DALLAS – Friendship-West Baptist Church is a bastion of black politics, where candidates go through cycle after cycle to win over its 13,000 congregants. It’s the church Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) calls home; His pastor, Rev. Dr. Frederick D. Haynes III, now running to succeed him in Congress. Even Beto O’Rourke visited last week to encourage people to register to vote.
But many congregants can’t help but notice a persistent absence this year: James Tallarico.
The Democratic Senate candidate has a long way to go if he wants to win the Texas seat – which will require him to win over the state’s nearly 3 million black voters, who broke down substantially for Crockett in the March primary and many of whom are skeptical of his candidacy.
“Come and ask. Come and try to earn votes,” said Alan Williams of Crockett voter and Friendship-West congregation. “I think he thinks our vote is just a default and he doesn’t have to earn it.”
A month and a half after winning the nomination, Tallarico has begun traveling around Texas, including visiting some black churches, meeting with faith leaders and elected officials, and walking through majority black cities. But the frustrations of Friendship-West worshipers — who have yet to hear from him directly — and interviews with Black power brokers across the state show that Tallarico is facing pressure to heal the open wounds from a contentious primary and move quickly to turn out voters.
David Malcolm McGruder, the church’s executive pastor, said Tallarico would have to do more to sell his vision to voters – and convince them he would follow through: “We have people who show up to our churches during election season, but who don’t come for us at the policy level after November.”
Tallarico admitted in an interview that he would “love” to visit Friendship-West soon. “My top priority is to bring our coalition back together, and that’s especially reaching out to Black Texans,” he said. “There is no way to win Texas without winning the trust and support of black voters. Period. Full stop.”
It’s clear that Talarico has his work cut out for him. He was not a black voter. preferred candidate. Some are tired of the chaotic primaries that put questions of race and electability at the center of the contest. And while Black voters are highly committed Democrats, they need to keep enthusiasm high to make sure they turn out, especially as concerns grow over voter suppression. (A Rules changed at the last minute In Crockett’s home base of Dallas County, thousands of people were turned away from the polls or had their ballots invalidated on primary election day.)
Democrats have long faced those charges take black voters for granted. Many Texas strategists are worried that will happen again by November — and that the party will blame black voters if Tallarico loses.
“Black voters have been disenfranchised over time,” said Antjuan Seawright, a longtime Democratic strategist who advises the Democratic senatorial campaign committee. “Some people may not understand that our vote, more than any other constituency in the history of this country, has always been a demonstration of our faith, but our faith has been either trivialized by many or has always been undercut.”
Tallarico is already receiving grassroots support from Democratic groups like O’Rourke’s Powered by People and several Black state lawmakers.
“We don’t have time to dwell on our emotions,” said Crystal Chism, president of the Dallas County chapter of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats. “We need to make the main thing the main thing, and that is getting Talarico elected.”
But one notable ally is missing: even though Crockett accepted the race early and endorsed Tallarico in March, he has yet to campaign or make much public effort to rally the base behind him. Crockett declined an interview request for this story through a spokesperson.
Tallarico said he and Crockett “have exchanged a few messages” since the primaries and that he “would love nothing more” than to have her on the campaign trail.
“She’s got her work cut out for her,” said former No. 1 NFL draft pick Russell Maryland, who won three Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys and voted for Crockett in the primary. “She’s going to have work to win over Jasmine’s supporters. … Tallarico really needs to get his toes in the ground, football-wise, and bite some dust.”
Seminary is still trying to recover from some of the criticism leveled against it in the lead up to the primaries.
In February, a PAC that supported Talarico ran a tv commercial With the tagline, “If she wins, we lose.” Crockett claimed that the advertisement darkened his skin and said it was bigotry. “It’s not even in a light tone yet,” He said. “This is straight up racist.” (Talarico stressed in an interview that the PAC was not affiliated with his campaign and that he disagreed with its message. He said he believed Crockett was electable statewide in Texas, because he has said it before.)
Then a social media influencer claimed that Tallarico told him in a private conversation that former Representative Colin Allred (D-Texas), who dropped out of the Senate race just before Crockett joined, was a “mediocre black man”. Tallarico has said that this was a mischaracterization of his comments, and that he was implying Allred’s campaigning style was mediocre.
Allred, who is now running in a competitive race to represent Texas’s 33rd District, said in an interview that he supports Talarico. “Of course I support them,” he said. “I support the Democrats. I’ve been supporting the Democrats here my whole life.”
But Tallarico’s challenge, Allred said, isn’t convincing black voters to support him over the Republican candidate — it’s convincing them to turn out.
“They need to show comfort in Black spaces and Black communities,” Allred said. “I’m sure he could do that, but there’s no option. Especially given how some of the ads went, there might be some element of showing remorse, even if he wasn’t responsible for all of them.”
Tallarico has visited a black church almost every weekend since primary, and he went to Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU, on Wednesdays. where he accepted She must “earn the trust, respect and support of every single supporter of Congresswoman.” He led and organized a block-walk in majority-black DeSoto, Texas. A roundtable with black community leaders Recently in Austin. And last month, he convened African American clerics at St. Luke’s Community United Methodist Church in Dallas to discuss the policy.
“The Democratic Party has taken black voters for granted and assumed they were just part of the base, assumed they would just show up and vote for you,” Tallarico said in an interview. “And I think we’ve seen the devastating consequences of that kind of disrespect toward black voters.”
To his advantage, Tallarico has an army of Texas Democrats eager to flip the state for the first time in decades. Last Sunday, O’Rourke — whose three-point defeat to GOP Senator Ted Cruz in 2018 was the high-water mark for Texas Democrats this century — mingled with congregants at Friendship-West while yellow-vested volunteers from his organization encouraged them to check their voter registration.
“I like James Tallarico,” O’Rourke said. “I’m excited for him. I’ve talked to him and said, ‘You can send me anywhere the campaign can’t reach. I’ll raise money for you. I’ll try to get your volunteers excited. I’ll speak as a surrogate. You let me know.'”
State Senator Royce West of Dallas, who voted for Crockett and has since endorsed Tallarico, is also optimistic, if more measured: “He’s getting excited. He has support within the African American community. Is it where it needs to be? No. Is he making progress? Yes.”
On the Republican side, longtime Senator John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton are locked in a lengthy and costly dispute that could be beneficial to Democrats. Tallarico’s internal polling shows that he is competitive against either candidate, but some observers believe he has a strong edge against Paxton given Paxton’s myriad controversies. Talarico boasts a cash advantage, with nearly $10 million in cash after the first quarter of the year, while Cornyn has more than $8 million and Paxton has $2.6 million.
“There is still work to be done,” said Cliff Walker, a Texas Democratic strategist and principal at Seeker Strategies. “But I don’t stay awake at night worrying that we won’t be able to reassemble this coalition in time for November.”
