In his first major appearance after over a week off the campaign trail with the flu, Democrat James Talarico addressed a range of questions at a CNN town hall Wednesday with a clear eye toward winning over undecided and moderate voters.
"This is, I think, a theme of this entire conversation tonight: We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis," Talarico said at the town hall, reiterating the populist message core to his campaign over the past year.
The audience in Fort Worth included around 20 Texas Democrats, 20 independent voters and 20 Republicans, several of whom asked questions of and debated Talarico directly on issues ranging from abortion to energy to immigration.
Talarico has consistently led in public polling of the race, an unusual sight in red Texas, and with independent voters. A Marist University poll released Wednesday found that 8% of Republican voters backed him, too.
The Austin Democrat had the national stage to himself. His opponent, Republican Ken Paxton, was invited by CNN to participate but did not respond, the network said. Talarico has also challenged Paxton to debate; Paxton has not agreed to any of the five invitations extended by TV networks, including Fox News.
With just four full days before early voting, Talarico used the forum to present himself as a moderate Democrat willing to buck both his party and the opposition. He repeatedly pushed back on the Democratic Party's record while also criticizing the GOP as he laid out his positions on immigration, energy, government spending and more.
"This was a heat-seeking missile at Republican voters who supported John Cornyn but don't like Ken Paxton," Democratic strategist Paul Begala said on CNN's post-town hall panel, referring to Texas' sitting Republican senator who was felled by Paxton in the primary.
Republicans seized on Talarico's answers to argue, as they have for months, that he was simply moderating for the campaign and that his stated positions ran contrary to his record in the Texas House.
"Even with CNN by his side, James Talarico couldn't defend his record of supporting the far-left's extreme agenda at the expense of Texas working families," said Chris Gustafson, a spokesperson for the Senate GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund. "Talarico proved once again that he's simply too liberal and too dangerous for Texas."
Talarico throughout the event focused almost exclusively on policy and mentioned Paxton just twice: at the very start of the 90-minute program, when he addressed the conspiracy theory Paxton helped fuel that falsely claimed Talarico was at an Ohio mental health facility last week rather than at home in Austin with the flu, and at the very end, when he lambasted Paxton as the "most corrupt politician in Texas."
Talarico's answers on the issues remained largely consistent from throughout his campaign.
On immigration and border security, Talarico said, "Joe Biden failed us during his administration by not securing the border. … But now we've seen under this administration a different kind of extremism."
He added that he did not support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but that the agency had become a "secret police force." He laid out the border security measures he has proposed, such as bolstering the ranks of border patrol agents and enhanced surveillance technology, in addition to more legal pathways for "hardworking immigrants who want to come here and contribute to our economy."
On energy, Talarico told an audience member concerned about the future of Texas' oil and gas industry that he was advocating for an "all of the above" approach that invested in renewable energy technologies while protecting oil and gas. He added that he is a capitalist, but sees the current economic system as a model of "crony capitalism" that "taxes work more than it taxes wealth."
"I think that's backwards," Talarico said.
Republicans have sought to poke holes in his response, noting that Talarico introduced a bill in the Legislature that would have required Texas to cut its carbon emissions to 50% of 1990 levels by 2030 and to 10% of 1990 levels by 2050. (Talarico has insisted that he has remained consistent throughout his career.)
Talarico emphasized to a voter asking how he would fight political corruption that the measures he has championed — imposing congressional term limits and banning super PACs, gerrymandering and congressional stock trading — should apply to both parties. National Republicans, including President Donald Trump, Senate Republican leadership and Elon Musk, have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Texas boosting Paxton and attacking Talarico — a fact of the race the Democrat noted at the top of Wednesday's forum.
"I don't care if they're Democratic super PACs or Republican super PACs, I think we got to ban them all because there's way too much influence from big money in our politics," he said. "I'm running on these political reforms that will affect both parties, that will clean up government, so that we can have a government of by and for the people again, not a government of by and for the billionaires."
Asked how he would address the national deficit, Talarico pointed to closing "billionaire tax loopholes," ending the war in Iran and, in an appeal to right-leaning voters, cutting down on government bloat.
"Let me just let me say something that a lot of Democrats aren't willing to say: We should be looking for efficiency in our government," he said.
Paxton, a darling of the hard right, has also recently sought to appeal to the potentially decisive crop of right-leaning, undecided voters. He launched an ad Wednesday touting his record as attorney general of suing city governments looking to raise property taxes, pharmaceutical companies and Big Tech.
"Liberals like James Talarico talk about putting more money in your pocket. Ken Paxton has actually done it," a Tarrant County woman says in the ad. "When big government and big corporations come for you, Ken Paxton goes after them, so you can keep more of your money."
Talarico, meanwhile, has tied high costs to billionaire influence and political corruption. And he has pointed to Paxton's exploding net worth while in office, his 15 homes and his past legal and ethical scandals to argue that the attorney general would seek to serve himself and not Texans while in the U.S. Senate.
"We cannot afford Ken Paxton's corruption," Talarico said to close out Wednesday's town hall. "This election is not about left versus right. It's about whether we will have a senator who puts money in your pocket, or a senator who puts money in their own. That is the choice before us in November."
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