On October 14, at 7:00 p.m., Senate candidate James Talarico, in collaboration with CNN and Jubilee, hosted a town hall in Dallas involving locals. The hosts of the debate reached out to many organizations to find participants for the event, including UTD via Student Government.
The event was moderated by CNN anchor Erin Burnett and took place less than a month before the midterm elections.
The participants of the event were divided into three groups of roughly equal sizes: Republican, Democrat and independent. Talarico mentioned that he disapproved of the separation as he believed in bipartisanship.
The event itself featured two portions: one where Talarico listened and responded to participants about specific issues and another where he had five-minute discussions with each of nine participants, attempting to change their mind about topics they disagreed with him about.
The first portion of the event consisted of the host calling for participants that had listed a specific issue as their top concern, and then Talarico speaking on a question the participant asked. The three issues chosen were “affordability,” “democracy” and “immigration.”
“I want to roll back the cuts to the Affordable Care Act, because those cuts are driving up premiums, sometimes $1,000 a month, for Texans,” Talarico said. “I want to cap the cost of more life-saving drugs, like Epi-Pens and cancer drugs. I think we need a robust public option that can compete with the for profit health insurance companies in this country.”
A recurring theme throughout the event was that Talarico blamed both parties for the current state of events and wanted voters from both parties to elect him so that he could bring the corrupt and the massively wealthy to heel. His responses on immigration policy also followed this theme.
“Joe Biden failed us during his administration by not securing the border,” Talarico said. “But now we’ve seen under this administration a different kind of extremism.”
In the second portion of the event, individual participants debated Talarico with a four-minute limit per participant. Both Talarico and the participants often ignored this limit with no consequences.
The first participant called during this section was a woman named Jody, who brought up abortion as an important issue for Catholics like her.
“So what makes it difficult for us to vote Democrat is that we have this idea that if you cannot provide policies or support policies that protect the most innocent among us, who is the unborn child, how can we trust that you’re going to provide policies for the rest of Texans and to promote dignity and human life in that,” Jody said.
Talarico responded that he prefers to sidestep the ethical arguments about the issue by focusing on the practical side of the issue: reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies, and thus the number of abortions, via sex education and access to contraception and healthcare.
Another participant, Paul, asked Talarico about his foreign policy regarding aid to Ukraine.
“I guess I get concerned when I look at how much money we’ve sent to Ukraine over the many years this war has been going on, and then I turn around and look at my own community and see people almost living under a bridge and begging for money,” Paul said. “Why should we focus our financials on foreign wars rather than our own citizens first?”
Talarico’s responded that he felt aid to Ukraine now was an investment in the future so that the U.S. wouldn’t have to send their own soldiers to fight Russia, using WWII as an example of why it was important to deal with aggressors in Europe.
One of the last participants, Jasmine, spoke about her difficulties competing with people from other states to buy a house in Texas. She added that the first-time homebuyer incentive was inadequate compared to the rising costs of homes.
“Actually, the folks who are buying up most of the properties here in Texas: it’s Wall Street,” Talarico said. “And so, we need to ban Wall Street from gobbling up our housing stock here in Texas, so that we can allow actual Texans to own a home.”
The final participant asked Talarico about his opinion on data centers, and about what he would do to prevent them from taking advantage of Texas residents. Talarico responded that he blamed Ken Paxton for supporting the data center companies in exchange for kickbacks. He then emphasized the importance of the 2026 elections.
“This election is not about left versus right,” Talarico said. “It’s about whether we will have a senator who puts money in your pocket, or a senator who puts money in their own. That is the choice before us in November.”