ms. Richards was defeated for reelection by president-to-be George W. Bush in 1994, six years after Sen. Lloyd Bentsen won reelection in 1988. That was the last time a Democrat won a U.S. Senate seat from Texas.

Texas Democrats’ statewide office drought is even more jaw-dropping when you consider that there are no fewer than 27 statewide elective offices in Texas, and every last one is held by a Republican.

The only chance Mr. Talarico has of winning is if Republicans don’t reunify behind whoever wins the May 26 runoff between incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and his challenger, state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Or, as Mr. Cornyn noted March 17 on social media in a punny play on words responding to Mr. Talarico’s pledge of vegan allegiance: “Vote Republican this November. The steaks couldn’t be higher.”

• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.