James Talarico's Fake Olive Branch to Republicans

· Reason

To read some of the press coverage, one would think the biggest winner of yesterday's Texas Republican primary runoff is James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate. He now gets to run against the scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as opposed to the steady old-hand incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas). 

Talarico himself wasted no time in seeking advantage in Cornyn's loss to Paxton by issuing an X post saying that the senator's supporters are welcome in his campaign. 

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This got a lot of praise on social media from liberals, who are once again indulging the hope that, with a compelling candidate of their own and a deeply flawed GOP nominee on the other side, Texas might at last turn blue.  

In truth, Talarico's outreach to Cornyn supporters is not particularly strong evidence of his political genius. One would have to be a pretty bad politician to try to pick up some disaffected Republicans after a bruising primary fight. 

His olive branch is also far less impressive when one considers how substanceless it really is. 

While he's dressed it up in conciliatory language, Talarico's message to Republicans is still a negative, partisan one: vote for me because the other guy is way worse. 

In the post-primary interviews he's given, he's notably not offered any new moderation of his policy stances. Talarico's comments instead focus almost entirely on Paxton's many legal and personal scandals. His social media feed, minus the one bit of outreach to Cornyn voters, is the same story. 

As The Washington Post's Dominic Pino points out with select screenshots from Talarico's issues page on his campaign website, the Democratic candidate is still running as a liberal Democrat. 

He still wants to hike taxes and the minimum wage. He still wants to make everyone eligible for Medicare. He still wants aggressive antitrust enforcement. He's still hostile to school choice and in favor of abortion. 

Talarico's only real pitch to conservative voters then is that he is less personally corrupt than the Republican candidate who backs the policies they generally agree with. Even if he makes that pitch with a smile, it's still a negative appeal to voters who aren't already in his camp. 

This isn't particularly surprising coming from Talarico. Any hand he extends to conservatives always has a wagging finger on it telling them to get in line. 

He'll talk up his credentials as a Presbyterian seminarian and, in the same breath, quote noncanonical Gospels and claim the Annunciation is a pro-abortion parable. 

But he's not the only Democrat to dress up negative partisanship as wholesome moderation. The party has a problem with this generally. 

Recall that Joe Biden, when he was still running for a second term, made staged pleas for ordinary Republicans to split off from MAGA and join him in saving the Republic. Kamala Harris ended her doomed presidential campaign with a very similar message. 

The trouble was that neither Harris nor Biden's pitch to anti-Donald Trump and Trump-skeptical Republicans included any policy concessions. Biden governed as the most left-wing president of my lifetime and would have continued to do so if he had won. 

He was not offering Republicans a seat at the table in his second term. Rather, he was saying that they needed to abandon any hope of advancing conservative policy priorities because Trump is personally so much worse.

That pitch might have worked for Biden in 2020, when he also ran as the decent moderate trying to reclaim the "soul" of the nation from Trumpian chaos and nastiness. When none of that campaign trail moderation was reflected in Biden administration policy, plenty of voters decided that maybe the chaos and nastiness were a price worth paying to avoid another four years of hardline progressive governance. 

Odds are most Cornyn-supporting GOP voters will make a similar calculation and line up behind Paxton, even if they do believe he's a slimeball.    

None of this should be construed as a defense of Paxton or Trump, two men who are manifestly unqualified to hold electoral office. 

But if Democrats are going to ask Republicans to surrender some ground on their policy priorities in order to keep manifestly unqualified candidates out of office, they need to be willing to do the same. 

Talarico's latest olive branch is more proof that they're not willing to build a genuine big tent.

Obviously, a moderate Democrat (or, for that matter, a corruption-free Republican) is not this libertarian's ideal lawmaker. I want a politics that leads to smaller government, instead of one that just tacks to the center to keep the crooks out.  

But we're not going to get steady, small government administration if one party keeps nominating scoundrels and the other sees that as a license to pursue their own hardline agenda. 

The post James Talarico's Fake Olive Branch to Republicans appeared first on Reason.com.

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