In South Texas, Allred and Talarico compete for Latino voters by vowing to fight for working class

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Jonathan Torrez of Harlingen walked into 1848 BBQ in Brownsville for a town hall with Colin Allred earlier this month unsure of who he’d support in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

An hour later, after hearing Allred describe how his mother would swipe her teacher’s credit union debit card “and say a prayer” to buy groceries, the 37-year-old car wash and restaurant worker decided Allred would get his vote.

“It’s not just he’s a minority, but he knows certain struggles I’ve gone through,” said Torrez, who grew up poor as one of six children raised by a single mother. “I know he can relate to that struggle and understand that struggle and take it seriously.”

The town hall was one of several events Allred, a former Dallas congressman and the 2024 Democratic Senate nominee, held on a recent two-day trip through the Rio Grande Valley, five months before next year’s March primary. Just the week prior, his main rival in the Senate race, state Rep. James Talarico, held rallies in McAllen and Brownsville.

The swings through the Valley are part of a broader effort by both candidates to win over Latino voters in South Texas, many of whom are blue-collar workers, Catholic or nondenominational Christian, and worried about rising everyday costs and widespread immigration raids. Allred and Talarico are both trying to break through by leaning into their own working class backgrounds and pitching economically populist visions, hoping the message will resonate with a voting bloc that lurched to the right in 2024 largely due to economic concerns.

The early attention devoted to South Texas is a sign both candidates recognize the region’s critical importance in deciding the primary — and that whoever emerges as the nominee will need to regain the party’s footing there to have a chance of winning in November.

“James and Colin going down early and making them a focal point is a big deal for both of their campaigns,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who hosts a podcast about Latino voters. “They realize the same thing that everybody else does: This is a boat that’s very fluid and very persuadable and open to the ideas of candidates who are going to bring them solutions to their everyday problems.”

Though Texas’ border counties used to vote reliably blue, recent cycles saw the largely Hispanic voter population side increasingly with Republicans, especially at the top of the ticket. Donald Trump carried counties along the border over Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, including all four counties in the Valley after drawing just 29% there in 2016.

But Latino voters more broadly have begun to sour on Trump, with local elected Democrats in South Texas reporting signs of buyer’s remorse among communities still saddled with high everyday costs and worn down by fear of the Trump administration’s immigration raids.

“We’re starting to see the real effects of the Trump policies,” said Richard Gonzalez, chair of the Hidalgo County Democratic Party. “You’re going to see a lot of these people basically be looking for a way out. If we do our messaging correctly, we can try to win those people back.”

Before then, Allred and Talarico will have to compete for their vote in the primary.

Counties within 20 miles of the Texas-Mexico border, most of which are overwhelmingly Latino, supplied 11.5% of voters in the 2024 Senate Democratic primary. Statewide, Latinos make up about one-third of the Democratic primary electorate, according to Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University who conducts statewide polling.

Sylvia Tanguma, president of the McAllen chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said she was still undecided between Allred and Talarico, but that their focus on kitchen-table issues would resonate with people in the Valley. In Hidalgo County — which includes McAllen and more than half the Valley’s residents — the median household income is about $57,000, and roughly one-quarter of the population lacks health coverage, both near the bottom of Texas’ major counties.

Voters in the Valley “just want someone that understands where they are coming from,” she said. “That they’re not rich, they don’t have money, and what they want is to be able to go to the store and buy groceries.”

In his loss to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, Allred ran ahead of Harris by about 10 points in the Rio Grande Valley, a record he points to as evidence that his candidacy resonates with South Texans and makes him the best qualified to take on the Republican nominee in 2026. He’s also trying to distinguish himself from Talarico by highlighting his biography and record in Congress, and rolling out a set of policies he’d pursue to make life more affordable, from reversing Trump’s renewable energy cuts to reining in the cost of prescription drugs.

“What we have to make sure we do in this election, and what is personal for me, is grounding ourselves back in working people’s lives and experiences,” Allred said at a town hall in Brownsville. “Folks who look like me and come from where I come from usually don’t make it this far. So I have a story to tell about who we are as a state, where we can go and also what kind of coalition it’s going to take to win in this state.”

Polling of the nascent primary has found that Latino voters are divided between the two candidates, with many still undecided. A statewide survey conducted in late September by the University of Houston and Texas Southern University found Talarico leading Allred, 42% to 38%, among Latinos, with 20% unsure who to support.

Talarico, a four-term state lawmaker from Austin, has similarly centered his pitch on fighting for working Texans and taking on billionaires, with a greater emphasis on his Christian faith — a religious background shared by many Latinos in the Valley — and his background as a former public school teacher in San Antonio.

At rallies in Brownsville and McAllen late last month, Talarico argued that national Democrats had taken Hispanic communities “for granted,” leading people to turn to an alternative.

“Republican politicians came here and made big promises,” Talarico said. “They promised big change, but they delivered more of the same. If you feel like you’ve been conned, if you feel like you’ve been left behind by both political parties, you have a place in this campaign.”

Voters in the Valley still up for grabs

Over lunch at a cozy Italian restaurant in Brownsville earlier this month, Cameron County Clerk Sylvia Garza-Perez raised to Allred a common criticism of his 2024 Senate campaign.

“You weren’t here as often as we needed you to be,” she told him, sitting alongside three other local elected leaders. “The party is in a place right now where they need hope. They need to have someone they can believe in.”

Though Allred spent time in South Texas during his 2024 run and grew up visiting his grandmother in Brownsville, some Democrats criticized his campaign last year for its buttoned-up approach, especially compared to Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s electrifying run in 2018.

This time, Allred, a civil rights lawyer and former NFL linebacker, is being more open about his backstory and how it shapes his politics, with the goal of establishing deeper connections with voters at smaller, community-centered events and “meeting people where they are.” In discussions with college students, a teacher union and local leaders, Allred drew on his upbringing by a single mother and how she couldn’t afford to buy her house until he was in the NFL to underscore his campaign focus on lowering costs for working Texans and uprooting corruption in politics.

“I decided that if I was going to run again that I wanted to try and show more of myself,” Allred said in an interview. “A lot of people see in my story either experiences that they’ve had or that they’ve seen in their community.”

From events with just a handful of participants to larger town halls, Allred also talked about how his mother, a public school teacher of 27 years, struggled to find child care and pay for groceries. He mentioned that he found out via the internet that his father died from alcoholism, and that their only real connection is a scar his father left on his lip when he was a baby.

“I have lived the same way that you live,” Allred told a couple dozen people at 1848 BBQ. “So I have a story to tell about who we are and what we have to do to address what folks are going through. And I have the experience.”

Talarico, meanwhile, is betting that his experience as a public school teacher on the west side of San Antonio, his focus on education in the Texas House and his faith will bring South Texas voters to his campaign. He was born to a single mother from Laredo, who fled an abusive partner with an infant Talarico in tow, and who made a nursery for him in the closet of a room at the hotel she worked at in Austin.

Lines to greet him and take photos after his events have stretched for three to four hours long, Talarico said, with voters in South Texas often asking to talk about faith and spirituality and to pray together.

“They want to know that faith is central to my work and my life, just like it is for them,” Talarico, an aspiring Presbyterian minister, said in an interview. “It creates an opportunity for a real, deep connection that’s deeper than partisanship, deeper than public policy. It’s something that I think resonates at the core of what people’s lives are all about.”

In Pharr, Marco Martinez, a broadcaster filming the school district’s homecoming football game this month, said he was undecided between Allred and Talarico. Allred had given a pep talk to the team at halftime, and, as he walked the sideline under the Friday night lights, Martinez excitedly took a video of him going by — until his colleague told him the flash on his phone was on.

“He’s down to earth. He knows and he understands the middle class. He understands the needs down here,” Martinez, who is from Laredo and has lived in the Valley for 25 years, said of Allred. But he added that as a Catholic, he admired Talarico’s faith and his efforts to fight Republican lawmakers’ bill requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

Martinez still didn’t know how to pick between the two. “That’s the tough part,” he said.

Disclosure: Rice University and University of Houston have been financial supporters 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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