Sitting at home in the fall of 2020, James Talarico tuned into a virtual candidate forum hosted by the Sierra Club. When it was his turn to speak, he rattled off a series of well-received comments: White supremacy, climate change and capitalism are inextricably linked “oppressive systems” that must be dismantled, he said, while Texas’ oil and gas industries are doomed, likening the sector to “cassette tapes in the 1980s.”
The 2026 version of Talarico has already disavowed some of his past “cringey comments.” But after CNN unearthed the Sierra Club comments on Tuesday, the Texas Senate hopeful once again had to respond to his past or evolving political positions — a looming problem for many statewide Democrats this cycle.
“James is a proud capitalist and agrees with the majority of Texans that racism, natural disasters, and a billionaire-controlled economy are all problems we need to address,” campaign spokesperson JT Ennis told CNN, mirroring other candidates’ attempts to pivot back to the economy — the year’s most salient issue.
No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas in over three decades, but voters believe the tides are more favorable this year: Talarico holds a slight lead in recent polling over Ken Paxton — whom some Republicans consider a weak candidate — and the Cook Political Report categorized the race as a “toss up” in a leftward ratings shift last month.
Trending
Even with these gains, the party has little room for error in the two months before the midterms. As expected, Talarico’s Republican opponent jumped on the comments as another example of the Democrat’s “radical” views, continuing to bank on the chance that his past views might scare off voters still on the fence.
“I think it’s been commonly recognized from the beginning that Talarico was going to have to answer for those comments and that it was going to be a persistent line of attack from Republicans,” Jim Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, told NOTUS.
Henson, who has analyzed Texas politics for decades, thinks Talarico’s comments are an effective example of the emerging Democratic “escape plan,” where candidates use the economy to qualify their earlier positions.
“You can’t disavow all those positions, but one thing Talarico is good at is speaking in reasonable terms about things,” Henson said.
Some progressive Democrats have tried to distance themselves from positions they took in the political landscape of 2020 — a watershed presidential election year defined by the COVID-19 pandemic and fervent social justice movements focused on police brutality — while still maintaining left-wing positions like curbing military aid to Israel.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) popularized the term “Woke 1.0” — though she noted that she was quoting New York City Council member Chi Ossé — when she called the pandemic-era period “crazy” in an interview with ABC News last month.
The term has come to encompass a variety of progressive policy positions made by statewide candidates before they had national aspirations, including Talarico, a state representative whose Austin-area district skews Hispanic and younger. Some Democratic strategists think Talarico has been able to effectively bridge the gap between his previous positions to adjust to the current political landscape.
“The sort of ‘Woke 2.0’ of it all —- to the extent that it exists — is going to be rooted in these causes around universality,” Tré Easton, vice president for public affairs at the Searchlight Institute, a center-left think tank, told NOTUS. Broader issues like health care access or energy and housing prices are now on the table as the party’s left flank shifts its focus away from identity-based issues.
“All that said, I do think it’s good that it’s happening, but, you know, the damage to the party’s brand remains,” Easton said.
As Republicans try to leverage culture war issues — which aren’t necessarily top of mind for most voters — Democrats running statewide or who hold 2028 aspirations still run the risk of being caught up by past comments, strategists warn.
Someone like Ocasio-Cortez, one of the progressive movement’s most influential members, has also tried to put some space between herself and “rhetoric in that time” — especially as speculation about her own presidential prospects looms. But some centrist strategists think the party’s brand and credibility have more “damage” through which they need to work.
Centrist think tank Third Way is known for working with more moderate Democrats, said Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy, education and politics. But the organization has been engaging with a “much broader ideological set of players” over the past two years, she told NOTUS, including progressives that have realized “the places that the advocacy groups were taking them was going to be an electoral dead end.”
While several candidates, including those affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, have been able to balance their past firebrand remarks from several years ago with new or updated positions, those running statewide like Talarico have more pressure to appeal to a wider audience than someone running for the U.S. House or other district-based races.
For example, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, has had to tread a precarious line on past comments about 9/11 in a tight battleground state race against former Rep. Mike Rogers, facing criticism that has intensified in part because of his Muslim faith.
“I think all of us look back and say, ‘9/11 was an awful thing that happened in this country,’ and I think all of us also look back and say, ‘Think about all the wars that were fought and how much safer do we feel like they made us?’” El-Sayed told CBS Detroit on Monday when asked about the post.
Francesca Hong’s narrow loss to David Crowley in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary served as another warning sign this cycle after the progressive candidate’s campaign faced a string of unearthed posts calling to “cancel Thanksgiving” or “defund then abolish” the police, who “exist to uphold white supremacy.”
Hong walked back these comments and more, but in the end, some Democratic primary voters in the swing state may have found it difficult to adjust to her new positions, strategists say.
“I think you can only disavow so much before you just start looking disingenuous,” Easton said, speaking broadly about all Democratic candidates.
As Talarico distances himself from past comments this week, the Democrat has tried to distinguish himself from Paxton by calling out his decision to wear a $41,000 watch at a recent campaign stop.
But the question remains whether those types of attacks are really “going to move voters,” Henson told NOTUS.
“It’s likely to help remind Republicans that they shouldn’t even consider voting for James Talarico because he’s just a ‘woke wolf in moderate sheep’s clothing’ or something,” Henson said. “But beyond that, I just don’t think it does them a lot of good, and I don’t think the Talarico campaign has to spend an enormous amount of time on it.”
Author
