Talarico told the crowd they were on the front lines of a movement to change Texas politics.
Harrison Mantas
hmantas@star-telegram.com
Tarrant County Democrats are on the front lines of a movement to take back the state and take back the country, State Rep. and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico told a packed crowd of more than 1,000 people during a rally at the Ridglea Theater on Friday night.
Talarico headlined the standing-room-only rally that featured the party’s candidates for governor, comptroller, railroad commissioner, agriculture commissioner and Texas’ 25th congressional district.
Tarrant County Democrats shocked the country by electing union leader and aircraft mechanic Taylor Rehmet to the state Senate, Talarico said.
“In November, we’re gonna shock the world by flipping a U.S. Senate seat here in Texas,” Talarico said.
Talarico pointed to Democrats’ high turnout in the March 3 primary elections as evidence of the party’s momentum going into the general election in November.
He gave credit to his primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, for helping to generate the energy that led to that high turnout.
“I am so grateful for her voice and for her leadership,” he said before vowing to earn the trust and support of Crockett’s supporters.
A new kind of politics
Talarico framed the campaign as an effort to fundamentally change what he called the politics of division.
“It tears families apart, it ends friendships, and it leaves us feeling terrible all the time,” he said.
He argued that defeating this politics of division can’t be done with more division, but must be done with love.
“We can’t win their game. We have to change the game,” he said.
Several speakers picked up on Talarico’s campaign theme of the fight being between top versus bottom rather than the left-right political spectrum.
State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for governor, used that framing to attack incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott as being more loyal to wealthy donors than to everyday Texans.
She ran through a list of rising costs Texans face, from energy bills to healthcare premiums, calling them “Abbott’s corruption tax” in a call-and-response with the audience.
She vowed to go after government vendors she accused of overcharging the state and use that money to support higher teacher salaries.
She also vowed to lower healthcare costs by going after what she framed as overcharging by insurance companies and lowering the cost of housing through a ban on private equity homeownership.
“Nobody here is asking for handouts. We are asking for what we already paid for,” Hinojosa said.
Fort Worth resident Margaret Duryee said she felt encouraged by the rally turnout, saying it used to be hard to get Democrats in Fort Worth to show up.
“The energy wasn’t there, because we were real sure we weren’t going to win,” Duryee said of prior campaign seasons.
She said the current Democratic slate gives her hope combined with what she said was a weak slate of Republican candidates.
Talarico finished his remarks by calling the current political climate dark; however, he told the attendees that if they were hurting, it meant they still had a heart.
That message resonated for Fort Worth resident Kathleen Stewart.
“It’s really great to come together and see all this enthusiasm, and I certainly want to help in any way I can,” she said.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Harrison Mantas has covered Fort Worth city government, agencies and people since September 2021. He likes to live tweet city hall meetings, and help his fellow Fort Worthians figure out what’s going on.