Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is scrambling to explain away his own words after 2020 comments calling to "replace" the policing system resurfaced — and ordinary Texans deserve to know whether the man seeking their vote wanted to abolish law enforcement when he thought nobody was keeping the tape.
The stakes are straightforward: Talarico is running dead-even against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in a race that could help determine Senate control, and his 2020 rhetoric cuts directly against the law-and-order image he's now trying to sell statewide.
In a 2020 virtual discussion with Texas Rising, a progressive youth activist group that at the time was explicitly calling for police departments to be defunded, Talarico told activists it was "rich" that "defund the police" was treated as off-limits in political debate, according to CNN's KFile, as reported by Breitbart. His full quote: "As an educator, it's always rich to me that 'defund the police' is considered off-limits in our political debate, when defunding health services, defunding public education has been the stated policy of our state government for decades now."
He acknowledged the slogan was "getting people all riled up" in his swing district but argued voters understood the concept when asked whether armed officers should respond to minor traffic accidents or mental-health crises.
In a separate September 2020 interview with Honest Austin, Talarico went further, according to CNN: "Our system of policing is deeply broken. We must replace it with something new and something better." He then questioned whether armed officers were needed for every emergency call.
Now his campaign says that's all been "taken out of context."
"James did not call for and does not support defunding the police, and he strongly supports Texas law enforcement and first responders," spokesperson JT Ennis told Fox News Digital. The campaign insists Talarico was merely calling out hypocrisy among politicians who condemn the defund slogan while supporting cuts to other public services. On the "replace" quote, the campaign told CNN it referred to reality television shows on policing — a claim that strains credulity given the plain language of his remarks.
But the record is more complicated than the denial suggests. CNN reported that from 2019 through at least 2022, Talarico repeatedly called to limit police power and invest in community-based alternatives. That same month in 2020, his campaign donated $2,500 to the Austin Justice Coalition, a group advocating cuts to the city's police budget. At a 2022 graduation ceremony for incarcerated students, Talarico tied reduced police and prison spending to social programs: "If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing, and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete."
The New York Post framed the story around Talarico being "put on defense," giving significant space to the campaign's denial and its counterattack on Paxton's record — including a plea agreement his office reached involving a sex offender. Breitbart emphasized the original comments and added the subsequent donations and statements that complicate the campaign's clean denial.
Talarico has recently moderated his public image, saying many of his 2020 comments "missed the mark." Last month, an undercover video captured him pledging to use a Senate seat to fight for transgender children.
The question for Texas voters: which version of James Talarico would show up in the Senate — the one who told progressive activists that defunding police was a perfectly legitimate policy position, or the one now insisting he never meant any of it?
