James Talarico stood behind a pulpit in 2023 and delivered a sermon titled "God is not a Christian." In it, the Texas state lawmaker rebuked conservatives by name, defended abortion, and essentially told a congregation that the faith they'd built their lives around had it all wrong.
Now he wants to be their senator. In deeply conservative Texas.
Talarico, a Democratic member of the Texas state legislature, is running for U.S. Senate in one of the most reliably red states in the country. Footage of the 2023 sermon surfaced this week and the content is exactly what you'd expect from a Democrat who thinks the path to statewide office in Texas runs through lecturing churchgoers about what God really thinks.
The sermon wasn't some nuanced theological exploration. Talarico used the pulpit to take direct aim at conservative Christians, arguing that their understanding of their own faith was fundamentally flawed. He defended abortion — not in some careful, hedging, "safe, legal, and rare" framework, but as something compatible with his reading of scripture.
This is a man who looked at the Texas electorate — the same voters who gave Donald Trump a 5.6-point margin in 2024, the same state where Republicans hold every statewide office — and decided the winning message was "your God isn't who you think He is, and also abortion is fine."
There's a certain kind of Democratic candidate who genuinely believes that if they just explain things slowly enough, red-state voters will come around. Talarico appears to be that candidate, except he skipped the slow explanation and went straight to telling Texans their theology is wrong.
The "God is not a Christian" framing tells you everything about where Talarico sits on the political spectrum. It's not a statement designed to win votes in Lubbock or Amarillo. It's a statement designed to get approving nods at a faculty lounge in Austin. The kind of line that plays well on a podcast interview and dies on contact with an actual general electorate.
Democrats have spent years insisting they have a "messaging problem" in red states. They don't. They have a belief problem. They believe things that are wildly unpopular with the voters they need, and occasionally one of them is honest enough to say so out loud. Talarico said it out loud. From a pulpit.
Texas hasn't elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Lloyd Bentsen won re-election in 1988. Beto O'Rourke couldn't do it running on charisma and skateboard tricks. Talarico's plan is apparently to do it by telling the most church-going electorate in America that God doesn't belong to their faith.
Strategically, this is the equivalent of running for mayor of Green Bay on the platform that the Packers are overrated. It's not going to work.
The latest polls put Talarico just one point behind his Republican competitor, Ken Paxton. But we all know how badly polls underrate Republican voters. Paxton's real lead is probably higher.
Some campaigns end on election night. This one might have ended on a Sunday morning in 2023.