Teacher turned senator makes Texas history

Democrat wins Texas Senate seat

James Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton in Texas's Senate race as a blue wave swept key states in the twenty twenty-six midterm election.

First Democratic senator in decades

The thirty-seven-year-old Talarico is now Texas's first elected Democratic Senator in nearly four decades, marking a historic shift in the state's politics.

Budget cuts inspired his career shift

Teaching sixth grade at Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio, Talarico witnessed how a five point four billion dollar Texas public school funding cut in two thousand eleven devastated his students.

One student changed everything

A struggling sixth-grader named Justin, abandoned by his mother and facing expulsion, was removed from school after his third strike when the district therapist supporting him was eliminated.

A radicalizing moment

Talarico described Justin's removal as radicalizing. He promised himself to use any power or influence to prevent such situations, setting him on a path to public service.

“I promised myself right then that if I ever got a little bit of power or a little bit of influence, that I would do everything I could with every fiber of my being to stop that from happening again.”

From classroom to Capitol

After leaving teaching, Talarico ran for the Texas House in twenty seventeen at age twenty-nine, winning and flipping the seat from Republican to Democrat.

Students guide his policy decisions

Now earning a U.S. Senator's average salary of one hundred seventy-four thousand dollars, Talarico still evaluates policy by asking whether it helps his former students, not party affiliation.

“Justin and my students are the ones I think about when I'm at the Capitol. They are the criteria that I use to evaluate public policy, not if it's a Democratic bill or Republican bill.”