James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for U.S. Senate, has urged his party to treat New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as a model to follow nationwide, while separately calling for a coalition broad enough to include democratic socialists and voters on the far left.
In an August 5, 2025, interview on the Higher Learning podcast, Talarico called Mamdani a “template” for Democrats across the country and said the party needed to “adopt” what Mamdani did to win elections.
The comments came roughly six weeks after Mamdani won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdani’s platform has included free public transportation, a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, and higher taxes on the wealthy. On Meet the Press, Mamdani said, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.”
Talarico had already addressed the ideological scope of his own coalition days earlier. Asked on NewsNation’s The Hill on July 29, 2025, whether his coalition included democratic socialists, he said Democrats needed a “giant tent” that was “going to include some Democrat Socialists.” He also spoke of reaching “people on the far left,” describing the goal as “winning power.”
Talarico has rolled out his own health care proposal, which he calls “Medicare for Y’all.” It would extend coverage to illegal immigrants, and its name echoes Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan. One of Talarico’s early campaign ads mimicked Mamdani’s own messaging, prompting Fortune to declare, “Texas has its own Zohran Mamdani.”
Older remarks from Talarico have also drawn attention. Breitbart News reported on September 1 that at a 2020 Sierra Club climate forum, Talarico described capitalism as one of three interconnected “oppressive systems,” thanking young activists for having “drawn the link between climate change and white supremacy and capitalism in our country” and saying that “only ending the ways that all three of those oppressive systems work together are we gonna be able to begin the process of dismantling them.”
In a 2021 appearance on the Activist Theology podcast, Talarico described Jesus as “this socialist anarchist from Palestine,” calling him “the most popular figure in our country, particularly on the conservative right.”
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