Can James Talarico teach Democrats a better way to talk about faith?

Tuesday night will deliver much more than the conclusion of the first round of voting in the feisty Texas Democratic Senate primary. It brings with it the first major opportunity to take stock of lessons ahead of the 2026 midterms, about what kind of fighter Democratic voters are looking for and what kind of message will motivate them to turn out.

But perhaps more interestingly, the primary race has elevated another question: What the role of religion should be, and that of candidates talking about their faith, in the political landscape of 2026.

Both Senate candidates, state Rep. James Talarico and US Rep. Jasmine Crockett, have relied on religion, churches, and faith-based messaging to make their pitch to Democratic primary voters. But Talarico’s brand of compassionate progressive Christianity, wedded to a populist economic message, has attracted the most attention in and out of the state as a core feature of his campaign. His pitch is a message of radical love, of healing political divisions, and of welcoming Americans who might not be traditional Democrats into a big-tent political coalition.

“In my faith, love is the strongest force in the universe,” the Presbyterian pastor-in-training would say on the campaign trail. He’d tell reporters that “politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors” and that his campaign platform would synthesize faith, love and politics: “You can’t stand for faith and then warp and weaponize religion to hurt our neighbors.”

Talarico’s case, that “a campaign based on love is more durable than one based on fear,” sounds novel — it was captivating enough to win plaudits from Joe Rogan, Stephen Colbert, and Ezra Klein.

But it faces a strong headwind in today’s political environment. Democratic primary voters in Texas and across the country also desire more fire, confrontation, and righteous anger from their candidates. Many have been drawn to candidates — like Crockett in Texas, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom in early presidential polling — with a message that’s often ruder, cruder, and adapted to meet the far less pious Donald Trump on his own terms, without any mercy, Christian or otherwise.

“Politics has changed. And one thing that the Democrats have struggled with is that they continue to be viewed as the doormat for the Republicans,” Crockett told my colleague Astead Herndon last month. “(Voters) continue to say, ‘Where’s the opposition? Where’s the fight?’”

That’s the kind of “fighter” spirit that has been simmering among Democrats for the last year. And it’s revealing a tension for Democrats who might want to take lessons from Talarico, might want to replicate his message of hope and faith, and feel a moral and political imperative to take back ground ceded to the religious right, especially as a resurgent religious left begins to take shape.

The role of religion in the Democratic Party serves as a bit of a proxy for some bigger existential questions it faces. After 2024, the party was struggling with multiple problems. It had lost more culturally conservative voters of all races, it had lost its working-class economic appeal after rampant inflation under President Joe Biden, and it had lost its edge among anti-system voters who wanted politicians who could challenge the existing status quo.

In that context, Talarico, seemed like a godsend to some: a religious progressive who could code as a cultural moderate on a manosphere podcast while offering a faith-based twist on the party’s message of taxing the rich and helping the poor.

It also might not have hurt that he was a white man in an election cycle after many Democrats blamed sexism and racism for undermining Kamala Harris’s message to voters. He seemed to demonstrate how an increasingly secular Democratic voting base might be able to tolerate — or even welcome — religious beliefs and messaging.

Talarico himself hasn’t compromised on the cultural issues that Democratic voters still care about — he’s defended abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and gun control using biblical reasoning. But this gray area of championing populist economics over culture wars, one which Democrats have been debating for at least the last year, might offer some cover for other religious Democratic candidates.

Catholic liberals, for example, talk about the poor, the liberal Catholic writer Christopher Hale, who helped lead faith-based outreach during President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, told me recently, and church leaders have been prioritizing “a human-first” message more recently, just as other Protestant, non-denominational, and non-Christian faith communities have been championing in the Trump era. “This (message) tends to have more sway in the democratic socialist, and the economic populist movements of the Democratic Party,” Hale explained.

Talarico has employed just this kind of pitch on the campaign trail: advocating more separation of church and state, grounding his anti-corruption, anti-elite, and anti-establishment critiques of both parties in the principle of caring for the least well-off. “The biggest divide in America is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom,” he would say in one of his most popular stump lines. “Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.”

Still, in the primary, at least, there are structural limits to how far this kind of message will go. While the state is dominated by conservatives and moderates, the Democratic electorate is different: more liberal, more diverse, and more hungry for a fighter. Each of those are sources of strength for Crockett, who benefited from a huge name recognition advantage in the contest and support from one of the largest cohorts of religious Democrats: Black voters. And while Talarico’s message might resonate with a future general-election electorate, in the primary, this religious pitch might have a limited audience.

“It’s not clear from the data that his faith, and willingness to speak about it earns him a direct advantage, at least in the only contest that matters right now, the upcoming March 3rd Primary,” authors from the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project research center concluded when analyzing voter trends and views of the candidates based on religious identification in February.

Instead, they theorized that Talarico’s religious appeals might actually resonate more with secular, non-religious voters who are making calculations about electability in the general election. In other words, supporters might be less interested in hearing Bible verses themselves, and more interested in whether some imagined swing voter cares instead.

Along those lines, some Crockett supporters have insinuated that Talarico’s Democratic backers are treating him as more electable because of his race, rather than because of any novel religious appeal. “You are not saving religion for the Democratic Party or the left,” former Rep. Colin Allred, who dropped out of the Senate race earlier and recently endorsed Crockett, said in a video slamming Talarico’s campaign. “We already have Senator Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock for that. We don’t need you. You’re not saying anything unique.”

And outside the party, Christian conservatives see Talarico as flattering Democrats by feeding them an unrepresentative view of their faith that just happens to align with progressive preferences on every social issue and asks them to sacrifice nothing to reconcile the Bible with partisan politics.

In addition to Talarico’s stances on transgender rights (“God is nonbinary,” he said in a 2021 floor speech) and abortion (“Creation has to be done with consent,” he told Rogan, citing the story of Mary), he drew howls from some Christian commentators for telling Ezra Klein on a podcast that other religions point to the “same truth” as Christianity when asked whether he believed his faith was truer than others. There are also sectarian differences: Talarico is a mainline Protestant, while the core of the Republican Party is evangelical.

But Democrats have only gotten less religious over the last few years

Complicating this all is the fact that while there may be a resurgence of the religious left in America, it’s happening as the party’s coalition, and its voters, get less religious overall.

I’ve covered the first phenomenon over the last year: how Trump’s threats to the social safety net, his prioritization of the rich, his persecution of immigrants, and his administration’s embrace of Christian nationalist rhetoric have inspired a counter-movement among progressive-minded religious Americans.

The second phenomenon is often overlooked in talk about Democrats and religion: while elected Democrats and party leaders might feel that there is an imperative to tap into this energy and make inroads with a religious electorate that the right has seized, their share of religious voters has declined significantly. Consider this calculation by the religion researcher Ryan Burge: 71 percent of Obama’s winning coalition in 2008 held some kind of religious faith. When Harris lost in 2024, that share had shrunk to 55 percent.

That shifting coalition has primarily hurt Democrats in general elections: political researchers have found time and again that secular, non-religious voters take more liberal positions on issues than religious voters. And that’s created a wedge between secular progressive voters and more religious and moderate nonwhite voters, who swung toward Republicans in 2024, including in Texas.“You can see the problem for Democrats,” the political writer John Halpin wrote in December. “Since more than two-thirds of U.S. voters overall remain Christian, the increasingly non-Christian and secular Democratic Party remains out of touch with a huge chunk of Americans.”

This ongoing party shift toward secularism and social liberalism could make it harder for Democrats to welcome religious candidates who perhaps stray further on social policy than Talarico in more red-leaning districts and states. It was not long ago that the party included a significant contingent of Catholic politicians who were moderate to conservative on abortion, for example, a group that once included Joe Biden.

Democrats counting on faith may pick up lessons from Texas

This tension in coalitions is what Talarico’s campaign has so far managed to balance. He’s not alone, though, and a successful primary could help inspire others to talk and invoke faith more in trying to navigate the post-Trump political environment.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, for example, has made his Christian faith a central part of his commentary as he tests the waters for a 2028 presidential run. He made headlines a few years ago, for example, when he vetoed anti-LGBTQ legislation in his state by invoking his Christianity: “My faith teaches me that everyone is a child of God, deserving of love.”

And something of a trend is developing down-ballot: of other Democratic candidates invoking scripture and biblical teachings in trying to win over Christian voters, and of the party finding their latest “secret weapon”: seminarians and pastors.

Democrats recruiting candidates to run this year know that their party must be competitive in more places around the country in order to maximize their odds at winning control of at least one house of Congress, to set up a pipeline to be competitive in the future, and to offer an alternative to growing Christian nationalist sentiment on the right.

But they also employ a note of caution here: “People want digestible stories… (of) ‘people of faith are now running as Democrats.’ I don’t think it’s that simple,” Rep. Morgan McGarvey of Kentucky, one of the House Democrats leading candidate recruitment this year, told me. “It’s more individual, more district and area specific. This is not a template that someone can go just have.”

McGarvey, a practicing Presbyterian, speaks about the intersection of faith and politics through a similar framework of radical Christian love as do Beshear and Talarico — “We want everybody to have health care, we want everybody to be able to find affordable housing, we want everybody to have a shot at the American dream…That’s that notion of Christian love that we can fight to get.”

If Talarico succeeds on Tuesday, prepare to hear a lot more of this pitch in Texas and across the country. McGarvey said that authenticity will be key here: “It can’t be a staffer writing you a line from the Bible to say. It’s got to be something that you feel and that you live and that is a part of your existence.”

But if these candidates succeed at getting this across, Democrats may end up seeing electoral payoff. At the very least, regardless of who wins this Texas primary, Talarico will have demonstrated that Democrats should not be afraid to talk about faith and engage in a new form of religious battle for the Trump era.