James Talarico thinks the San Antonio Spurs will win the 2026 NBA championship in a seven game scorcher against the New York Knicks. He also thinks he can end the statewide Democratic electoral drought in Texas.
It’s early summer, and hope springs abundant in Texas. The conference playoffs and primaries have been fought, the final contest is underway, but now comes the hardest part: winning it all.
Within hours of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s runoff election victory against sitting Texas Senator John Cornyn, the Talarico campaign announced a five-city blitz through the state: Houston, Nacogdoches, San Antonio, Leander, and Plano. According to the campaign, over 9,000 supporters attended the short-notice “The People vs. Ken Paxton” tour, which sought to define the state attorney general and MAGA devotee around the storm of criminal allegations, legal troubles, and personal scandals that have tainted his political career. In Plano, the last stop on the tour and Paxton’s home turf, a crowd of Talarico supporters about 4,000 strong chanted “lock him up!” in reference to the attorney general — a corrupt, criminal, and immoral entity that represents “the rot at the core” of American politics, as Talarico tells supporters.
The tour is an affirmation that Talarico considers Paxton’s victory over Cornyn a win for his own chances of becoming the first Democrat to win a statewide election in Texas in over 30 years. Paxton was considered the weaker primary candidate by his own party, and brings in a mountain of personal and political baggage to the race that Talarico hopes he can highlight. On top of that, Paxton is not exactly a powerhouse campaigner.
“This idea that Ken Paxton is immune from accountability is a false narrative,” Talarico tells Rolling Stone. “I mean he’s kind of like Trump without the charisma, or the sense of humor, or the star power. Kind of all the worst parts about Donald Trump, and none of the good parts.”
The campaign wants to force confrontation, both by making Paxton’s shady record a centerpoint of the race, and by making their opponent — who has a habit of ducking debates with his electoral challengers — meet them in person. I “absolutely” want to debate Paxton, Talarico adds with a grin. Ideally “multiple times.”
“[Texans] deserve to see both candidates debating their proposals and their records, so that absolutely needs to happen,” he says. But Paxton can be tough to pin down. He doesn’t have a public calendar of events on his campaign website, and the opening week of his stint as the official Republican nominee was spent not on the ground with potential supporters, but on a national media tour attempting to turn the race into a referendum on Trumpism, touting his connection to the president and trying to cast Talarico as a woke-opsessed radical leftist. Talarico isn’t taking the bait.
“We’ve been talking about Donald Trump for 10 years now, and I’m ready to talk about something else,” Talarico says of his decision to leave the president out of his opening attacks against Paxton. “I think there’s a lot of disillusionment among the president’s supporters, and my job is to extend an open hand rather than a closed fist.”
On a sweltering Sunday in Leander, a northern suburb of Austin, Talarico has just finished shaking hands with, no exaggeration, hundreds of his supporters. The last of them had hung around nearly an hour and a half after his rally speech ended — under the intermittent shade of oak trees and a lattice of water misters — just to snap a quick picture with him. The smell of sunscreen and lager lingers even as the last stragglers leave the venue. Throughout the day, no small number of attendees swapped out the Spurs gear they arrived in for Talarico merch. A similar scene played out in San Antonio less than 48 hours earlier, where the crowd chanted “Go, James, Go!” in a riff on the “Go, Spurs, Go!” chant the city has been practicing all month.
On stage, Talarico, 37 years old and just beginning to gray, made his pitch. “I have a legislative record, Ken Paxton has a criminal record.” He juxtaposed the astronomical wealth Paxton has accumulated since entering elected office with the struggles of everyday Texans to afford the lives they see their politicians living. “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis,” he declared, to raucous cheers from the thousands of supporters in attendance.
“No one has really prosecuted the case statewide against Paxton and his crimes,” Talarico says later after ducking away for a brief cool-down in a refurbished Airstream trailer that serves as the venue’s green room. He says his goal is to “actually articulate the choice that’s in front of voters in a way that Ken Paxton has never had to face.”
While Paxton has served three terms as Texas’ chief legal officer, he has yet to be electorally tested since Republicans in the state legislature impeached him in 2023, on 20 articles including bribery, alleged corruption, abuse of office in his dealings with Texas real estate developer Nate Paul, retaliation against whistleblowers, and obstruction of justice. Paxton was acquitted by the Texas Senate, shortly after a Super PAC aligned with the attorney general donated and “loaned” $3 million to the campaign coffers of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who also happens to serve as the president of the Senate presiding officer over the impeachment.
Paxton has also been criminally indicted, on charges of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The feds alleged that the attorney general, at the time a state lawmaker, had tricked investors (and at least one Texas lawmaker) into buying stock in a tech firm without disclosing his own kickback arrangement with the company. The case hung over Paxton for nine years, delayed by venue disputes and other technicalities, before being dropped after he agreed to pay out $271,000 in restitution, perform 100 hours of community service, and take an ethics course.
In July of last year, Paxton’s scandals and repeated instances of infidelity apparently became too much for his wife — state Senator Angela Paxton — who filed for divorce. Mrs. Paxton wrote in her announcement that she was separating from her husband on “biblical grounds,” and adding that “in light of recent discoveries,” she did not believe “that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.” Their divorce trial was slated for later this month, but was recently canceled after they agreed “a trial setting is no longer necessary.”
Paxton has managed to maneuver himself out of seemingly every possible roadblock. If it sounds like a familiar story, it’s because it is. The comparisons between Paxton and Trump write themselves. They are both criminally indicted politicians accused of abusing the powers of their offices, alleged serial adulterers, and survivors of impeachment efforts. The president may be absent from Talarico’s stump speech, but he is very much a part of the race.
Facing historically low approval and inklings of dissent within his own party, Trump has spent primary season ousting Republicans who have wavered as the administration spirals, and forcing through only the most loyal MAGA candidates — Paxton among them. Trump has promised to come down to Texas to campaign alongside his personal pick, and, like Paxton, has tried to paint Talarico as both a dangerous, DEI-obsessed leftist radical who will drag Texas into California-esque ruin, and an effeminate vegan who lacks the proverbial Texas toughness needed to succeed in the state. Paxton’s first post-runoff ad highlighted Talarico’s support for transgender rights, immigration reform, and climate change, ending with an image of Trump and Paxton and a voiceover reminding the audience that “this is Texas,” before flipping to an image of Talarico and declaring that “this is not.”
Talarico’s first post-runoff ad targeting his opponent, meanwhile, highlighted a sweetheart plea deal he gave to Adam Hoffman, a man who admitted to molesting a young boy over a period of three years — an attempt to contrast Paxton’s “tough on crime” rhetoric with his actual record as Texas’ attorney general.
Talarico wants to avoid mentioning Trump and force Paxton to campaign as himself not just because Paxton’s record is bad enough on its own, but because he’s never really been tested as a candidate. The attorney general historically benefited from cruising to the Republican nomination and never having to actually campaign to win an election. There are two critical exceptions. The first took place in 2018 when, amid a criminal indictment for fraud that Paxton later settled, he barely won reelection by three points over his Democratic challenger. The second came just a few months ago, when Paxton narrowly lost the Republican primary vote to Cornyn, but managed to force a runoff since neither candidate won an outright majority. To Talarico, it’s a sign that the attorney general’s ground is far less stable than he’d like voters to think.
“Ken Paxton has never been up for election since he was impeached by his own party,” Talarico explains. He says that in 2024 many Texans voted for Trump because “they thought he was going to lower costs, and now they’ve seen everything get more expensive just one year into his term. So that disillusionment is real among a lot of Trump voters, and I think my goal is to provide them a home in this movement.”
“I am not interested in relitigating the 2024 election,” he adds. “That’s why I don’t talk about Donald Trump very much. I’m focused on the future. Like how do we actually elect leaders who are going to fight for us, who are going to fight to unrig this economy?”
Yet the circumstances in which Trump took back the White House are necessary context to understand the current electoral landscape in the state. Trump made a series of historic gains among Hispanic and Black voters. In Texas, border counties that had not elected a Republican president in over a century were suddenly tinged red. It looked like a potentially lethal blow to state Democrats, until Trump actually took office. Tariff wars, hardline immigration enforcement, and rampant corruption have seen the president’s progress among Hispanics all but completely wiped out. The oil and gas shock caused by Trump’s war against Iran is pummeling the freight-heavy, car-centric state. The consequences of MAGA governance are coming home to roost. It’s now a matter of Texans taking to the polls.
Last Friday, as San Antonio prepared for a winner-take-all Western Conference Finals Game 7, hundreds of Talarico’s supporters queued up outside of Paper Tiger, a local music hall just off of the city’s historic Pearl District. It’s the kind of weekend most Texans would spend in the shade, with a beer or a ranch water in hand. People are instead sharing sunscreen and UV umbrellas as campaign staff pass out bottles of ice cold water. Daniel, a Navy veteran, tells Rolling Stone he had been raised in a conservative military household, and that he “sat on the sidelines” during the 2024 election, throwing a vote at a “random” third-party candidate and hoping that voters would not allow Trump to retake office. He says he feels needed to take a more direct hand in the process this time around. “I have daughters,” he says. “I would not want them to be in the Republican Party.”
Chris, a self-described Republican, says he’s voting mostly “against” Paxton, but is interested in Talarico’s platform. “I think he’s moderate, which I like, despite how they portray him,” he explains. “Paxton is such an undeserving person. He’s a criminal, and yet somehow he’s an attorney general here in the state.”
Plenty of attendees point to the Trump administration and Texas Republicans enabling the president’s agenda in the state. Teachers and social workers are fretting over funding restrictions, the deviation of public funds to private and charter schools, and the demonization of their professions.
Several women cite reproductive choice as their motivating issues. Some had supported Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) in the Democratic primary but want to give Talarico a fair shake. A significant contingent of attendees and volunteers says Talarico’s embrace of his Presbyterian faith as the guiding star of his progressive politics speaks to their conservative Christian roots.
As one young Talarico volunteer puts it, “I think we’re all still trying to figure out our spiritual journeys, and that’s always going to be an evolving conversation for every person, and I like that he brings it in in a way that is, I think, actually how the Bible is interpreted, that sound and cares about people in a real way.”
Talarico stresses that this movement is open to everyone. “I do feel like there’s a lot of Trump supporters, Trump voters who come to events like this — particularly young people who voted for the president in 2024 — they voted for him primarily to lower costs,” he says of his crowds. “They thought the economy in ‘17 and ‘18 and ‘19 was a good economy, and they were right. So they were hoping he would bring that back. They thought he was going to end the forever wars, they thought he was going to drain the swamp, and he thought he was going to release the Epstein files.”
“More than a year into this administration, he’s failed on all four counts,” he adds of the president.
Talarico presents himself as a candidate devoted to service. The opening anecdote of his stump speech is a memory of his great grandfather — known affectionately as “Poppy” — a WWII veteran who loved Matthew 23:11: “The greatest among you will be a servant.”
“That is a radical idea in a world obsessed with power and wealth and status,” he tells a rapt, overflow crowd. “Jesus is saying that real greatness is serving others.”
But to assume Talarico’s emphasis on his religious devotion means he is a mellowed-out, kumbaya candidate would be making a mistake. There is no quarter for Ken Paxton.
“Three years ago this week, Ken Paxton was impeached by his own party for using his public office, his position of public trust to enrich himself and his billionaire donors at our expense is everything that’s wrong with politics. He doesn’t serve us, he serves himself and his donors,” Talarico declares to the crowd in San Antonio. “Since taking office, Ken Paxton’s net worth has increased 7,000 percent while our pay has remained stagnant. He has 11 homes now, while most Texans can’t afford one. He’s taken bribes from wealthy donors while blocking overtime pay for Texas workers and gutting our health care. This is the rot at the core of our broken system. It’s why we can’t afford anything. It’s why we can’t get ahead, no matter how hard we work.”
Not Trump. Not Republicans. Ken Paxton. Talarico doesn’t need to invoke the specter of the man in the White House. He knows voters will draw a line from Paxton to the president themselves.
“We don’t have a government of, by, and for the people. We have a government of, by, and for the billionaires, those billionaires by politicians like Ken Paxton, and then those puppets turn around and rig the rules of the economy in favor of those billionaires at our expense,” he continues.
The crowds go wild.
Sitting at a picnic table in Leander a few days later, still in his blazer despite the mugginess of the mid-afternoon Texas sun, Talarico reminisces about the Spurs, who the night before had defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder to advance to the NBA Finals.
“I was a teacher in San Antonio the last time the Spurs were in the Finals,” he recalls of the team’s 2014 championship run. “They always embodied this team ethos, right? There was never a ball hog, it was all just them as a unit, and I feel like this new team embodies that, too.”
“I don’t think anyone thought we were gonna go this far,” he muses. It’s unclear if he’s still talking about basketball.
