Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico on Tuesday decried a \u201ccorruption crisis\u201d he says is plaguing the U.S. political system, competing for the spotlight with President Donald Trump in deeply conservative West Texas ahead of next week\u2019s midterm elections.<\/p>\n
Trump was in Texas for the third time in a month in a last-minute push to back Republican Ken Paxton and block Democrats from notching their first statewide election victory in more than three decades.<\/p>\n
Talarico took the stage in Lubbock an hour after Trump wrapped up his own speech across town. A seminarian and a former teacher, Talarico reached for metaphors from both the Bible and a famous Texas pastime \u2014 Friday night football \u2014 to cast himself as an underdog against powerful forces including Trump and Elon Musk, who is bankrolling attack ads against Talarico on Paxton\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to shock the nation and shock the world when we beat the billionaires and take back Texas,\u201d Talarico said.<\/p>\n
Moments earlier, Trump leaned into cultural issues to portray Talarico as too liberal for Texas.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe doesn\u2019t represent your values, and we can\u2019t take a chance,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
Trump won Lubbock County by 40 points in 2024, and won most of the other counties in West Texas by far more. Republicans hope the president\u2019s visit will motivate his staunch supporters to vote. The president spoke earlier in Corpus Christi, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.<\/p>\n
As Trump\u2019s war in Iran spikes gas prices and adds pressure on Republican candidates across the U.S., he sought to highlight an earlier military operation in Venezuela. Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefly appeared onstage with Trump, who used the trip in part to highlight the arrangement made with Venezuela to process more of its crude oil in Texas refineries.<\/p>\n
Trump is entering the final week of his last midterms in a frenzied push to shore up Republican strongholds against unusually competitive Democratic candidates. Beyond Texas, he swung through Mississippi, Michigan, Georgia, Florida and Iowa over the past week, and his next stops are Ohio, South Carolina, Florida, Kansas and Iowa again.<\/p>\n
He won all of these states in 2024.<\/p>\n
Texas tests Trump\u2019s sway over the GOP<\/p>\n
The campaign marathon is a bet that while Trump is broadly unpopular, he still holds sway over the GOP\u2019s most loyal voters \u2014 a bloc whose participation in the elections will be critical.<\/p>\n
The strategy is facing its fiercest test in Texas, where Talarico has capitalized on the difficult political environment for Republicans and Paxton\u2019s history of ethical and legal problems.<\/p>\n
Trump argued that Paxton was a \u201cgood man\u201d and Musk, the world\u2019s richest man, has joined Trump\u2019s effort to stop Talarico\u2019s advance.<\/p>\n
\u201cTalarico is lunatic left,\u201d Musk wrote on his social media platform, X, to his 241 million followers, part of a drumbeat of attacks he\u2019s posted against the candidate in the race\u2019s final days.<\/p>\n
Musk has headquartered Tesla and SpaceX, as well as himself, in Texas, and is so set on ensuring Republicans hold control of his adopted state that he appears to have sunk at least $158 million into defeating Talarico. Musk gave that much to the Senate Leadership Fund, which then gave the same amount to the Texas PAC, the largest contributor to Paxton\u2019s campaign.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s helped make the race one of the most expensive in the country, with over $563 million being spent on advertising between the primary and general elections, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact.<\/p>\n
While Musk\u2019s investment is a challenge for Talarico, it also falls right into the Democratic campaign\u2019s central message. At every stop, Talarico has argued that, for too long, the wealthy and their donations have corrupted politics, and that this corruption has fueled the affordability crisis.<\/p>\n
Talarico has begun naming Musk in his stump speeches. Paxton tends not to discuss him.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is trying to buy Texas,\u201d Talarico said of Musk. \u201cTexas is not for sale.\u201d<\/p>\n
That parallels the Texas governor\u2019s race, where Democrat Gina Hinojosa is waging a spirited campaign against GOP Gov. Greg Abbott.<\/p>\n
Hinojosa has sued to access communications between Musk and Abbott, arguing that their relationship shows how cozy her opponent is with Texas’s ultra-wealthy.<\/p>\n
On Monday, a judge ruled that Hinojosa, as a state representative, must be able to review more than 1,000 unredacted pages by Thursday.<\/p>\n
Rubio\u2019s visit previews GOP\u2019s potential 2028 contest<\/p>\n
As the midterms reach the final stretch, the early stages of the next campaign are already surfacing.<\/p>\n
Rubio, who also serves as Trump\u2019s national security adviser, was hitting the road with Trump for the first time as the president barnstorms the country. A State Department official said Rubio was traveling with Trump in his capacity as national security adviser and not secretary of state.<\/p>\n
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the travel plans, said Rubio \u201cneeds time with the president on all kinds of issues\u201d and \u201cbeing on the plane with him gives him a chance to talk to him about these items.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rubio previously ran for president in 2016 and is considered a top prospect in 2028. He has not said whether he will run, and his political activities have been limited since becoming secretary of state.<\/p>\n
He appeared onstage with Trump briefly in Corpus Christi \u2014 and only after Trump repeatedly called on him to come forward.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an honor to work for the greatest country in the world, for the greatest president in the history of the United States of America,\u201d he said before exiting. He was similarly brief in Lubbock, where he kept his remarks to a single sentence.<\/p>\n
Another top Republican 2028 contender, Vice President JD Vance, has been more active on the campaign trail, stopping in Michigan on Tuesday, where he called the Senate race between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed a \u201cclash of competing visions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg, the former U.S. transportation secretary and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, was in Mississippi, campaigning on behalf of Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom a day after Trump made his own stop in the deep red state. Both parties have poured money into the state, where Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith faces a surprisingly tough challenge.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no mystery why gas prices are up, Buttigieg said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s because Donald Trump decided to start a war and your elected leaders refused to stop him. We can do better than that under new management,\u201d he said in Biloxi.<\/p>\n
In California, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat running for governor, urged voters to reject a voter ID ballot measure, which he said would make it harder for people to vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want democracy not just to shine, but be so resilient and so strong that Donald Trump cannot knock California down,\u201d Becerra said in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Sloan reported from Washington. Associated Press journalists Matthew Lee, Aamer Madhani and Michelle L. Price in Washington, Haven Daley in San Francisco, Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix and Joseph B. Frederick in Orangeburg, N.Y., contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico on Tuesday decried a \u201ccorruption crisis\u201d he says is plaguing the U.S. political…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8817,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-479373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-lone-star-politics","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479373","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=479373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}