Get ready to hear a lot more about James Talarico. The Texas state representative won the Democratic US Senate primary on Tuesday, defeating Jasmine Crockett—a high-profile member of Congress representing Dallas—in a race that pitted two candidates with a knack for garnering attention and diverging theories of the electorate.

Talarico, who I recently profiled, is a former public school teacher and current seminary student who has built a following among Democrats inside and outside the state for his sermons and floor exchanges challenging Christian nationalism. Talarico will be an underdog heading into the general election. The race will be a reach, even if he ends up facing Republican Attorney General Paxton—who has, after all, been elected in a cloud of scandal three times before. It will also be absurdly expensive; the tab for a competitive general election will easily exceed nine figures.

I wrote nine years ago that Beto O’Rourke could run the best campaign in Texas in decades and still lose by 5 percentage points. In 2018, he did—and lost by 2.6 points. But Trump is underwater and just blew up the life boat, and the situation for Democrats in the state is not as dire as it seemed a year ago. A state Senate candidate recently flipped a ruby-red district in a bellwether county, and he did it not just through a fluke of special-election turnout, but by peeling off Republican voters. In........

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