Heartbreak or Turning Tide? Texas Democrats Chase a First Statewide Win Since 1994 — and Tarrant County Is the Bellwether
The BBC and Reuters both spent the final weekend in Texas asking the same question: whether James Talarico can end a three-decade statewide drought. Their reporting keeps landing in the same place — Fort Worth's county, decided by fewer than 2,000 votes last time a Democrat carried it.
Texas is, once again, the Democrats' great unrealized hope — and this time the whole world is watching it try. A BBC analysis published Sunday and a Reuters analysis datelined Fort Worth both frame Tuesday's election around the same streak: no Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since 1994, the longest drought in the nation, and polls suggest Senate candidate James Talarico — 37, a former schoolteacher who studied to be a Christian minister — may turn a Texas Senate seat blue for the first time since 1988. Total spending on the race has passed half a billion dollars, the most expensive Senate contest in American history.
The Republicans quoted in the reporting do not dismiss it. 'If the Democrats do pull it off, I think it's going to cause a lot of soul searching and a lot of psychological damage to the Republican Party in Texas and nationwide,' Texas Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser told the BBC. On the other side, James Henson of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin told Reuters this is 'the most competitive election between the parties that we have seen here since the early stages of Republican hegemony,' adding: 'If Talarico or Hinojosa win, it's a political earthquake.' Democrats are contesting every state and federal race in Texas for the first time since 1972, Reuters noted — a full-slate investment, not a single-candidate bet.
And both pieces keep returning to this station's western county. Tarrant County — home to Fort Worth, the most conservative of Texas's big urban counties — is the bellwether: Joe Biden carried it in 2020 by fewer than 2,000 votes, the first Democrat to do so since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The BBC found the same energy at the other end of the state, where the line to see Talarico at Lubbock's Fiesta Center stretched around the building and down the parking lot, and Hockley County's Democratic chair, Aaron Gonzalez, told the BBC: 'This time is different.' Whether it is gets answered Tuesday — in the rain, with Tarrant County's count among the last numbers the whole country will be waiting on.
