Balgarianovinite.com
After Senate candidate James Talarico won the Democratic primary in Texas, his donor base didn’t just grow. It went national.
During the final six weeks of the first quarter, the number of itemized out-of-state donors more than doubled. Those donors accounted for 46% of the itemized money his campaign raised after Feb. 11, fueling a surge that helped push his massive quarterly haul to $27 million.
“It shows us that Talarico is now a national figure in the sense that he was able to raise money not just from Texans but from people across the country,” Rice University political science professor Mark Jones told OpenSecrets.
In all, Talarico has raised nearly $40.3 million and reported roughly $9.9 million in cash on hand. Media reports quoted campaign officials as saying the quarterly total exceeded that of any prior Senate candidate from any state in the first quarter of an election year. OpenSecrets reached out to Talarico’s campaign for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Jon Taylor, who chairs the department of political science and geography at the University of Texas San Antonio, said the numbers reflect broader Democratic enthusiasm.
“It tells me that the Democrats are more enthused than people thought about Texas and the Texas Senate race,” he said.
The surge drew comparisons to other Texas Democrats who raised big dollars during their Senate campaigns (but still lost). Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke raised a record $38 million from July through September during his 2018 challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz (R), part of nearly $79 million overall – but only $6.7 million of that came in that year’s first quarter.
O’Rourke and former Rep. Colin Allred – who raised nearly $93 million in 2024 but also lost to Cruz – “were strong fundraisers too, but I don’t think nearly as well as what Talarico has done,” Taylor said.
“Which tells me, again, voters are energized,” he added. “In the case of O’Rourke, he did bring in money, but not as much as you might think. The difference is, he didn’t start raising a lot of money until he started catching fire in the mid-to-late summer of 2018.”
Talarico, who is attempting to become the first Democrat to win statewide office in Texas in more than 30 years, amassed his haul while the Republicans were still deciding his November opponent, with Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton headed to a May 26 runoff. The seat is likely to remain in Republican hands, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
Paxton raised about $2.2 million and reported about $2.6 million in cash on hand across his campaign committee and his joint fundraising committee, which formed in March.
Cornyn’s financial picture is more complicated. His first-quarter campaign finance reports show he raised about $9 million and reported roughly $8.2 million in cash on hand across his campaign committee and two joint fundraising committees. Most of that total – $7.2 million – came through Cornyn Lonestar Victory Fund, a JFC that collected large contributions which largely cannot be transferred to his campaign, flowing instead to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. That committee delivered only about $178,000 to participating entities during the cycle, and much of its $2.8 million in cash on hand was unavailable to him. The JFC also spent nearly $9 million on a single vendor for fundraising media during the quarter.
“The Cornyn campaign isn’t going to have anything close to the number of small donors like Talarico,” Jones said. “If it’s the Cornyn campaign, we’re going to see a campaign that has a lot of people giving the max, are close to the max as individuals, to Cornyn directly, and then, dramatic, very high super PAC expenditures. Paxton, it’s likely to be the same, although he may have a little more trouble getting some of those individual donations.”
Talarico’s filings show just how quickly that enthusiasm translated into money. His victory over Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the March 3 primary fell squarely in the middle of a dramatic shift in his fundraising profile.
A post‑primary bump was expected. What stood out was the speed.
According to Federal Election Commission filings, Talarico raised nearly three times as much from mid-February through March as he did during the first six weeks of the year. He raised $7.5 million between Jan. 1 and Feb. 11, the cutoff date for the campaign’s pre-primary filing, and nearly $19.6 million from Feb. 12 through March 31, according to its April quarterly report.
The number of out‑of‑state itemized donors jumped from more than 6,600 in the first six weeks of the quarter to nearly 19,500 after Feb. 12 – almost a three-fold increase. As the raw number of non-Texan donors grew, so did their share of the campaign’s fundraising base. While Texas donors still made up a majority of itemized contributions, the share dropped from 66% in the first half of the quarter to 57% afterward.
The largest gains came in California, where the share climbed from 7.2% in the first half to 8.6% in the second, and in New York, which accounted for nearly 3% of donors in the second half – up from 2.3% in the first. The trend was widespread, with 42 of the other 49 states increasing their share, and included both smaller states like Maryland and more conservative-leaning ones like Montana.
The campaign reported about $12 million in itemized individual donations during the quarter, with $8.5 million coming after Feb. 11. Out‑of‑state donors accounted for more than 46% of those second‑half dollars, up from 34% of itemized dollars in the first six weeks.
Taylor said the growing out‑of‑state interest suggests that – in this Senate race, at least – Texas is drawing national Democratic money, countering what he characterized as a persistent complaint that “the state is essentially a money machine for the party to fund people outside the state.” However, Texas House races also saw significant out‑of‑district giving in 2024, a previous OpenSecrets report found.
A handful of out-of-state donations came from recognizable entertainment figures: Musician Dave Matthews gave $5,000 in five installments of $1,000 between Jan. 16 and March 29. Barbra Streisand donated $2,500 on March 19. Actor Brad Garrett (“Everybody Loves Raymond”) made two $500 donations, on Feb. 21 and March 7. Actor Noah Wyle (“ER,” “The Pitt”) contributed $500 on Feb. 18.
While they represent a tiny fraction of the overall donor pool, they reflect the national attention Talarico has drawn – attention driven in part by his media appearances. Interviews on Joe Rogan’s podcast in June 2025 and with Stephen Colbert in February – which the late-night host says was pulled by CBS’s lawyers over equal time concerns before drawing more than 9 million views on YouTube – helped introduce him to a national audience.
“Those two appearances, I think, bookend a very successful effort by Talarico to transform himself from a relatively unknown central Texas state representative to a national Democratic figure,” Jones said.
Despite the surge in donations and shift in the donor base’s geographic distribution, the shape of those contributions barely changed. About three‑fourths of itemized donations were $100 or less, and the median gift remained $50. Campaign officials have said that 97% of all contributions – itemized or not – were under $100, and that the $40 million raised came from more than 970,000 donations made by 540,000 individuals.
“Lots of small donors,” Taylor said. “Which tells me that Democrats are, in this respect, enthused about a candidate for the first time in forever.”
Jones said the pattern reflects Talarico’s ability to connect with lower-dollar contributors. The consistency of those gifts – even as the donor pool expanded nationwide – underscores how Talarico’s fundraising surge was driven by breadth, not necessarily bigger checks.
Those contributors typically are not “fat-pocketers, who aren’t deep-pocketed donors, writing the max check, and that’s it,” he said. “These are individuals who see Talarico on [Colbert or Rogan]. … Those together have really sort of allowed him to reach a national audience of small donors, people who are giving symbolically as a way to support Talarico, not to bankroll his campaign.”
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