James Talarico

in every corner of Texas, from Beaumont to El Paso, from Amarillo up in the Panhandle all the way down to Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley.

And everywhere we do events, you know, I stay till the very end.

I shake every hand.

I take every selfie.

I answer every question.

And so I get to hear from people one on one.

And no matter where I go in the state, I have people who come up to me and whisper, I'm not a Democrat.

like they're in the witness protection program or something.

And a lot of people say this is the first campaign they've ever gotten involved with or the first time they've ever showed up at a political event, a political rally or a town hall.

And so I do feel like we are building a coalition that is bigger than the Democratic Party.

It's bigger than the Republican Party.

It includes a lot of people who are participating for the first time and who desperately want to see

a better politics, and who want to see a senator who's actually going to fight for them and their families.

Yeah, well, before I was ever in elected office, I was a school teacher.

I taught sixth grade language arts at Rhodes Middle School.

Shout out to Rhodes and the Wildcats.

The west side of San Antonio is a beautiful, historic neighborhood.

It's also one of the poorest zip codes in the whole state of Texas.

And so I saw firsthand how decisions made in the halls of power, whether it's the halls of the state capitol or the halls of our national capitol,

hurt students like the ones that I taught, hurt communities like the West Side.