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Before we get to the meat of this live, I just wanted to say thank you! We hit the top 100 rising Substack publications in U.S. Politics today. We’re #76 and climbing. That’s because of you. Ok, now to the great conversation that capped a busy week of Substack Lives.
Common Power Executive Director Charles Douglas joined me to break down what is actually happening in this country, not from a studio, not from a green room, but from the ground. He was just in Texas knocking on doors for James Talarico with a team of volunteers. His dispatch from the ground was genuinely insightful.
Talarico won the Democratic Senate primary in Texas, 53% to 46% over Jasmine Crockett. Breaking down the demographics Talarico won, and the Democratic primary vote more generally, there are some key lessons to glean. Charles believes there could be a proof of concept for a coalition that the left has been arguing about theoretically for years, and Charles just watched it operate in real time at actual doors in El Paso.
What Charles brought back from Texas is not a simple story. It is not “progressive wins Texas” or “moderate beats progressive.” Both of those framings miss it. What happened in Texas is that a candidate with genuinely progressive positions, who fights for abortion rights and refuses to throw trans people or any other constituency under the bus, built a coalition so broad it included Black Republican families who didn’t back Kamala Harris, Hispanic women who were drawn to James Talarico’s Mexican roots, and disaffected independents who haven’t voted in years. That is not a moderate coalition. That is a working-class coalition. There is a difference.
And it is not just Texas. The same thread runs through Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York and through Katie Wilson's in Seattle. Different candidates, different states, different languages for it. But the underlying argument is the same: working people are getting squeezed while wealth concentrates at the top, and the way to build a majority is to name that clearly and fight it directly.
Talarico uses Christianity as his moral framework. Mamdani uses a socialist one. What they are communicating is the same value system. That consistency is not a coincidence. It is a signal about where the country actually is when you get off the internet and knock on the doors.
The conversation got heated in places while we responded to some folks in the live chat. Our conversation was more fired up than usual, which Charles and I both appreciated. Some of that heat went into a debate about voting, about exhaustion, about what Black voters give to a Democratic Party that has not always returned the investment.
I want to address that directly in one section below, because it deserves to be addressed with the seriousness it requires, not fully dismissed.
The rest of this write-up is the Texas story, because that story is one that needs to be told.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.
What Charles Saw On The Ground While Knocking Doors For Talarico
Charles Douglas was knocking on doors in El Paso and across Texas with Common Power’s volunteer operation. The picture he brought back is more complex and more hopeful than what you’d gather from the online fight about this primary.
Charles said the broad headline is this: Texas is ready to flip, and Talarico’s win did not happen in a vacuum. It is built on years of infrastructure, starting with Beto O’Rourke’s voter registration operation, which he turned into on-the-ground energy rather than walking away after losing. Charles made the point directly: “You don’t have Talarico without Beto.” That organizing laid the groundwork that made a 2026 run viable in people’s minds before Talarico ever announced.
The doors Charles knocked were not the monoculture you’d expect from online takes about Texas. He encountered Republicans who wished him luck, Crockett supporters who couldn’t wait for “that Wednesday when we’re all together,” and independents who had simply been looking for a reason. What was absent at those doors, Charles said, was the hate. People offered water. They thanked him for being out there. The opposition between Democratic and Republican voters that dominates social media was not the reality he encountered face-to-face.
The anecdote that stopped the conversation cold: Charles’s colleague Wole met a Black family in an El Paso hotel lobby who identified as God-first, were anti-DEI, had not voted for Kamala Harris, and were enthusiastically backing Talarico. It was like a family conjured up in a The New York Times profile piece. But this family was real. And what it showed is that Talarico’s message reached people whose political identity the left had written off, not by compromising his positions, but by leading with something universal: a God-fearing man who brings people who are different together.
The New Blueprint: Working Class First, Moral Argument Front and Center
This is the section of the conversation Charles pushed hardest on, and it connects Talarico to a pattern that keeps showing up across the country.
Charles drew a direct through line from Talarico to Zohran Mamdani in New York, to Graham Plattner, to Katie Wilson in Seattle, to Justin Pearson in Tennessee. The thing connecting all of them is not strategy or style, it is two principles: unify the working class, and pay for working-class programs by taxing the wealthy. That’s it. Those two things, Charles said, can travel across almost any geography, any demographic mix, any political tradition. The specifics look different. The core is the same.
I made the point about the distinction between Talarico and Mamdani that people missed: they used different frameworks because they came from different places. Talarico’s moral backbone is Christian, rooted in his seminary background, and he describes Jesus in terms that Charles said made him want to go back to church. Mamdani uses a socialist framework. The language differs. What they’re communicating is the same value system: the rich are extracting, working people are carrying the weight, and that has to change. Charles said this has to be a moral argument, not a data argument. He credited something I’d said months ago, and I appreciated the callback.
Both Charles and I pushed back hard on the framing of Talarico as a moderate or centrist. Charles said it plainly: people call him moderate because Republican voters like him, but that’s a categorical error. Being moderate in demeanor is not the same as being moderate in substance. Talarico talked about taxing the wealthy. He fought for abortion rights. He did not throw trans people under the bus. No one can point to a single thing he did to compromise those positions to appeal to the right. What he did was lead with something that didn’t require people to share his politics to feel seen.
The Gerrymander That Backfired
Charles saved this for the end, and it’s genuinely remarkable. Republicans drew new maps, thinking 2024 was a permanent realignment. They were wrong.
Here’s what happened: Republicans drew five new congressional districts in Texas after Hispanic voters swung toward Trump in 2024. The logic was that they had won those voters over for good, so they’d pack them into districts that would hold. Charles laid out the result: in four of the five new districts, Democratic primary turnout outpaced Republican primary turnout. Not by a little. By a lot. And every one of them had a large Hispanic population.
I pointed out that this is the pattern of the entire Trump term. He announces something meant to entrench his power. It backfires. He thought he’d won Hispanic voters permanently. Instead, his policies targeting Latino communities drove them back, hard. The gerrymander designed to lock in 2024 may have created four new competitive districts. We also noted that other GOP states have paused their own gerrymandering efforts after reading the writing on the wall.
The larger takeaway, which Charles made clear: Texas is a bellwether. What happens there tells you something about what’s coming nationally. The demographic math is shifting. The maps Republicans drew based on 2024 are already obsolete. And Republican legislators across the country are starting to act like people who no longer believe Trump is going to protect them.
On Voting, Exhaustion, & What This Moment Requires
Some of the chat went to a difficult place during this conversation. I want to address it directly rather than paper over it. Someone in the chat was advocating that Black people leave the Democratic Party.
Charles acknowledged something real: Black voters have been the most consistent Democratic voting bloc in American history, Black women especially. The exhaustion people feel about “fall in line” messaging is not irrational, and it did not come from nowhere. Crockett’s path to victory depended on massive Black voter turnout in Harris County, and that turnout did not materialize at the scale her campaign needed. That tells you something about the state of the relationship between Black voters and the Democratic Party, and it deserves honest reckoning, not lectures.
Charles made a sharp point about what’s actually at stake for people who sit out: if Democrats regain the House and win the presidency in 2028, the people who fought and organized and showed up are the ones who will have leverage over what comes next. The people who sat it out will not be at the table. He put it simply: being an adult means compromising. You don’t get everything. You work with the coalition you have to get as much as you can, and then you keep fighting. That is not blind loyalty. That is a strategy.
I came in harder than usual on this one, and I’ll stand by it. Advocacy for not voting right now, when federal agents are killing people in the streets, and American bombs may have killed 160 children in Iran, is not a principled position. It is reckless. You can critique the Democratic Party, primary people, push the party left, disagree with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and still vote. That is the line I draw. I draw it because people have died as a result of people making those same purity decisions and withholding their votes from Kamala Harris.
Bottom Line
What Charles brought back from Texas is a blueprint, not a theory. Talarico proved that a genuinely progressive candidate can build a coalition across ideological lines without compromising his core positions, without throwing any constituency overboard, and without relying on the anger and vitriol that has dominated Democratic politics for the past decade. The voters who made that happen were not who you’d expect. That’s the point. We’ll see if he can replicate that in the general election.
The gerrymander backfire is the Trump story in miniature: every move designed to lock in power is being undone by the consequences of his own policies. Republicans drew those maps based on a 2024 realignment that is already unraveling. Hispanic voters who came home to Texas Democrats did so because Trump came after them after they gave him a chance. That is not a coalition you can legislate back into existence.
The Iran situation, the unemployment numbers climbing, the coalition around Trump cracking from Nick Fuentes to Tucker Carlson, these are not separate stories. They are the same story: a political project built on promises it cannot keep, losing the people who believed in it. We are watching that happen in real time. The midterms are coming. The question is whether the people who understand what is at stake will show up to meet the moment.
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