The candidate, who could be the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since 1988, supports the Jewish state’s right to exist but questions the way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prosecuting the war after Oct. 7.
James Talarico, a Texas state representative, is described as firmly in the mainstream of Jewish Democrats at a time when the party has nominated critics of Israel in other states. The last Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas was Lloyd Bentsen, who won a third term in 1988 but resigned in 1993 to become U.S. treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton.
Steve Adler, who is Jewish and who was mayor of Austin, Texas, from 2015 to 2023, told JNS that Talarico is a “real staunch defender of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state together with concern about the number of people that are dying.”
Talarico also believes that “one, you have to protect the security of Israel but two, isn’t there a better way to do this?” Adler said. “We’re trying to find a different and better way, and I think that’s where most Jews are in the country.”
Jews in Texas are still feeling the impact of Oct. 7, according to the former Austin mayor.
“A lot of Jews’ perception and view on politics changed with the attack from Gaza, as well as looking at the reaction to that attack coming from around the world and even in large parts of this country,” Adler told JNS.
“You have significant parts of the Jewish community feeling afraid and threatened and unsure, translating to greater and greater resolve to help ensure that Israel survives as a Jewish state,” he said.
Talarico’s website describes Oct. 7 as “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust” and states that “Israel has the right to defend its people.”
But he also says on the site that “Netanyahu does not have the right to bomb civilians, restrict aid or use forced famine and collective punishment as tactics.”
“With tens of thousands of civilians killed and unimaginable human suffering in Gaza, America must lead with moral clarity and prevent any U.S. funds from being used to harm civilians,” his site says.
Support for the Jewish state
The American Jewish Congress says that both Talarico and Ken Paxton, Texas attorney general and the Republican nominee for Senate, support Israel.
Talarico backed a two-state solution, wanted to stop settlement expansion and opposed Iran gaining a nuclear weapon but called for diplomacy, according to the AJC voters’ guide. In the legislature, he backed a law setting up a procedure to determine if student misconduct was motivated by Jew-hatred.
But the American Jewish Congress reported that some Texas Jewish leaders said that Talarico’s “outreach had not been broad enough and urged him to meet more extensively with Jewish communal organizations.”
Paxton has “called for federal and state coordination against antisemitic violence” and signed onto a statement by state attorneys general after Oct. 7 that described Hamas as “a genocidal terrorist organization and characterized the attack as a premeditated massacre of civilians involving murder, kidnapping, torture and rape,” the congress said.
The Republican also backed the Iran war to stop the country from getting nuclear weapons.
Adler told JNS that he is sorry to see U.S.-Israel relations become enmeshed in partisan politics and the Democratic Party split over supporting the Jewish state.
“It’s been real unfortunate watching Israel-United States relations over the last decade-and-a-half to see that support becomes more and more of a partisan political issue, as opposed to enjoying its bipartisan support that Israel had for so long,” he said.
“That kind of divide that’s in the Democratic Party over the issue of Israel in Gaza and support for arms,” Adler told JNS. “If so, what arms?”
The former mayor acknowledged that some Texas Jews would like Talarico to be more pro-Israel.
“There are obviously some Jews that would like Talarico’s stances to be stronger in support of Israel, but I think that his views do reflect the kind of more middle-road, more measured view,” Adler told JNS.
“We don’t have a candidate running statewide that is easily dismissed as being extreme one way or the other on this issue,” he said. “I don’t think the democratic socialist candidate can win in Texas.”
Natalie Baldassarre, national press secretary for the Republican National Committee, told JNS that Talarico was “beholden to far-left groups and is hiding his true extremist views to gain power.”
Campaigning away from traditional Democratic issues
Adler said that Talarico is doing as well as he is—leading Paxton by 1.7 percentage points in the Real Clear Politics polling average—because he’s not campaigning on traditional Democratic issues, such as social spending, while running against a candidate with a 57% disapproval rating in a recent Houston Public Media poll.
“He started having a more and more credible race,” Adler told JNS, of Talarico.
“More and more Republicans are willing to stand up and are coming forward, saying that they’re going to support him and not the Republican candidate,” he said. “That just has not happened in Texas before here recently. Part of what happened, I think, is that the Democrats are winning on other than the traditional Democratic issues and values that have been promoted in the past.”
Instead, Talarico is discussing things that you don’t often hear from Texas Democrats, according to Adler.
“The issues that are really dominating this race are not those traditional issues,” the former mayor told JNS. “It’s things like data centers and AI, where more and more people are feeling like there’s something big out there that they just don’t control.”
“You find that Republicans and Democrats are joining on a substantive issue,” he said. “That’s something new that we just haven’t seen before.”
“Costs are so much higher. Gas prices are so much higher. I think people are disillusioned,” Adler told JNS. “In fact, sometimes feeling betrayed with their vote for Trump when he said this was going to be his priority, and now he seems to be running in the country that almost makes it sound like he doesn’t care.”
U.S. President Donald Trump’s job disapproval ratings reached 60% in an NBC News poll released Sunday. In the poll, voters said that they were dissatisfied with their financial situation by 51% to 49%.
“The positions and the decisions that he’s made with respect to the war in Iran or with tariffs, there is no other explanation that’s widespread to support the increase in cost that people are dealing with,” Adler said. “They fault the president alone for those choices.”
‘Excruciatingly close’
Talarico’s strength—and that of the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, state representative Gina Hinojosa, who is running against Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican—has alarmed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“Texas is excruciatingly close,” Cruz said last week on his podcast. “Understand, we could lose Texas. Let me repeat that. We could lose Texas, and by the way, not just the Senate race. We could lose every single statewide race in Texas. That’s how close these numbers are.”
Adler told JNS that he has hoped for years that Republicans would finally lose, but it hasn’t happened before.
“There may be Republicans that don’t vote or are not very energized. One of the big unknowns is how many of those Republicans will either not vote or will go ahead and vote for some Democrats, even though they’ve never done that before,” he said.
“Every year for the last 25 years, I’ve been waiting for this to happen,” he said. “I think that Democrats here traditionally get their hopes up and then they’re dashed to the ground.”
Two years ago, he said, the momentum had been with former U.S. vice president Kamala Harris until the final weeks of her presidential campaign in 2024, when it switched to Trump.
“I think that Kamala Harris probably would have won the presidency if the election had been five or six weeks earlier,” Adler told JNS. “But you could almost feel the win to go out of her sails in that last month.”
“You feel that momentum now, but it’s going the other way,” he said. “I don’t think anybody really knows for sure how strong that momentum is, and whether that will carry over these last couple of weeks.”
“But if it does,” he told JNS. “I think that there will be some surprise Democrats that win that are carried with this momentum. They seem to be kind of peaking at the correct moment.”
