Texas Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate James Talarico saw a boost in campaign cash and had his profile skyrocket amid a war of words between Stephen Colbert, CBS and the Trump administration over his spiked The Late Show interview.
Colbert said that the network’s lawyers told him that Talarico, a state legislator from Austin, could not appear on the show. This comes as early voting for the Senate primaries in Texas began on Tuesday.
But the effort may have backfired. As of Wednesday morning, the taped-but-never-aired interview that Colbert’s show posted on YouTube had garnered 5.2 million views.
Talarico’s campaign, which also posted it, announced that he had raised $2.5 million in the past 24 hours off the controversy.
“This is a campaign of, by, and for the people — so I’m proud that neighbors from all across our state and country stood together to defend free speech,” Talarico said in a release. “This is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture, the kind that comes from the top. A threat to one of our First Amendment rights is a threat to all of our First Amendment rights.”
The Texan is running for the Democratic nomination against Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a two-term congresswoman from Dallas.
Democrats hope to flip the GOP-held Senate seat given that incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who is running for a fifth term, is engaged in a bitter primary against the state’s MAGA attorney general Ken Paxton.
Cornyn and allies have spent more than $50 million to save the incumbent in the primary, which also features a challenge from two-term Rep. Wesley Hunt. The polls close on March 3.
If no candidate earns a majority, the top two candidates in the race will face each other in a runoff, which is expected to be even more bitter. That would take place on May 26.
Polling shows that Paxton would be uniquely vulnerable in a race against a Democrat and run the risk of Democrats winning a Senate seat in the Lone Star State for the first time since 1988.
But the race between Talarico and Crockett, while initially respectful, has turned caustic.
Earlier this month, former congressman Colin Allred, who dropped out of the race, endorsed Crockett off of a rumor from a TikTok account that said that Talarico reportedly told her that he had signed up to run against a “mediocre Black man” rather than an “intelligent Black woman” like Crockett. Both Crockett and Allred are Black.
On Tuesday, Crockett accused Talarico’s super PACs of running ads that darkened her skin and saying that if she wins, Democrats would lose the race.
“It's not even undertones right now,” she said. “It is straight up racist. And I need people to understand that that cannot be the way that we proceed.”
Colbert for his part does not seem deterred from the tussle with CBS. On Wednesday evening, he will feature Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is running for re-election in Georgia.
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