{"id":49762,"date":"2025-11-14T18:59:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T18:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/49762\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T18:59:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T18:59:08","slug":"rep-joaquin-castro-eyed-ag-run-to-break-2026-senate-logjam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/49762\/","title":{"rendered":"Rep. Joaquin Castro eyed AG run to break 2026 Senate logjam"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\tAudio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy<\/a>, and give us feedback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As he weighed a bid for the U.S. Senate earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro<\/a> found himself at an impasse with three other big-name Democrats who also wanted to run for the upper chamber.<\/p>\n

At the time, Castro met over Zoom with the other then-prospective candidates \u2014 former U.S. Reps. Colin Allred and Beto O\u2019Rourke and state Rep. James Talarico<\/a> \u2014 to try to hash out their plans for 2026. Castro eventually offered to run for Texas attorney general if the others could divide up the remaining statewide offices, including governor and lieutenant governor, instead of running against each other for Senate. In the end, Castro said Friday, \u201cwe just couldn\u2019t get there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of us initially were interested in the U.S. Senate race,\u201d Castro, a seventh-term congressman from San Antonio, said on a panel at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin. \u201cBut, you know, it doesn\u2019t really make sense to have four people running for the U.S. Senate, and then nobody\u2019s running for anything else. So at one point, I told a few of those guys \u2026 hey, I\u2019ll slot down to the AG race if you guys can figure out the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

About a month after the May 31 Zoom meeting, which was first reported by The Dallas Morning News<\/a>, Allred announced<\/a> he was running for the Senate seat held by GOP Sen. John Cornyn. Talarico soon after<\/a> joined the race, pitting the two Democrats against each other as the party remained without a high-profile candidate to take on Gov. Greg Abbott.<\/p>\n

Castro said Friday he\u2019s \u201cnot blaming them\u201d for seizing what \u201ccould be a great opportunity in 2026,\u201d whether the Democratic nominee ends up facing Cornyn or one of his GOP challengers, Attorney General Ken Paxton or U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt.<\/p>\n

Still, Castro added, he saw the 2018 midterm as a cautionary tale, when O\u2019Rourke ran for Senate and was \u201ccarrying the ticket\u201d of other statewide Democrats, none of whom gained the same traction and fundraising support. O\u2019Rourke lost to Sen. Ted Cruz by less than 3 percentage points, the closest a Texas Democrat has come to winning statewide in decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdeally, if you were gonna design the strongest possible chances of winning, you would design it so that you have strong candidates that are well-funded in each of those races,\u201d Castro said. \u201cThat was my hope, that we would have a full slate, and we didn\u2019t quite get there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Castro added that he would do \u201cwhat I can\u201d to support the Democrats who have announced statewide bids, including Austin state Reps. Gina Hinojosa and Vikki Goodwin, who are running for governor and lieutenant governor, respectively.<\/p>\n

Asked if he had ruled out a statewide run, Castro said he hadn\u2019t made a \u201cfinal decision\u201d and would announce his plans at some point before the Dec. 8 candidate filing deadline.<\/p>\n

The San Antonio Democrat has toyed with statewide runs a number of times since he began representing Texas\u2019 20th Congressional District in 2013. He previously passed up Senate bids in 2018<\/a> and 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6505,2135,21085,27,29,28,11535],"class_list":["post-49762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-beto-orourke","tag-james-talarico","tag-joaquin-castro","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-texas-tribune-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49762","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=49762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}