James Talarico wins US Senate race in Texas: NPR

Texas Senate candidate James Talarico speaks to supporters during primary election night in Austin, Texas.

Mark Félix/AFP via Getty Images

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Democratic Rep. James Talarico has won the U.S. Senate race in Texas, according to an Associated Press race call. Talarico’s victory breaks the Republican Party’s three-decade monopoly on statewide offices in Texas.

Talarico defeated Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Trump, in one of the most closely watched and expensive races this year.

Talarico’s victory is a blow to the Republicans and to Trump himself. Trump and his allies have invested millions of dollars in the race, and Trump has often attacked Talarico at campaign rallies across the United States, using him as a national surrogate for Democrats.

Paxton becomes the first Republican to lose a Texas Senate seat since the 1990s.

Paxton, who has never lost a race since winning election to the Texas House of Representatives in 2002, defeated incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in a primary runoff election to win the Republican nomination. He was helped achieve this victory by a last-minute endorsement from Trump.

But with the president’s popularity having plummeted, Trump’s support may have acted as a drag on Paxton. The attorney general had expressed concerns about the issue after Trump campaigned for Paxton at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in September.

Talarico, a four-term Austin lawmaker, matched or led Paxton in most statewide polls as of mid-summer. He led Paxton by a wide margin in fundraising for most of this year, although conservative super PACs allied with the attorney general offset that advantage with heavy advertising spending in the final two months of the campaign.

Talarico first rose to prominence in the state in 2018 by flipping a heavily Republican House district that had voted for Donald Trump for president two years earlier. A former San Antonio middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico focused his campaign on education and strongly opposed efforts to inject religion into the public school system. He was one of the most vocal opponents of a law requiring the display of an explicitly Protestant translation of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms, which is now the subject of multiple federal lawsuits.