high turnout in the March 3 primary elections<\/a> as evidence of the party\u2019s momentum going into the general election in November.<\/p>\nHe gave credit to his primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, for helping to generate the energy that led to that high turnout.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am so grateful for her voice and for her leadership,\u201d he said before vowing to earn the trust and support of Crockett\u2019s supporters.<\/p>\n
A new kind of politics<\/p>\n
Talarico framed the campaign as an effort to fundamentally change what he called the politics of division.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt tears families apart, it ends friendships, and it leaves us feeling terrible all the time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He argued that defeating this politics of division can\u2019t be done with more division, but must be done with love.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t win their game. We have to change the game,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Several speakers picked up on Talarico\u2019s campaign theme of the fight being between top versus bottom rather than the left-right political spectrum.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She ran through a list of rising costs Texans face, from energy bills to healthcare premiums, calling them \u201cAbbott\u2019s corruption tax\u201d in a call-and-response with the audience.<\/p>\n
She vowed to go after government vendors she accused of overcharging the state and use that money to support higher teacher salaries.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody here is asking for handouts. We are asking for what we already paid for,\u201d Hinojosa said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe energy wasn\u2019t there, because we were real sure we weren\u2019t going to win,\u201d Duryee said of prior campaign seasons.<\/p>\n
She said the current Democratic slate gives her hope combined with what she said was a weak slate of Republican candidates.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That message resonated for Fort Worth resident Kathleen Stewart.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really great to come together and see all this enthusiasm, and I certainly want to help in any way I can,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tarrant County Democrats are on the front lines of a movement to take back the state and take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[116,118,117,2135,24552,83948,122,2134],"class_list":["post-214470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-james-talarico","tag-ridglea-theater","tag-state-rep","tag-tarrant-county","tag-u-s-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}