James Talarico’s progressive take on Christianity made him an online sensation. Will it translate to his Texas Senate bid?

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About 20 minutes into his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Texas Rep. James Talarico started making his case that the Bible sanctions abortion.

In the Book of Luke, the Austin Democrat noted, Mary has a vision from God that she’s going to give birth to a baby who will bring down the powerful from their thrones. But, critically, before she becomes pregnant, Talarico said, an angel “asks Mary if this is something she wants to do, and she says, ‘if it is God’s will, let it be done.’”

“To me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create,” Talarico, an aspiring Presbyterian minister and U.S. senator, told Rogan, arguing “the idea that there is a set Christian orthodoxy on the issue of abortion is just not rooted in Scripture.”

He went on to accuse the religious right of prioritizing abortion bans and “control” of pregnant mothers, rather than reducing miscarriages and protecting children through expanded health care access.

“I think that’s what we see across this Christian nationalist movement,” Talarico said. “This is religion at its worst: trying to control people and what they do.”

It was archetypal Talarico fare, blending religion and a progressive, populist politics on a digital platform made to reach millions. The appearance on Rogan’s show was only the latest in a string of viral hits this year for the devoutly Christian Democrat, who has garnered an enormous following online from videos that show him sermonizing about how religion informs his liberal worldview and debating his Republican colleagues in the Texas House over their efforts to infuse religion into public life.

By the end of the podcast episode — in which Talarico also wielded Scripture to defend gay rights, argue against religion in public schools and explain his work in the Legislature to lower the cost of prescription drugs — Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump for the White House in 2024, told Talarico he “needs to run for president,” catapulting the four-term state lawmaker across the internet and making national headlines.

Instead, Talarico is embarking on a long-shot attempt to parlay his budding stardom into a winning 2026 bid for U.S. Senate, betting that a message grounded in faith and taking back power for working Texans will be enough to break through in a state littered with failed Democratic hopefuls.

Modern-day Democratic candidates have struggled to appeal to Christian voters, especially the white evangelicals who make up around a quarter of Texas’ electorate and broke almost 90% for Donald Trump in November.

But for Talarico, religion is his foundation. And taking a different tack from Democratic campaigns of the past, he’s putting his Christian faith at the forefront of his pitch, citing it as the basis of his policy goals, political aspirations and an outlook that frames politics not as “left versus right, but top versus bottom.”

That approach, Talarico said, demands fighting for the little guy — a battle he thinks national Democrats have forgotten how to wage.

“Imagine a Democratic Party that takes on big money and isn’t captured by it,” Talarico said to an audience of Democrats in Hays County last month. “Imagine a Democratic Party that delivers for people on housing, health care and education, and actually defeats the right-wing extremists who have taken over this country.”

Bruised by recent blowout losses, Texas Democrats nonetheless see an opportunity in next year’s Senate race, with the incumbent, GOP Sen. John Cornyn, toiling to fend off a primary challenge from Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose hard-right politics and trail of personal and legal woes could give Democrats a clearer opening if he wins the nomination. Democrats hope that backlash to the Trump administration will also drive voters to the polls.

It’ll be an uphill battle for any Democrat to fulfill the perennial promise that Texas will go blue. But some see Talarico, 36, as uniquely positioned to get there — if he can prevail in the Democratic primary. Former Dallas congressman and 2024 Senate nominee Colin Allred is already in the race, as is retired astronaut Terry Virts.

Talarico’s “not the only Christian Democrat in the country, but he’s the one who maybe most effectively tells a story about why he believes what he believes,” Luke Warford, a Democratic strategist not involved in the Senate primary, said. “He is unlike anyone else in the Democratic Party. And I think that resonates at a time when people are hungry for different.”

Usually dressed in a dark suit and Lucchese cowboy boots stamped with the seal of the Texas House of Representatives, Talarico is a soft-spoken seminarian with a choir boy’s face. He invokes Bible teachings in conversation as regularly as a Sunday school teacher (which he was, in fact, as a teenager).

He was raised in the suburbs north of Austin by a single mother and taught sixth-grade language arts at a public school in one of Texas’ poorest zip codes in San Antonio for two years. He first won office in 2018 by flipping a swing district in Round Rock, becoming the youngest member of the Texas House at 29.

In the Legislature, he homed in on education issues, creating viral moments clashing with Republicans on public school vouchers, book bans and religion in schools. Diagnosed with Type I diabetes after nearly falling into a coma during his first campaign, Talarico also passed bills capping monthly insulin copays at $25 and enabling imports of lower cost prescription drugs from Canada.

Guiding it all, Talarico said in an interview, was a profoundly Christian “suspicion of concentrated wealth and power,” and a spiritual commitment to uplifting his neighbors — a message at the center of his fledgling Senate campaign.

Billionaires “divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so that we don’t notice that they’re defunding our schools, gutting our health care and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends,” he said in his campaign launch video last week. “It is the oldest strategy in the world: Divide and conquer. But we will not be conquered.”

Embracing the attention economy

When Talarico gave his stump speech at a local Democratic fundraising event in Dripping Springs last month, the roomful of attendees — future Democratic primary voters with a median age well into retirement — lit up.

But the same speech, calling for Democrats to “start flipping tables” and take on the billionaire class, also manages to capture tens of thousands of viewers on TikTok, where a younger, more politically amorphous audience won’t hesitate to pan any perceived inauthenticity and scroll away in an instant.

“The Democratic Party has forgotten how to fight,” Talarico says in one clip from the Dripping Springs event that’s logged around 200,000 views. “But this critical moment in our country’s history demands fighters, not folders.”

The speech spans discussion of his upbringing by a single mother, his days as a public school teacher, Jesus’ teachings and the lesson from his grandfather — a Baptist preacher who ministered in Corpus Christi and Laredo — that “we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave two commandments: love God and love neighbor.”

“This democracy of ours is a lot more than a constitution — it’s a covenant. It’s a relationship between neighbors. It’s a promise that we make to each other,” Talarico said. “But as we speak, the most powerful people in this nation are breaking that promise, with every gerrymandered district, with every suppressed vote, with every transfer of wealth.”

The story he tells is one that emerges from his faith and that is consistent across his videos, where he’s leaned into an understanding of politics and policy popularized by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders that revolves around who’s on top — and how the powerful keep everyone else divided.

He’s earned over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram each, a reach, especially for one state lawmaker out of a 150-person body, that has quickly established him as a spokesperson for Democrats as they struggle to regain power in Texas. His TikTok following — 1.2 million — dwarfs the Texas Democratic Party’s 73,000 followers, exceeds that of The Wall Street Journal and other national media brands, and is almost half that of Gavin Newsom, the digitally-active California governor. On Instagram, Talarico has over five times as many followers as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, though Abbott beats him on X by a degree of seven.

This approach to reaching voters is geared more toward today’s attention economy and the dominance of short-form video than typical statewide campaigns, which have long relied on expensive TV ads and mailers to get a message across.

“A lot of people get their news from their TikTok algorithm, or they get their news from a podcast, so if we’re not there, they’re not going to hear from us,” Talarico said. “We win by persuading our neighbors. And if you’re not out there making the case and winning the debate — the public debate — then you’re not going to win elections.”

Central to Talarico’s skyrocketing online profile are his posts addressing religion and politics. Some of his first viral TikTok videos show him confronting Republican lawmakers over legislation requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms and allowing unlicensed religious chaplains to work in mental health roles at public schools.

He has also drawn millions of views on sermons that lay out his progressive reading of the Bible, including one from July where he questions what Jesus would do “about a tax system that benefits the rich over the poor” and “a health care system that forces the sick to start GoFundMe pages to afford lifesaving surgeries.”

Talarico’s online fame has yet to translate among the Texas electorate, with early polls finding that the majority of Democratic primary voters have never heard of him or don’t know enough about him to form an opinion.

Still, some early signs of the buzz surrounding Talarico could be seen at his recent public appearances. After the Dripping Springs fundraiser, the line of people waiting to chat and take selfies with him was never less than a dozen deep. A few weeks later, at his campaign kickoff event, the line to greet him pushed a couple hundred people long, bringing to mind a boy band meet-and-greet.

In the Texas House, Rep. Phil Cortez, D-San Antonio, has played a running bit on Talarico since 2023, asking for a selfie with the rising star whenever they cross paths. Talarico, at this point, laughs and demurs or says that he’ll have to start charging for photos.

“His social media game is second to none,” Cortez said. “You could just tell he’s just a really nice guy, probably too nice to be in politics. But I think young people gravitate toward him. … They’ll be out there block walking for him every day.”

Christianity through a progressive lens

The first protest Talarico ever attended was as a fourth grader in Austin, demanding then-Gov. George W. Bush support legislation making it easier to prosecute hate crimes after the grisly murders in 1998 of James Byrd Jr., a Black man who was lynched in Jasper, Texas, and Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was beaten to death in Wyoming.

He went to that protest outside the governor’s mansion with his church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian, which also later criticized the Iraq War and President Barack Obama’s use of drone strikes and mass deportations. The Rev. Dr. Jim Rigby, who is still Talarico’s pastor today, was put on trial by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) in the 1990s for ordaining lesbian and gay clergy.

“Politics and religion and causing trouble all were very intertwined and synonymous for me growing up,” Talarico said in an interview. “Being a Christian means getting in trouble. It means ruffling feathers, going against the grain.”

At the center of Talarico’s faith and politics is a capacious understanding of Jesus’ two sweeping commandments: love God, and love neighbor. For Talarico, both demand health care for all, fully funded public schools, access to child care and an economic system that rejects concentrated wealth and power. He enrolled in seminary to deepen his knowledge of the Biblical stories at the base of his politics, graduating in May with a master’s degree in theological studies.

“Christianity is both spiritual and political, because politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors,” Talarico said during a sermon he delivered in June at University United Methodist Church in Austin. “Jesus took on the system. That’s Christianity at its best.”

Talarico’s melding of religion and anti-billionaire sentiment is, in part, what first drove his rise, with some of his earliest viral moments focusing on GOP megadonors Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, and their sway in pushing Texas politics toward their Christian nationalist vision.

He draws a sharp distinction between that vision, which he argues is focused on “elevating our religion over others, dominating our neighbors, instead of loving them as ourselves,” and his own understanding of religion in politics. In his campaign launch video, he’s positioned between a white church and a house bearing the Texas flag — a literal separation between church and state.

The imperative to live out his faith through political activism was also what drove a 15-year-old Jimmy Talarico to email then-Texas Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin, in 2006, pleading to be admitted to his volunteer campaign program to spend his summer knocking on doors in triple-digit heat.

“I remember getting that email and reading it at home, showing it to my wife, and saying, ‘This is the most extraordinary letter I’ve ever seen from a 15-year-old,’” said Strama, who represented the district Talarico now sits in. “The reason what he says is achieving so much resonance is because of the authenticity of where it comes from.”

Republicans see things differently. If Talarico wins the primary, his GOP opponent, along with Texas’ robust network of conservative donors and political groups, will be ready to lay into him for the party-line positions he has taken over the years on issues like abortion, transgender rights and religion in schools. Some have already started pressing the case that Talarico’s stances are antithetical to Christian beliefs.

“James Talarico is another radical left-wing Democrat whose values do not align with Texans,” Matt Mackowiak, senior adviser for Cornyn’s campaign, said in a statement. “Just like Colin Allred and Beto O’Rourke before him, Talarico will find Texans are not interested in his brand of abortion-on-demand, open borders, anti-Texas politics.”

In response to Talarico’s Senate campaign launch, Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen, posted on social media that the Austin Democrat “isn’t reading the same Bible I’m reading. And his ‘values’ couldn’t be more unTexan. He may talk [the] talk … but he can’t walk the walk.” And GOP Rep. Cody Harris of Palestine accused Talarico of twisting Scripture “to sound sweet to the ears for his own glorification and contort[ing] Jesus to fit a nuanced feel-good justification for sin.”

But Talarico is betting that a message more tightly focused on working people and their needs will resonate beyond the culture war issues Republicans might try to pin on him.

Trans, undocumented and Muslim people are but a small slice of the population, he said at his campaign kickoff, adding that those frequent Republican targets aren’t the ones cutting health care, school funding or taxes for their wealthy donors.

“We are focused on the wrong 1%,” he said. “It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians. The culture wars are a smokescreen.”

Talarico’s grounding in religion and his ability to talk about issues from the lens of his faith also set him apart from other Democrats, positioning him to potentially break through with a wider group of voters and distance himself from the national party’s brand, said Warford, the Democratic strategist.

People “want a leader that is rooted in values and in a worldview that feels trustworthy and authentic. Faith is not the only thing for that to be rooted in, but it is one that is really prominent across the state of Texas,” Warford said. “It’s also really valuable from simply the perspective of showing that he is different from other Democrats.”

An uphill climb

Talarico is framing his bid for Senate as an underdog campaign, and in many ways, it is.

He hasn’t been tested statewide, nor has he ever faced a competitive primary. He’ll have to raise more money than he ever has before. And he’ll have to establish himself outside the Austin area, starting with primary voters pining for liberal policies that could prove toxic among Texas’ general electorate. Talarico’s challenge there will be to win over Democratic voters — who are disproportionately people of color — without tying himself to the national party brand or otherwise sullying his chances in November, said Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and director of the Lone Star Project.

“There’s a reason that Democrats haven’t won in Texas in a long time,” Angle said. “It’s because we have to win with a coalition that’s much harder to build than the Republicans’. And it’s not just an ideological coalition, but it’s a racial coalition, and it’s very hard to be known.”

And there’s the fact that the sheen has eventually worn off every Texas Democrat who has run statewide over the last 30 years. O’Rourke came the closest to victory in 2018, when he lost to Cruz by under 3 points.

Allred is also far more familiar to voters across the state, with campaign infrastructure that raised a whopping $99.9 million in his 2024 run against Sen. Ted Cruz.

But Talarico thinks Texans, across demographic and ideological lines, are ready for something new.

“The country is looking for a reset in the Democratic Party, and I think we’ve got to put forward people who are offering something different,” he said. “People are tired of being pandered to. They want someone who’s actually going to talk about the challenges they face, which tend to be common across all these different lines of difference.”

Talarico thinks Allred would make a “fine U.S. senator” and considers him a friend, having served as one of his surrogates in 2024. But he said they have “disagreements about how to campaign” and “what’s necessary in this cycle” — an allusion to Democratic critiques of Allred’s relatively muted campaign last year, particularly in contrast with O’Rourke’s frenetic runs in 2018 and 2022.

Allred has said he’s committed to a different approach this time and has already held a half dozen town halls across the state on his “Unrig Texas” tour.

“I’ve never taken anything for granted in life or politics, and this campaign is no exception,” Allred said in a statement responding to Talarico’s entry into the race. “For the next fourteen months, my focus will be on meeting with and listening to Texas families — all across our state — to build the diverse coalition we need to win.”

Talarico pledged to campaign in “unorthodox” ways, such as with town halls full of Republican voters. He said he hopes to replicate O’Rourke’s “energy” and “his willingness to go everywhere and talk to everyone” in 2018, when he visited all 254 Texas counties.

Talarico has also followed O’Rourke’s lead in swearing off contributions from corporate PACs, which he defines as those aligned with or named after a corporation. He raised over $1 million in small-dollar donations in the first 12 hours of his campaign, he announced last week.

But even while railing against billionaires’ influence in politics, Talarico has accepted donations from groups funded by them, including Miriam Adelson, the casino mogul and GOP donor, whose group gave Talarico almost $60,000 last year, and Charles Butt, the H-E-B chairman who has backed candidates in both parties opposed to private school vouchers.

Talarico, who has introduced legislation to cap campaign contributions, said he knows his message against money in politics opens him up to scrutiny. He said he accepted those donations because he supported the causes of the groups providing them, from legalizing gambling to fully funding public education. And he added that he was not willing to “unilaterally disarm while Republicans play by their own rules.”

“It certainly would be easier just to accept everything,” he said. “I am in this broken system like everybody else is. I, at least, am trying to put forward ideas for how it could be different.”

Disclosure: H-E-B has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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