Every campaign eventually tells you who it thinks its people are. This week, thanks to a recording obtained by the Daily Caller, Texas got a good look at who Democrat Senate nominee James Talarico believes will carry him to Washington. The answer, straight from his own strategists, is drag show crowds, World Cup fans rooting for Mexico, and voters previously scrubbed from the rolls.
That is not a Republican caricature. It is the plan, laid out on a strategy call by the very operation Talarico has hired to turn out his vote.
The operation is Powered by People, the outfit run by Beto O'Rourke, a man who has now lost a Senate race, a presidential race, and a governor's race, and who has reinvented himself as a mentor to the next generation of Texas Democrats. On the call, Powered by People Executive Director Aimee Prudhomme summed up the philosophy in a single line. The campaign, she said, goes "where the people are." She then explained where, in her judgment, the people are: college campuses, places of worship, concerts, clubs, and drag shows, plus the World Cup watch parties full of fans cheering for Mexico. She noted the enthusiasm for those watch parties had not cooled even after both the United States and Mexico crashed out of the tournament. The volunteers, she assured everyone, are still there.
Set aside the spin and take the strategy at face value. A candidate for United States Senate from Texas is being advised to build his coalition at drag shows and at viewing parties for a foreign national team. If a Republican consultant had described the GOP base that way, it would be treated as a gaffe for the ages. Coming from the Democratic nominee's own turnout machine, it is presented as savvy outreach. Texans are entitled to notice the difference.
Then there is the matter of the purged voters. Democrats prefer the word purge because it sounds sinister, but what they are describing is the routine maintenance of voter rolls, the removal of names that no longer belong, the deceased, the relocated, the ineligible. A campaign that builds its ground game around re-enrolling people the state already determined should come off the rolls is not defending democracy. It is telling you exactly where it intends to find its margin. For anyone who believes an election should count citizens once and only once, that should be a flashing red light, not a talking point.
The irony thickens when Beto himself gets on the line. According to the Daily Caller's recording, O'Rourke used the call to warn that Republicans, from Greg Abbott to Ken Paxton to Donald Trump, are trying to intimidate voters and rig the outcome against Talarico. This is the same party that spent years lecturing the country about the dangers of questioning election results and branding anyone who did so a threat to the republic. Apparently the rules change when the losing streak belongs to your own side. O'Rourke, who told MSNBC's Jen Psaki earlier this year that "James Talarico will be the 51st vote in the U.S. Senate," is now selling the rigging narrative he once claimed to despise.
None of this comes cheap. Talarico has raised staggering sums, more than seventy million dollars since launching last September, including a record twenty-seven million in the first quarter of this year. That is a torrent of money, much of it from outside Texas, funding a strategy aimed at the cultural fringe rather than the working families the campaign claims to speak for. The candidate insists he is "uniting Texans onto one team." The turnout blueprint tells a narrower story.
To understand why drag shows landed on the target list, look at Talarico's record. When the Legislature took up a 2023 bill to keep sexually oriented performances away from children, Talarico declined to vote yes, and afterward defended Texas drag queens as, in his words, "some of the best in the nation." He has called voter ID requirements a form of suppression and has argued against allowing poll watchers inside polling places at all, as reported by the Dallas Express. A candidate who spent his time in Austin fighting the very safeguards most Texans support is now, unsurprisingly, courting the constituencies most invested in tearing those safeguards down.
In fairness, the campaign frames all of this as ordinary voter registration and turnout, meeting citizens where they live, worship, study, and gather. Prudhomme's list did include churches and campuses alongside the clubs and drag shows. Democrats will say there is nothing scandalous about knocking on doors and signing up eligible voters, and by itself, registering lawful voters is exactly what campaigns are supposed to do. The race is genuinely competitive, and Talarico's fundraising has made him a serious contender against Republican nominee and Attorney General Ken Paxton in November.
But a strategy reveals priorities, and priorities reveal a worldview. When your own director stands up and names drag shows and Mexico watch parties as the places to find your voters, when your headline mentor is a three-time loser now peddling stolen-election theories, and when your ground game leans on reversing the removal of names from the rolls, you have told Texas precisely who you are building this campaign for. It is not the rancher in Lubbock or the mom in Tyler or the oil worker in Midland.
Talarico can raise all the money in the world. He cannot buy his way out of the coalition his own team just described. In a state that still believes elections should be run straight and won honestly, that description may prove to be the most expensive thing his campaign has produced yet.
