Talarico wins Texas Senate seat, first Democrat since 1988
Seven Lights
James Talarico won the United States Senate seat in Texas, CBS News projected early Wednesday, defeating the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, and sending the first Democrat from Texas to the Senate since 1988.
Mr Talarico, a state representative and Presbyterian seminarian, addressed supporters on Wednesday after the projections. “We just took back Texas,” CBS News quoted him as saying. In the same speech he said: “Against big money and big odds we took our power back.”
The victory completed one of the longest-standing goals of Texas Democrats, who had sought a competitive Senate contest in the state through successive cycles without success. Mr Talarico combined an appeal to religious language with a stringent call for economic justice, a platform that eroded three decades of Republican control of the state’s federal politics, The Guardian reported.
Mr Paxton, the state’s attorney general, had been the controversial choice of President Trump, who endorsed him through the closing weeks of the campaign. Republicans poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the race, including funds from the billionaire Elon Musk, The Guardian reported. Mr Talarico attacked the negative tenor of his opponent’s campaign in his victory speech. Polls through the autumn had rated the contest a dead heat, and The Guardian described the result as a seismic shift in the state’s politics.
The Texas result formed part of a broader reversal for Senate Republicans on Tuesday night. Democrats also took seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Kansas, Iowa and Maine, capturing control of the chamber. Texas had been reckoned the most improbable of the seven flips.
Mr Talarico will take his seat when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, as House and Senate Democrats prepare to open investigations of the Trump administration and press an affordability agenda that the president can block by veto.