Good evening. How much do old tweets matter? We’ll look at that tonight in the context of the Texas Senate race.
Will Talarico’s long online paper trail haunt him?
It’s tough to imagine former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, 73, taking to Reddit forums to confess communist sympathies, or Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, 78, tweeting in solidarity with “our neighbors with a uterus” after the fall of Roe v. Wade. As Democratic voters clamor for generational change, these are often challenging days for the party’s career politicians of a certain age. But the old guard does tend to have one advantage over the younger upstarts: boring social media histories. James Talarico, the 36-year-old state representative who won the Democratic Senate nomination in Texas on Tuesday, is just the latest millennial candidate to experience the promise and perils of digital ubiquity. The state lawmaker — who has more than two million followers on Instagram and 1.6 million on TikTok — often went viral during the primary and had a strong online campaign presence. But Talarico’s social media skills mean he also has a long (internet) paper trail. It didn’t take long for Republicans and right-wing activists to dredge up videos and tweets showing his past progressive comments on gender and race as they try to paint him as an ultra-woke liberal. “If this is a real Talarico post, he is toast,” Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, wrote as he shared one, adding, “He could win in Minnesota, but not in Texas.” JT Ennis, a spokesman for the Talarico campaign, scoffed in a statement that Republicans were simply “scared” of Talarico (and some are, at least if the hard-right Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, wins the Senate Republican runoff and becomes Talarico’s opponent). “While they lob stale attacks to mislead Texans, we are uniting the people of Texas to win,” Ennis said. The challenge and opportunity for younger candidates “is that they have grown up online,” said Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, a group that recruits younger progressive candidates to run for office. “Most of them have gone through their coming-of-age, their political journeys, through tweets, through Reddit posts, through Facebook posts,” she said. Already, this political season has had no shortage of Democratic dust-ups over past online activity — some of it serious, some of it partisan, some of it in the eye of the beholder. First, let me stipulate: For years, some Republican candidates and conservative activists — and not just young ones — have faced controversies over racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, sexist and other kinds of offensive posts, leaked group chats and videos. Not to mention, of course, President Trump’s social media history, which includes many provocative and sometimes racist posts. But I wanted to focus on Democrats today because, after their devastating losses in 2024, many are trying to elevate younger candidates who talk like normal people and connect with voters. On social media, at least, that can cut both ways. Voters are “looking for people who are effective and authentic communicators,” Litman said. “Sometimes those people say stupid stuff on the internet.” In some cases, the issue has been inflammatory posts, as we saw with some hires of Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York or the Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine (who apologized for incendiary comments he made on Reddit some years back). In other instances it’s been a matter of questionable online activity. Last summer, my colleague Reid Epstein reported on how Democratic operatives in Iowa were circulating an old message board in which the Senate candidate Zach Wahls, at age 19, had shared his pornography preferences. And for years, Republicans have used Democratic tweets about racial injustice and policing from the summer of 2020 — after the police killing of George Floyd — to paint the party as antagonistic toward law enforcement. How much of this sticks? It depends on the content and the campaign. What might be a blip in a New York City Democratic primary race could be a serious problem in a statewide contest in, say, Wisconsin, as Mandela Barnes, the Democratic Senate nominee there in 2022, learned the hard way. (He is now running for governor.) In other cases — Maine comes to mind — primary voters so far seem to be willing to overlook a messy online past. But what happens closer to Primary Day, much less in a general election, is an open question. “Obviously there’s a line,” said Mayor Justin Bibb, 38, of Cleveland, who got his first Facebook account as a senior in high school. But broadly speaking, he said, he thought younger generations of voters tended to be more forgiving of past online musings. “Our generation of voters really understand that opinions evolve, viewpoints evolve and who we are evolves,” he added. “At the end of the day, I think voters just care about authenticity.” IN ONE GRAPHIC
A weak jobs report could spell trouble for TrumpEmployers cut 92,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent. The White House is insisting that President Trump’s agenda is working — and that any recent turbulence will be short-lived, my colleague Tony Romm reported. But that’s a risky bet in a midterm election year, especially when voters are feeling the economic pain and may be inclined to take out their anxieties on the party in power. Got a tip? NUMBER OF THE DAY 41 percentThat’s the share of Americans who approve of the U.S. decision to take military action in Iran, according to a CNN poll this week. Ruth Igielnik, The Times’s polling editor, explains. Several high-quality polls have come out in the days since the attack. Support has ranged from 27 percent to 50 percent, suggesting that public opinion on the topic has not yet crystallized. And nearly a third of Americans — 29 percent in the CNN poll — said they were not paying much attention. It is not uncommon for support to peak in the beginning days of a military conflict, but the approval typically fades over time. A vast majority of Americans initially supported the Iraq War, but their backing fell dramatically as the conflict wore on. But polls suggest there has not been much of a groundswell of support for this action. Still, the president has support within his own party, even as most Republicans have increasingly been opposed to foreign intervention in recent years. Nearly all polls found large majorities of Republicans in favor of the military action.
M.T.G. is out. Who’s in?After Marjorie Taylor Greene’s spectacular blowup with President Trump and departure from Congress, who might replace her? One leading candidate is Colton Moore, an auctioneer, dump truck driver and former Republican state senator, who, my colleague Richard Fausset writes, can make the colorful Greene seem positively dull.
ONE LAST THING Where to eat on the Texas campaign trailThe political world may be spending more time in Texas in coming months, as the Republican Senate primary goes to a runoff and Democrats hope for a competitive general election. If you find yourself in Austin, my colleagues Priya Krishna and Brett Anderson have a recently updated list of 25 restaurants to check out, from barbecue and Tex-Mex spots (of course!) to places that feature Japanese and Caribbean fare. Hannah Fidelman and Tara Terranova contributed reporting. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here |
