Karl Rove Declares Democrat James Talarico Could Pull Off Wild Upset in Texas

Fox News’ Karl Rove warned on Thursday that Democrat James Talarico could pull off a wild upset in the Lone Star State’s 2026 Senate race if Republicans nominate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to run against him.

Talarico prevailed against Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, while Paxton is headed to a run-off against incumbent Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) on the GOP side.

After acknowledging that he is a longtime personal friend of Cornyn, Rove touted the senator’s overperformance in the primary before being asked if “Democrats actually have a chance” by anchor Dana Perino.

“Well, if Cornyn is the nominee, no. But if it’s Paxton with all the baggage that he’s got, the Democrats-, look, George Soros is spending millions of dollars a year in building the infrastructure for the Democratic Party. Democrats, a lot of thoughtful Democrats said, ‘We gotta have Talarico as the candidate because, you know, Crockett had no chance whatsoever.’ And Talarico has a history of having appeal to Republicans. He ran for the state house against an incumbent Republican in a suburban district that covered both Travis County and Williamson County, the Republican county to the north, and won, beating an incumbent Republican,” answered Rove, who continued:

Now what happened is they then redistricted and he moved to a nearby district that was a lot more Democrat inside Travis County, Austin, Texas, and got re-elected from safer territory. But yeah, no, look, this is-, Cornyn would win this going away. This is one of the arguments that even the White House political staff has been making. Paxton on the other hand has so much baggage that the Democrats would pour a hundred or two hundred million dollars into the state with the hope that they can pull off something like they did in Alabama when they beat a very troubled Republican candidate and had, briefly, a Democrat senator from the state of Alabama. They haven’t won a Senate race here since 1988, they haven’t won a statewide race since 1994, but everybody believes that this year is the year that if we had a damaged candidate on our ticket that they might be able to pull it off.

Watch above via Fox News.

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