Republican scheming backfires in Texas election

On Sept. 9, 2025, a little-known 36-year-old former middle school teacher and seminarian named James Talarico announced he was jumping into a crowded Texas Senate race, joining several other Democrats vying for GOP Sen. John Cornyn’s seat.

He’d first made news by flipping a Trump-leaning state legislative district in 2018, and became something of a rising star inside Texas Democratic circles. Outside of Texas, however, he still had work to do.

But he was smart — over the next seven years he started going where ambitious and savvy young Dems go to reach new voters, places like Joe Rogan’s podcast and Pod Save America. He gained more national attention during the Texas redistricting battle in 2025 when Texas Dems decided to leave the state in protest.

But when he entered the Senate race, he was still very much an underdog. He told Politico at the time, “[M]y life has always shown me that it’s a good idea to bet on the underdog.”

But Talarico wasn’t looking like such a good bet. When media-darling Rep. Jasmine Crockett jumped in the race in December, it looked like his bid was all but done. If he’d been a rising star, she was, for many Dems, the North Star, with regular appearances on cable news, “The View” and Jimmy Kimmel, and even presidential buzz swirling around her.

Leading up to the Democratic primary, as recently as Feb. 22, Crockett was leading Talarico by as many as 18 points.

Cut to Tuesday night, where Talarico pulled off an impressive win against Crockett, beating her by more than 7 points. He’ll face the winner of the Republican runoff, either Cornyn or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in the general.

So what happened? How did Talarico go from underdog down by double digits to a convincing win? Two words: Stephen Colbert.

On Feb. 16, a little more than two weeks before the primary, Talarico got a huge boost when Colbert accused CBS of blocking an interview with him from airing, a decision Colbert implied was out of fear of the Trump administration’s crackdown on media outlets he deemed unfriendly.

The fracas ate up the national airwaves, and Colbert posted the interview on YouTube instead, where it gained 5 million views in just two days. The Talarico campaign said he raised $2.5 million in 24 hours. Suddenly Talarico was the frontrunner.

Just like it had Sen. Mark Kelly and independent journalist Don Lemon, the Trump administration had targeted Talarico for censorship and intimidation and inadvertently made him a resistance hero, boosting his name ID, his fundraising, and his future prospects.

To be sure, Republicans wanted to face Crockett in the general, figuring their chances in Texas were better against a progressive Black woman rather than a Presbyterian white man.

And their calculus was probably right. But Trump’s GOP, in its bloodlust for lefty scalps, still doesn’t realize it keeps handing the opposition giant gifts — if Kelly wants to run for president, if Lemon wants to compete with corporate media, if Talarico wants to become the first Texas Democrat to win the Senate in three decades, they all got a lot closer to their goals thanks to Trump’s hamfisted attempts at censoring them.

He’s failed all three times — a grand jury would not indict Kelly, Lemon is almost certainly going to be acquitted, and now Talarico is poised to give Republicans a run for their money in November, especially if the scandal-plagued Paxton is the nominee.

These are embarrassing own goals that Republicans simply can’t afford. And they make clear that Trump is no longer the effective dragon-slayer he once was. Good news for the left.

(S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.)