Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
3/4/26: James Talarico Defeats Crockett, Dan Crenshaw Goes Down In Texas
04 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What role did independent media play in recent elections?
We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Sounds like we're trying to free the BP26. We don't know who they are, but we want to free them. If you are the Senate Republican Leadership Fund, you just burned through all of your money trying to keep Cornyn alive. So you really need this month free. Get that corporate discount.
We'll take it. Exactly. So to discuss all this, we're joined by Dave Weigel of Semaphore, David Sirota of Lever News. Thank you, David. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you guys being here. So let's start with, and we're going to do a second segment later on the Republican primary, but let's start with Tallarico and Crockett. Sirota, so it seemed like this started out as...
a race that didn't have any kind of ideological content to it, that it was like different styles, like different MSNBC styles really. That seemed to evolve as Tallarico, and I want your take on this too, as Tallarico started embracing this top-bottom, like we're taking on the billionaires, they're your real problem, and Crockett stuck with whatever the MSNBC stuff is.
Yeah, I'm not sure what she was really running on. It's like a brand, like a vibe. I mean, look, it's all vibes, right? It's all vibes. I think Tallarico clearly, as the campaign went on, recognized the, I guess we could call it proxy-wise, like the Bernie vibe. Like if you call the anti-billionaire stuff like the Bernie vibe, right? Like I think what I take away from this race is that
People like him have realized that there is, that is the normal middle center of the Democratic Party. Oh, and by the way, if people are getting the news from this show, he won. Yes. We should mention. Right. Like, I think.
we've seen in a series of races that these candidates who are winning these primaries have recognized that while there's this debate going on between, you know, third way and, you know, the so-called left, et cetera, et cetera, that actually there isn't really much of a debate going on at the kind of voter level over anti-oligarch politics.
That is now the just sort of mainstream normal of the Democratic Party, which I, you know, taking a long view now, I'm like- Because Crockett was running on that, too. Right. Yeah. And, like, I just turned 50 recently, and you're about as old as I am. I am, dude. Right? Okay. Like, that may seem like a just, like, not all that interesting. Right. Of course.
But, like, that has not been the way it's been up until now. And so I look at that race, and I say, wow, to think about how far— We've come since like just Bernie 10 years ago, Bernie five years ago. That's my takeaway of a candidate who can kind of code moderate, you know, vibe-wise, code moderate, but be the anti-billionaire candidate.
I wanna run that past you, Dave, because one of the reasons I thought this was such an interesting primary is you have the stylistic, the stylistic hewing to norms from Tallarico, who's almost stylistically, again, like a Biden candidate, who says we're gonna restore decency to the country. We're a Buttigieg candidate, a lot like that.
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Chapter 3: How did James Talarico's campaign strategy differ from Crockett's?
She mentioned that a couple times when I was covering her. She had some big events, some big conversations, but a lot more of what Democrats have not had any success with, which is how dare a felon, a 35-count felon be allowed to serve in the government? This guy is corrupt? But it was like, okay, well, yeah, Trump's corrupt, sure. But who is behind him? And how are you being distracted?
And every time you're watching a reaction to him, what are you missing? It's this. It's this policy. It's this diminution of Medicaid funding. It was that. Enemy first, which is, it's kind of obvious, but there have been lots of Democrats who never get there and they're very loose and they do not say, here's the bad guy, I will take on the bad guy, your life's better for this reason.
He did it all the time. So when I was writing speeches for Bernie Sanders, some people would, well, one, I'd get Raz, how do you write a speech for Bernie Sanders? He says the same thing over and over again. I mean, that's where I got all my gray hair. Trying to put in new things.
But the question of why do people show up to hear what they've already heard, it was like, I feel like a lot of people showed up on those campaigns because they liked hearing somebody recount and name the villains, the enemies, because it felt like no one else was naming them. And so when you say, when you point out that Tallarico was actually naming villains, naming the enemy,
I feel like that's become code for authenticity, code for I am willing to name villains. The people who don't want you to name villains are the donors. The money doesn't want you to name that. And I think this question about what is left and right, what is moderate, what is liberal, et cetera, et cetera. The Third Way Conference this week was all about how the Democrats need to be moderate.
They need to reject their left. I would ask a question like, in this race, who does the average voter think, in the Texas primary, was the candidate on the left? Or who was the moderate? I think those terms don't mean anything anymore.
That's why I say, when I'm referring to, people ask where is my politics, I'm like, I'm not even sure the word left or right or moderate, I don't think these terms mean anything anymore. regular people who are trying to follow this. Now, the Hispanic vote swung wildly to Democrats this time. Either one of you can take this, but Tom Bonnier, Democratic data analyst, we can put this up in post.
He flagged that, he says, Zapata County turnout in the primary there yesterday was 143%, the total number of votes that Kamala Harris won in the general election. Republicans in this high-profile manner went and redistricted Texas to try to add a couple of members. And I want to get your take on this. It may end up being an incredible own goal, shoot yourself in the foot kind of moment.
So he flags four of the districts, congressional districts, the 9th, 28th, 34th, and 35th that were redistricted in order to be Republican districts. In each one of them, Democratic primary turnout was higher than GOP primary turnout, in some cases by like 3,000 or 4,000, in other cases by 20,000 to 30,000 to 40,000 more votes.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Talarico's anti-billionaire messaging?
Clear on ICE and making the argument that, again, Democrats, I think, are mostly comfortable making, even if they don't like saying abolish. Well, we agree that immigration enforcement is good, but why are they flagging down Hispanic people and saying if they have papers? That's popular there. Border Patrol is very popular. If you've been to South Texas, people have— It's a big employer.
Well, yeah, you know the Blue Lights Matter flag. You'll see a green line and a flag. That's the Border Patrol flag. Myra Flores. Yeah, exactly. And he was careful about that. But it was spending time in that area and also talking about religion. I think there are going to be a lot of criticisms of how he talks about religion. Many from me.
It's a little more like Gnostic than most Hispanic Catholics are comfortable with when it comes to divinity or God's gender, etc., That's where Hogan's gonna hit. Which, by the way, is something that was hugely divisive in the Rio Grande Valley for Democrats, this question of what's moderate, what's not.
I agree, the labels are really hard to say because it's like, he runs as a kind of stylistic moderate. Where is he on some of these cultural issues? Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley, independent-type Hispanic voters, that might be an issue for them. It was. And I did meet Hispanic voters who were saying their whole family was MAGA the last election.
They've got right-wing Catholic family who share memes on Facebook and they can't believe they're a Democrat. But they can send them a Tallarico video about something specific and say, well, this is what I believe. And it was... It's not going down the litmus test of a Catholic voter who's pro-life. He's not going to match that. Gender critical person, he's not going to match that.
But just talking about faith in the way he did, quoting the book of Matthew, quoting the Sermon on the Mount, just doing that versus the secularism they were used to from other Democrats. Beto O'Rourke is not very comfortable doing that. A lot of Democrats are not. They don't go to church very much. They don't talk about it.
Going to church, the fact that he was a seminarian and talked about God at all, I think I was maybe a little bit cynical about that because it's when going in before I went there. But just they had not heard that they were hearing Democrats talk about shouting your abortion and. He would talk about Christian nationalism, which I think is more for the John Oliver audience.
But the part they were hearing was, well, he's quoting the Bible. I haven't heard a Democrat come here and quote the Bible because he's not like Henry Cuellar, who knows the region. He's at least trying. And he made some inroads that way. But that plus the ICE thing. And I've heard that from Arizona and from other places, too, that, look, they're not saying abolish ICE. They're saying...
There has to be some Goldilocks bull in the middle that is protecting the border and not chasing my friend down because he has a Mexican flag on his truck because he's fifth generation. He just has a Mexican flag. Well, last point before we go to Needle Alam, and you may have something to add, Sarota. It's just Crockett was flirting with just dragging this out last night.
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Chapter 5: How did voter demographics shift in the Texas primary?
Let's talk about Ken Paxton. Ken Paxton, like Chip Roy, headed to a runoff with John Cornyn. We can put F3 up on the screen. This is the results. Very, very interesting results in this race. Cornyn overperformed what a lot of people expected. He's not quite a Crenshaw-style figure. He's been around Texas for a long time. He's obviously a senator, so...
He has probably more built-in goodwill, but is definitely friendly with leadership. He's a member of the GOP establishment, no question about that. Lots of people in Texas angry about that post-Eubaldi gun bill that Cornyn got behind. That's definitely been a problem for him. Wesley Hunt pulls in 13.5%.
Senate leadership fund aligned with Cornyn then lashes out at Wesley Hunt as he's defeated and is basically like, well, we could have avoided a runoff if you hadn't even gotten into this race. Those are not Cornyn votes. Wesley Hunt voters? What do you think, Weigel? By the end, I don't think they are.
Because the last two weeks, in Texas you'd see the ads, the last two weeks was SLF going after Hunt. They wanted this number. So what is their theory of this race? It is get Cornyn above Paxton by any margin at all. If it was like the polls were a month ago and it was Paxton 43, Cornyn 33, Hunt... better than he did, then Trump would look at that and say, this guy's a loser.
I'm not going to endorse him. They just want Trump to endorse John Cornyn. Forget any other issue in the race. Just endorse him. And right now, in other rooms, I'm sure they're saying, we got Tallarico, not Crockett. There's no runoff on their side. So we're not sure Paxton can win. Texas Republicans are not that worried. I mean, they voted for him This was a story I covered in 2022.
Running for AG after all of his indictments, George P. Bush was running as the savior who had saved the AG seat, and Paxton was fine. So it's tough to convince Republican voters. The people in D.C. who make these donations were pretty well convinced that Paxton would blow it to Tallarico, so they're going to do that today. We're not talking about any ideological differences.
There really weren't any in the campaign. The entire argument against Hunt was that he was a showboat who never showed up for votes. It was not he voted wrong on something. It was just that. And Paxton just kind of – he wasn't raising as much money, but he was kind of holding his powder because he knew he had this locked in.
He had – I mean, this is similar to what he got, I think, in his AG primary because he had two challengers. I think he did a little bit better. But that's the story. It's just to the extent there is a big Republican establishment, this has been their thing for years. It's just – We can't really make a positive argument for our guy's individual record. We can say that Trump loves him.
So let's just wait this out and see if we can get Trump in the race. And the Hunt theory was, Corden's so weak that I can leapfrog in and I'd easily win. That's true. And if Republicans blow this at some point, they'll say, why did we invest so much when we could have just easily held the seat with Wesley Hunt, who would not have any problem. No scandals.
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