James Talarico had a problem, and he didn’t need me to tell him what it was. The unassuming state lawmaker had beaten U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in a Democratic Senate primary that their supporters had turned nasty, even as the candidates mostly stayed above the fray.

Now here he was months later, a white man needing to endear himself to Black voters still raw over what happened on the way to Crockett’s loss. Worse, they had grown even more disenchanted by what they considered a lack of outreach from his team since he’d won. And they didn’t see his campaign spending any money to try to make it right.

Crockett gave him a lukewarm endorsement but wouldn’t give him the time of day, much less campaign with him.

The Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas had Talarico as the general election choice of 67% of the state’s 3 million Black voters. In a long-red state with 19 million registered voters, that was nowhere close to the kind of overwhelming support from that demographic it would take for him to defeat state Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee.

As we walked in the middle — not at the front — of hundreds of people taking part in Opal’s Walk for Freedom, the symbolic 2.5-mile Juneteenth march that Dr. Opal Lee had turned into a Fort Worth institution, there could be no doubt about it: James Talarico had a problem.

And he could not have seemed less bothered by it, despite the rain.

“It’s nice to show up to things and not have to be the center of attention,” he told me. “To just be there as a supporter, as a cheerleader. Because I feel like that’s kind of the spirit we have to get back to in our politics.”

You get used to answers like that the more time you spend around or listening to Talarico. It’s a tone that often feels out of place in today’s aggressive politics. It’s the tenor of a man who has been a seminarian and a teacher.

One could argue that demeanor is one of the reasons that Talarico has the best chance in decades to do something no Democrat has done since 1988 — win a Senate seat in Texas.

By October, that same Texas Politics Project poll had him at 79% among Black voters. Overall, polling averages compiled by MS NOW partner FiftyPlusOne show him with a 3.5-point lead over Paxton with days to go — even better numbers, as Talarico modestly noted, than Beto O’Rourke ever managed in his ballyhooed but unsuccessful 2018 challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz.

Yet still a sign of a contest close enough that Black voters could swing it.

The story of how Talarico took his problem and met it head-on is a story of old-school pounding the pavement, modern campaigning via influencers, and yes, money. But it’s also a story of the power of that rarest of political traits: humility. It could turn out to be the story of the 2026 midterms.

A rough spring

In June what was clear was that the Black voter problem that Talarico had was not entirely of his own making.

The ugliness of the primary, most of it online, eventually bled into the real world, something rare in campaigns. Black Texans were largely behind Crockett, a two-term member who had quickly become a national figure. And the people who had gone all in for her, especially the Black women who make up the backbone of Democratic turnout in Dallas and Houston, were left feeling like it was 2024 all over again (particularly after Crockett got a last-minute endorsement from former Vice President Kamala Harris).

The day before I walked with Talarico, I sat down in a Dallas art gallery with two of the most influential political content creators in Texas, Camille McCallum and Olive Okoro, both Black women who backed Crockett in the primary. Between the two of them and the roughly 40 other online creators who had been in Crockett’s orbit, they could reach millions of followers. Both told me they would hold their noses and vote for Talarico.

Their concern was that millions of Black Texans wouldn’t be doing the same.

“Jasmine Crockett spoke to Black Texans,” Okoro said. “She didn’t change how she spoke. And it put a lot of people there like, ‘I can see myself being like her. I can see somebody who looks like me on the political floor, who’s talking the way I am.’”

McCallum’s frustration was more specific. She had been on the bus Crockett organized to take people from Dallas to Austin to testify against the new congressional maps Republicans drew up at President Donald Trump’s behest. She’d seen the fight up close.

And then she’d watched supporters of Talarico throw racist and sexist attacks online.

“There were friends of mine that were harmed in the whole stan culture with the Talarico campaign people, and that wasn’t James Talarico himself hurling insults,” she said. “But you know, even Beyoncé sometimes tells the Beyhive to calm down.”

Crockett endorsed Talarico the morning after the primary, and for Okoro and McCallum, the message they were receiving was to join the team they spent months trying to defeat. It immediately had McCallum feeling taken for granted, even knowing she was going to vote for Talarico.

“What am I going to do, get Ken Paxton elected? Definitely not,” she told me then. “But at the same time, why is no olive branch being extended?”

At this point, neither of them had heard from the Talarico campaign. Not a call, not a text, not a DM.

“No,” Okoro said. “Which is so crazy!”

It wasn’t that they wanted to be courted for its own sake. It was that they read the silence as strategy. McCallum laid it out as plainly as anyone about the Democratic Party’s simmering Black voter issue:

“From where I am sitting, it feels very much like ‘we have our Democrat core, and then we’re going to get these flip people, the people who may flip-flop in elections, Republicans who are not MAGA,’” she said. “And in that strategy, Black people get lost. As kind of a nonpriority, or kind of like a safe bet. Like, ‘Well, the Black folks that been voting since 1965, they’re still going to be voting in 2026.’”

For Talarico, she had one message: “Make me feel like a priority. Because I was going to show up for you anyway, but I’m trying to help you.”

I showed Talarico the message McCallum had for him at a Black-owned coffee shop in Fort Worth, after the walk and still a little damp. He watched the whole thing. First, he made the point that it’s a false choice between mobilizing disillusioned voters and peeling off Republicans, and that he had done both when he flipped a Trump district for the state House.

But he also conceded her premise: “I think Black Texans have felt that they’ve been taken advantage of by the Democratic Party.”

Is it a feeling, or is it an actual fact?

“That feeling reflects a truth,” he said. “The Democratic Party, certainly nationally, has just assumed that Black people are a part of the Democratic base. You hear that all the time, right? And a base implies those are people who will never leave you. And that is such a harmful way to think about voters.

“And I will tell you, as someone who has been in tough elections, it is the fastest way to lose an election, is to take voters for granted. To assume Black folks are going to show up and vote for you because you have a D by your name. We have to stop doing that. We have to start treating Black voters as swing voters.”

So what was he doing to put his words into action, specifically, right then, in June? “We are building it by the day,” he said. Faith leaders, visits to historically Black colleges and universities, a volunteer army of 45,000 and growing.

On Crockett, he said they had exchanged messages in March and April, and that he’d left her a voicemail a few weeks earlier inviting her to deliver the keynote at the state convention. She told the Dallas Morning News around the same time that she hadn’t returned the call or listened to the message, and that she had “no idea” whether she would campaign for him.

I told him that I had been told over and over, by pollsters and by Black Texans, that it was hard to see a path for him without an active Crockett on the trail.

“I feel like what’s happening in Texas is so much bigger than any one politician, including me,” he said. “I honestly don’t think it depends on me or any politician. It’s really going to come down to the people of Texas.”

However, he acknowledged, “As the nominee, this is on me to bring the coalition back together.”

A month later, an event in Houston would test exactly how much he meant it.

Hot temps in Houston

On July 19, Talarico walked into the Kingdom Builders’ Center in Houston for a town hall that was, by design, a room full of Black voters who had hard questions. Crockett’s home turf is Dallas but the primary wounds were just as raw in Houston, with its half-million Black residents. And a Houston state representative, Jolanda Jones, had been publicly saying he wouldn’t return her calls.

The questions came fast. Voting rights, Black farmers, diversity initiatives, Black campaign staffers, downballot Black candidates. About 45 minutes in, his staff tried to cut it off at one more question. That’s when Kandice Webber stood up.

“You cannot win without us,” she told Talarico, her voice raised. “So you stay here and you answer our questions, or you suffer the consequences!”

He stayed, for about 20 more minutes. Another woman, Juli McShay, asked him to rebuke the supporters who had harassed Crockett and other Black influencers online, and he did it right there in the room.

“Please keep Congresswoman Crockett’s name out of your mouth,” Talarico said, and demanded that his people treat his former opponent with respect.

It was that Beyhive moment McCallum was looking for.

That night, Talarico pledged to spend $25 million on Black voter outreach, something his campaign called the largest such investment in modern Texas history. “I’m committing to you here that we will be putting resources where our mouth is,” he said.

Spending money and showing up

By September the campaign was spending the money earnestly. It hired three veteran Black Texas operatives to run the outreach program. It brought on Black-owned firms. It bought ads in legacy Black media like Dallas Weekly and The Houston Defender and joined podcasts that younger Black Texans actually listen to. And he received the endorsement of the powerful Congressional Black Caucus.

When I went back to Texas on the last weekend of September, the state fair had just opened and Talarico walked onto the field at the State Fair Classic. It’s an annual football game between Prairie View A&M and Grambling State, in front of more than 50,000 people. Two HBCUs, two serious Southern marching bands and the Divine Nine Greek organizations in full regalia.

The candidate was announced as a special guest. A man in the stands gave him a bear hug and told him he had his vote. A woman leaned over the railing and asked him what he was going to do about Black schools that keep getting shut down. He told her he was a former teacher and he was working on district takeovers.

The reception was warm, including from McCallum, who had begun to volunteer for the campaign.

“Mr. James Talarico! You have been invited to the cookout,” she said into a tiny handheld mic as she stood in front of the “Talarico for Texas” bus. “What did you think?”

“The energy out here is great. The food is right. The music is right. So I’m honored to be here,” he answered.

On Sunday we went to church. Concord Church in Dallas is one of the biggest Black congregations in the state, and its pastor, Bryan Carter, has been in the pulpit there for 23 years. Every Sunday since the summer, Carter told me, they had been registering voters in the lobby.

“Voting is a moral obligation,” he said. “Your vote is your voice.”

Carter is careful, the way Black pastors who have been doing this for a long time are careful. He didn’t tell his congregation who to vote for. But when he introduced Talarico, he called him “a man of conviction, a man of faith, a champion for justice,” as the room stood up and applauded.

Talarico, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, is comfortable in church. He’s able to connect the political and spiritual.

“When Jesus healed the sick, he didn’t ask for a deductible. So when I fight for universal healthcare, I’m doing it on biblical grounds,” he said from the pulpit. “And when the Hebrew prophets saw corruption in high places, they spoke truth to power. So when I take on the politicians who are serving themselves and not the people, I am doing it on biblical grounds.”

Carter said Talarico strikes a note that others who have come courting Black votes struggle with. “He’s been unique in that he has been able to blend both an agenda that supports justice, that cares for the poor, the marginalized and oppressed while at the same time leveraging that as motivation for public service,” the pastor said of the former seminarian.

I sat down with Talarico one more time in a side room at Concord. We had been talking about Black voters for months at that point. I wanted to know what he had learned.

He said he hadn’t understood, when the campaign began, the size of the funding gap between HBCUs and other schools. He said he learned on the trail that Harris County, anchored by Houston, is the deadliest place in America for a Black woman to give birth. He said he’d figured out that younger Black Texans aren’t in the pews on Sunday morning the way their parents are, which is why the campaign was at Sunday Funday brunches in Houston and tailgating on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard before the Classic.

“If we really want to reach those voters, showing up at a Black church is not going to suffice,” he said. “We’ve got to be out where they are.”

The long game

One of the things about courting Black voters in Texas these days, though, is that it’s not only about persuading them. It’s also about whether they will actually be able to vote.

At the end of August, Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, moved to close 92 Election Day polling sites, from 316 in the last midterm to 224. The Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Campaign Legal Center sent a letter warning that the cuts fell hardest on Black, Latino and Asian American neighborhoods.

“Voter suppression is powerful, I don’t want to sugarcoat it. Big money is powerful,” Talarico told me in that side room at the church. “But none of that can compare to people power. I’m putting my faith in people power every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

The hill Talarico has to climb to win in Texas is huge. His campaign thinks it’s made a lot of headway on the Black voter issue with its investments, though it’s impossible to know whether all is forgiven until Tuesday.

It’s possible those investments won’t pay off this time around. I asked Talarico about the long game, the way the other side has been playing it for decades. He looked to the Civil Rights Movement.

It’s a balance of an inherent conflict between “urgency and patience. We can’t get discouraged after one election,” he said. “We can’t give up after one victory or one Supreme Court case. We have to maintain that urgency over decades. And I think Black Texans have obviously shown us how to do that, because it’s a necessity.”

James Talarico had a problem, but he saw it differently. Where Black voters saw a lack of his talking to them, he saw a need to listen. Where they saw a lack of investment, he saw a need to make sure he would have the money for it. Where almost the entire Democratic Party saw a desperate need for him to win, he saw beyond November.

MS NOW producer Shawn Killebrew contributed.

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Sixteen days before Election Day, Abdul El-Sayed is sitting at the dinette of a bus that has his face plastered all over it.

I had just played him a clip on my iPad. It was of Tashawna Gill, a Detroit organizer he knows well and who was one of his earliest supporters, describing an alarming trend in what she and her canvassers were hearing from Black voters in the city’s retirement communities.

“They’re skipping that part of the ballot,” Gill said. “We do the senior home tour, and they’re not interested. They skipped that on the ballot. They have returned their absentees, and some of them have shared that they’ve returned their absentees without checking the box for anything for the Senate race.”

In the tight space on the bus, the clip finishes, and El-Sayed says: “I hope more folks will fill out that part of the ballot. This one’s for all the marbles.”

How did it feel, I asked? Hearing that his story, his message isn’t landing with people in a community he has long served, people he needs if he wants to become Michigan’s next senator?

El-Sayed has a reputation of being pretty sure of himself. Unflappable, quick on his feet, someone who leans into the “don’t let ’em see you sweat” brand of politics.

For a second, that drops.

”Obviously, it’s heartbreaking. I’ve spent most of my career serving exactly those communities,” he says. “But I also get that campaigns are complicated.”

He blames the tens of millions of dollars in PAC money for the tepidness within the Black community toward his attempt to hold Michigan’s open Senate seat for Democrats, and for “destroying trust” he built with the Black community in his time as a public health official in Detroit.

“Rebuilding it takes a long time, so I’ve got work to do to rebuild trust, but I’ve been serving those communities for a long time,” he said. “I’m confident in the work I have done and confident in the work that I will do. And I hope I get the opportunity to do it.”

He notes that he’s not sure, either, just how widespread the sentiment Gill related is among his would-be constituents.

And just like that, the self-assuredness is back.

It’s clear, though, that he’s hurt that the work he has done in Detroit is being misconstrued or discounted, or that folks just don’t know about it. And he’s running out of time to spread the word.

Empty yards

The clip that I had El-Sayed respond to was from a walk I took with Gill on a quiet street back in Detroit.

She wanted me to see the lawns on Greenview Avenue in North Rosedale Park. It’s a neighborhood of brick houses on Detroit’s northwest side that she calls one of the most educated, highest-turnout precincts in the city. And she would know — her office is one block over.

Gill is a well-known organizer who chairs the Michigan Democratic Party’s Grassroots caucus, founded the African American Leadership Institute, helped get Gretchen Whitmer elected governor and was an early endorser of El-Sayed’s Senate campaign when most of the party establishment — including Whitmer — was behind U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens. Every day, Gill’s office sends out about 70 canvassers across Wayne County.

She knows of what she speaks, especially when it comes to Black voters.

“If you look down here, do you see any yard signs? Look left and right,” she says. I do, and it’s … empty. “It doesn’t even look like it’s an election going on anywhere,” she said.

Typically, Gill said, the streets are pretty lined with them. That they aren’t now, so close to the election, “is scary to me.”

Yard signs are not votes, but they are a sign of enthusiasm and of a campaign that is working hard to get those signs stuck in lawns.

Detroit is 75% Black, according to census data, the largest majority-Black big city in the country. And the Democratic playbook for winning statewide has not changed in a lifetime: run up the score in Wayne and Genesee counties, then hang on everywhere else.

When Detroit doesn’t turn out, Democrats lose. Two years ago, when Elissa Slotkin narrowly held Michigan’s other Senate seat, she won 86% of the Black vote compared with Republican Mike Rogers’ 12%. Recent polling shows El-Sayed hovering below 80% of the Black vote.

The concerns aren’t new. Back in the primary in August, El-Sayed eked out a 1-point win against Stevens. He won the college towns and progressive strongholds. He lost Detroit by 28 points.

El-Sayed seems well aware that the tepidness exists. The campaign says it and party entities have spent nearly $14.3 million in paid media specifically for the Detroit and Flint markets.

They’ve invited the equivalent of the Black political Avengers to endorse and campaign with him in the state, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. Former President Barack Obama is stumping with El-Sayed in Detroit this weekend.

The campaign says it has been to 45 Black churches and had more than 125 meetings and roundtables with Black elected officials, faith leaders and community organizations.

It’s not something that’s been lost on his opponent either; they see an opening. The Rogers campaign opened a storefront office on Livernois Avenue in Detroit while we were there, and a group calling itself Democrats for Mike Rogers has been campaigning for him. A recent ad features Black voters saying they felt El-Sayed cared more about Palestine than Detroit.

“If you’re from Detroit, you know no Republican will be going through Detroit like they’re going through Detroit. They are in places a Republican would never be,” Gill said. “So I’m scared that a slice of that, just a little bit, will go to them.”

A Rogers campaign spokesperson touted their outreach, saying they are the first Republican to open a Detroit office, have visited a dozen Black churches and visited Flint and Pontiac “multiple times.” And multiple Democrats in Michigan have told me that Rogers is showing up in places in Detroit that haven’t seen a statewide GOP candidate in years.

Nearly every person I talked to on the ground in Detroit pointed to three reasons why El-Sayed is underperforming with Black voters.

Community conflict

The first one is uncomfortable to talk about: historic tensions between Black and Arab Michiganders. Dearborn sits right on the edge of Detroit, and today Arab Americans are estimated to make up the majority of that city’s 105,000 residents. Older Black voters know the long, violent history between the two communities. In 1980 an Iraqi immigrant store owner shot a Black customer he suspected of stealing soda. In 2023 a clerk at a gas station locked customers inside with an armed man after a card used to purchase less than $4 was declined. One of them was killed. A crash this fall reignited the fight.

Gill puts it in plain terms: “African Americans, especially seniors, feel like they were treated disrespectful, targeted, kicked out of the stores in Dearborn. So our seniors and our parents, when they see Abdul, they blame him for all of that.”

He wasn’t there, I point out. She knows that but says that trauma is unfairly being taken out on his candidacy.

Former Obama administration official Portia Roberson is CEO of Focus: HOPE, a civil rights organization in Detroit founded in 1968. She put those tensions this way:

“It has seemingly been that Arab people have been able to move to Detroit in this area and find ways to be successful, whether that is owning gas stations, whether that is owning party stores, and that Blacks who have been here have been locked out of those places,” she said.

I asked El-Sayed about the tension.

“I’ll be honest with you, I understand. I’ve worked in the city of Detroit. You walk into one of these party stores, you walk into a gas station and you’ve got somebody that looks like me behind bulletproof glass, and you look at the way that they’re treating customers. The number of times that people have been denied a bathroom or their kid gets sold a loosie cigarette out of the back or they’re catcalling a woman in the community. That’s deeply inappropriate. It’s wrong and I’ve never been one of those guys,” he said, “even if I look like one of those guys.”

While he was health director in Wayne County, he said, he led a conversation with “those guys” about why that behavior was inappropriate, adding, “You can’t just take money out and not invest in the local community. You can’t just deny local contractors opportunities to service your business and think that’s OK.”

A fateful stance

That second reason? The Uncommitted movement in 2024. In February of that year, more than 101,000 Michigan Democrats, about 13%, voted “uncommitted” in the presidential primary to protest President Joe Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. El-Sayed publicly announced that he was one of them. Nine months later, Harris lost the state as Black voters watched a party they had carried for decades fail to show up for the first Black woman at the top of the presidential ticket.

When it comes to the Black community, El-Sayed leans hard on his track record. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s mandate to him when he hired him back in 2015 to run a health department that had been gutted: “rebuild it.” In his first year, the department restarted lead screenings for children and helped pay for them in Detroit schools. The department also partnered with a nonprofit to offer free eye exams and glasses to thousands of students. After his failed run for governor in 2018, El-Sayed became director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services.

His stance on Uncommitted is overshadowing all of that.

Roberson has voted consistently her entire adult life, and that movement still stings.

“As a Black woman, I’ve never had the luxury of voting on one issue. I’ve never had that luxury. I’ve never been able to walk into a polling booth and say, this is my one issue and if it doesn’t correlate with my one issue, I’m willing to throw the rest of it away,” she said. “We knew all of the things that have now happened to us, and you still decided to be uncommitted because of your issue.”

El-Sayed endorsed Harris the day after she became the nominee; Uncommitted largely was about the primary for him. And Harris came to Detroit just last month to endorse and campaign with El-Sayed. She has gotten over his criticism of the Biden-Harris policies.

“But a lot of folks haven’t,” Roberson said, laying out the very kind of single-issue objections she had just disavowed. “And I have friends who are very politically astute, and they have said, ‘I will never forgive that.’ It got so big so quickly that they couldn’t pull it back when it was time to coalesce around Kamala Harris, and now we are here.”

At the doors Gill’s team knocks on, the version that seniors are sharing is harsher than what actually happened and full of wrong information, she said.

They tell her teams, “‘He didn’t vote for Kamala. He didn’t help her get in.’ That’s the No. 1 thing,” she said. So the message from his campaign to set the record straight “needs to be louder.”

Democrats’ dilemma

The third reason is largely ideology, and in some ways reflects the maneuvering between progressives and mainstream Democrats within the larger party. Older Black voters in Detroit are more likely to be politically moderate. El-Sayed is running on Medicare for All, and Rogers has spent the fall telling anyone who will listen that Detroit is about to elect a socialist. For the record, El-Sayed says he is a capitalist.

The campaign’s answer to older Black voters has largely been to head to the Black church, the Old Faithful of politics. His team says he has been to 45 Black churches during this election season.

Last Sunday he visited two churches in Flint. His message was, yes, political and full of references to a shared God between his Muslim and their Christian faith. But one of his biggest applause lines was his promise to be back as Sen. El-Sayed.

“This is not my first time in communities like these,” he said from the front of the stage. “I’ve been showing up to do this work for the better part of a decade, and I hope that I can show up for you in the United States Senate. If you give me that honor, I promise you this will not be the last time you see me, and the next time I come, God willing, I’m bringing resources and I’m taking your pain and your purpose with me to the halls of power.”

The bridge he’s trying to build is a difficult one. A 2024 poll from AARP found that among Black Michaganders, only 29% called themselves “liberal.”

El-Sayed’s bet is that a different Black voter can come and make up the difference. “There’s a generational divide, and even if there are some seniors who might say, ‘You know what, we’re going to leave this blank because we’ve seen all the ads,’ there are a lot of young Black voters who are like, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever voted,’” he said.

The candidate isn’t blind to the tensions. On the contrary, he seems very aware of them and how hard they may be to overcome. But he’s also running out of time.

I asked Roberson if she thinks he has done enough in the short period he has been the nominee to get the Black vote where it really needs to be.

“That’s tough. Probably not,” she said. “I think there’s more he could have done. And listen, I’m giving grace to the fact that he had a contentious primary. But I do think there were more voters out there, and there are still more voters out there that he could be talking to.”

Her larger point is that it’s less about effort and more about translation. That in a lot of his ads, his platform sound great to the voters who follow politics closely, and who maybe aren’t affected by those three points of tension.

She’s also pretty hopeful. That when Detroit’s most reliable voters wake up on Election Day, they will do what they’ve always done.

”We know what we’re going to get if he doesn’t win,” she said. “So what are we so afraid of that we’re going to get if he does win?”

Nobody on Greenview Avenue has answered that yet. The lawns are still empty.

“Detroit just needs to be waking up. It needs to be waking up because it is asleep,” Gill said. “That is my fear, that Detroit has not woken up.”

El-Sayed says he’ll keep coming back either way.

“At the end of the day, whether folks vote for me or they don’t vote for me, I intend to serve in the same way that I showed up to serve back in 2015 when I came to Detroit to rebuild the health department.”

MS NOW producer Alexander Trowbridge contributed to this report.

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