Lessons from Texas and NC's Democratic primaries
An insurgent hero needs a villain
Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.
The midterm elections are officially underway, kicking off today with several hard-fought primaries in southern states that Democrats hope to turn blue this year. We’ll look at the races, the results, and what they mean.
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In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico pulled off a stunning upset over US Rep. Jasmine Crockett, 52-47%. Just a few months ago, Crockett looked like a slam dunk frontrunner, given her broad public profile and massive fundraising totals. Talarico, on the other hand, was a lesser-known lawmaker and seminary student just starting to build a national profile. Of course, longtime Progress Report readers knew his name because I interviewed him in 2024, which you can read below.
The two candidates struck very different profiles, both in substance and style. Crockett has largely conventional liberal politics (she was backed by the crypto lobby during her first run for office) but soars on TV and in Congressional hearings with a smash mouth, in-your-face political antagonism that Democrats have craved from their leaders. Yet while a darling of the MSNBC (or, MS NOW) crowd, Crockett struggled to raise money once she jumped into the Senate race, no doubt in part because of the inevitable electability argument that always penalizes Black women.
Talarico, on the other hand, offered a kind of cherubic populism, quoting scripture and citing Christ’s compassion as the basis for his progressive economic platform. Culture wars, he would often say, were a way for the rich and powerful to pit working and middle class Americans against one another. And I can vouch for his populism: for the past few years, I’ve spoken with Talarico about a number of different stories at More Perfect Union, largely centered on workers’ rights and education.
The message allowed him to avoid the loaded issues that Republicans have relentlessly pushed in Texas. CBS’s decision to censor his interview with Stephen Colbert led to a massive influx of donations and lent a straight-edge candidate the opportunity to cast himself as a danger to the establishment.
It always seemed odd to me that Talarico was seen as the underdog. A boyish white man in his 30s, with a religious background and populist policies, he is a fantasy come true for Democratic partisans, a cross between old south and new left with none of the bigotry or irony. He won’t be mistake for Bernie Sanders, but Talarico’s campaign cast billionaires and corporate greed as the root of society’s problems. Crockett, on the other hand, spent the stretch run of the campaign amplifying muddled racism allegations against Talarico and attacking one of his high-profile consultants.
It was a nasty battle, but if there’s reason for all Democrats to feel some hope, it’s the fact that over 1.7 million people voted in the primary, a number that exceeded the GOP turnout for a series of competitive primaries, including their heated Senate race.
(In another win for the left, Crockett will be replaced in Congress by Frederick Haynes, a progressive Baptist pastor who was backed by Justice Democrats.)
It’s a bit awkward for the left to be aligned against a Black woman candidate, but that’s the way both endorsements and polling broke in the Texas race. I wouldn’t say that it spells an end to identity politics, but the policy and generational divides are deepening in ways that may supersede race in many places, at least when it comes to Democratic primaries.
Then again, that dynamic was also on display in North Carolina’s 4th congressional district, where 69-year-old incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee squared off against 32-year-old Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam. The incumbent looks likely to survive by less than a point after defeating Allam by more than nine points in 2022, a result that suggests that the balance of power is shifting but it won’t be so easy to knock off entrenched leaders with good voting policies.
The left wanted to make this a proxy battle between several factions of the Democratic Party, running a campaign that cast Foushee as a tool of special interests. That has less to do with her record in Congress — she’s been a strong progressive — than how she got there.
Back in 2022, Foushee beat Allam in a crowded primary thanks in large part to a late $2 million spend by AIPAC. Four years and one genocide later, such overt material support from the conservative pro-Israel lobby was so toxic with Democratic primary voters that Foushee was forced to publicly reject any help from AIPAC. This just a few years after few in the party dared to condemn the war on Gaza and the DNC refused to allow a Palestinian activist to speak on stage in Chicago.
(Not that she went without help from the organization’s major donors; recently, Foushee’s campaign received $600K in air support from a Super PAC called Article One, funded in part by a major donor to AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations.)
At the same time, Allam, the first Muslim woman to serve in elected office in North Carolina, received over $1.1 million in outside help from organizations that were launched to counter AIPAC’s influence one cycle after the group spent millions to knock off several high-profile progressive incumbents.
The race also featured a divide on artificial intelligence and data centers, both of which have been the subject of backlash at the national and local level. Foushee and Allam responded very differently to the controversy surrounding a proposed data center in the district: the former offered ambivalence, stating that she trusted local officials to make the right decision, while the latter, a local elected official, vehemently opposed what would be a 190-acre data center.
The congresswoman’s ambivalence may have had something to do with the fact that she was recently named co-chair of a new Democratic AI committee, which dovetails nicely with the fact that Foushee was boosted by more than $1.6 million in late ads funded by Jobs & Democracy, a PAC funded entirely by AI company Anthropic.
Still, the effort to cast Foushee as a conservative or corporatist was complicated by the fact that she did not have a particularly objectionable record while in office. This race was more about the left’s embrace of Allam, and the lesson from North Carolina tonight is that a populist progressive insurgent still needs a real villain to rail against. Because while Foushee was not that villain, several state legislators did offer the exact prototype required for a successful primary challenge.
Two incumbents, state Reps. Nasif Majeed and Shelly Willingham, were ousted by Democratic voters after years spent helping Republicans override the vetoes of Democratic Govs. Roy Cooper and Josh Stein. A third Cooper antagonist, former Democratic Rep. Michael Wray, attempted to make a comeback after losing in 2024, only to get pasted by more than 25% points tonight.
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Very helpful analysis, thank you. The framing of the TX race is clearer than anything else I've read. But you totally missed the biggest progressive win in NC, Rev. Rodney Sadler defeating renegade incumbent state house member Carla Cunningham in Charlotte. Hers was THE vote that allowed R's to override Gov. Stein's veto of the law requiring county sheriffs to hold every person until they'd communicated with ICE. And hers was the product of alignment with outside groups the most -- Carolina Federation (and two colleague groups) have a People's Bench campaign that recruited and trained Rev. Sadler, who is a close colleague of Rev. William Barber. All In for NC ran a big phone bank and fundraised for him. UNITE HERE ran a huge IE canvass for him and all the other state rep races you appropriately cited.
"Two incumbents, state Reps. Nasif Majeed and Shelly Willingham, were ousted by Democratic voters after years spent helping Republicans override the vetoes of Democratic Govs. Roy Cooper and Josh Stein. A third Cooper antagonist, former Democratic Rep. Michael Wray, attempted to make a comeback after losing in 2024, only to get pasted by more than 25% points tonight."
Oh good, maybe breaking the supermajority will finally fucking mean something.