He Said He Could Make Prisons ‘Obsolete.’ Now He Wants Texas to Send Him to the Senate — and his website quietly dropped the word ‘progressive.’

In 2022, Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D-TX) stood before a group of inmates graduating from a high-school program at a Texas prison and laid out a vision: cut what America spends on “wars, prisons, and policing,” move the money to schools and health care, and “make prisons obsolete.” He praised a prison-abolition theorist and called incarceration itself a form of “violence.”

Four years later, Talarico is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas — a state that backed Donald Trump by double digits and has not sent a Democrat to the upper chamber since 1988. So the language changed. His campaign now says he “opposes defunding the police.” And in the weeks around his Senate launch, his website was quietly edited to drop the word “progressive,” the phrase “trans kids,” and his pledge to build momentum for “bold, progressive ideas.”

This page lays out the gap between what Talarico said when he thought no statewide electorate was listening and what his campaign says now — with the original speech video, the archived web pages, and the on-record campaign statements, source by source.

• “Make prisons obsolete” — Talarico's 2022 pitch: redirect half of what is spent on wars, prisons, and policing to schools, health care, and jobs · Source: Washington Free Beacon; the candidate's own speech video
• “Prison is violence” — how he framed incarceration in the same 2022 address, after praising prison-abolition theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore · Source: Washington Free Beacon; Dallas Express
• Aug. → Sept. 2025 — window in which his campaign site dropped 'progressive,' 'trans kids,' and 'bold, progressive ideas,' per web archives, as his Senate run launched · Source: Washington Free Beacon
• “Border security Democrat” — how the man who once called ICE 'secret police' and the border a 'welcome mat' now brands himself · Source: Fox News Digital; The Reload
• Talarico (D) vs. Paxton (R) — the November 2026 matchup: Talarico beat Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the March 3 primary; AG Ken Paxton ousted Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP runoff · Source: Ballotpedia; Texas Tribune

The most load-bearing fact in this story is not a leaked memo or an anonymous source — it is a video Talarico posted himself. In 2022, he delivered a commencement-style address at the Ferguson Unit, a Texas prison, to inmates graduating from a high-school diploma program. After approvingly quoting Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prominent prison-abolition theorist who argues that “prisons are a catchall solution to our social problems,” Talarico offered his own arithmetic: “If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete.”

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He went further than budget math. Prisons, he said, “allow us to ignore the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism,” and he argued for a “restorative justice” model in which “the question is how to right a wrong, not how to punish a wrong.” In a separate 2022 church appearance flagged in the reporting, he invoked scripture to condemn keeping people in “cages” and called prison itself “violence.” None of this is paraphrase by opponents — it is on tape, in his own voice.

“If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete.”

James Talarico (D-TX), Ferguson Unit prison-graduation speech, 2022

A 2022 speech is one thing; what a candidate chooses to advertise about himself in real time is another. And here the receipts are web archives. According to an archived version of Talarico’s site captured in August 2025, he had written that he was “committed to building momentum for bold, progressive ideas—no matter how long it takes,” and touted “ambitious legislation” to legalize marijuana, “combat climate change,” and “repeal anti-union laws.” A “Meet James” section described fighting efforts to “bully trans kids, ban books, whitewash our history.”

By early September 2025, when Talarico launched his Senate campaign, archives show the makeover. The word “progressive” had vanished. The homepage now credited him with fighting “billionaire mega-donors” rather than “Republican extremism,” and the “Meet James” section touted efforts to “expand job opportunities for young adults” in place of the trans-kids language. The policy substance may or may not have changed; the public-facing label of it plainly did.

Confronted with the 2022 footage, Talarico’s campaign did not embrace it — it ran from it. Asked by Fox News Digital about the resurfaced “defund”-adjacent remarks, his campaign said Talarico “opposes defunding the police and has a proven track record voting to send billions of dollars to support law enforcement.” His current campaign “Public Safety & Justice” page now opens by saying public safety means “ensuring law enforcement has the resources to investigate and prosecute crime” — the near-opposite framing of the 2022 speech.

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The policing reversal is not the only one. On immigration, the man who once called ICE “secret police” and described the border as a “welcome mat” now brands himself a “border security Democrat.” On guns, he has pitched himself as a Second Amendment defender while, only months earlier, backing “red flag” laws. Republicans were happy to keep score: Matt Mackowiak, a senior adviser to then-Sen. John Cornyn, called Talarico “a ‘defund the police’ radical who wants to make our schools and our streets less safe.”

The moderation is not happening in a vacuum — it is a campaign strategy with a clear electoral logic. Talarico won the March 3, 2026 Democratic primary, defeating Dallas Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and others. On the Republican side, state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-TX) ousted longtime incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in a May runoff, aided by a late Trump endorsement. That sets up a November general election in a state Trump carried by roughly 14 points — the environment that makes “make prisons obsolete” a liability rather than a credential.

Talarico himself has acknowledged the friction. As the general election opened, he said some of his earlier comments on cultural issues “missed the mark,” describing a few as “cringey.” That is a candid admission — and also a tacit confirmation of the thesis: the positions that helped him in a deep-blue Austin district and a Democratic primary are the ones he is now sanding down for a statewide electorate. The question for Texas voters is which version is the real one.

An honest account names the caveats. Politicians moderate as they move from a safe district to a statewide race — that is ordinary, not scandalous, and Talarico is entitled to argue his views have genuinely evolved. “Make prisons obsolete” was delivered as an aspirational, big-picture line at a prison graduation, not a filed bill to zero out police budgets, and he has in fact voted for spending that funds law enforcement. Reasonable people can hear the 2022 speech as a rhetorical flourish about root-cause prevention rather than a literal abolition plan.

But the load-bearing facts are not in dispute. The speech exists and he posted it. He praised a prison-abolition theorist and called incarceration “violence.” And the web archives show the words “progressive” and “trans kids” coming off the site at the exact moment he entered a statewide race. A candidate is free to change his mind; voters are equally free to notice when the change tracks the calendar of an election rather than any new argument — and to ask which set of positions he would actually govern by.

James Talarico (D-TX) spent his rise in Democratic politics calling to slash police and prison budgets, praising prison abolition, and branding himself with “bold, progressive ideas.” Running statewide against Ken Paxton (R-TX) in a red state, his campaign now says he opposes defunding the police, calls himself a border-security Democrat, and quietly removed the progressive labels from his website between two 2025 archive snapshots. The facts are his own — a video he uploaded and pages he published. We’ll track the general-election race, any further shifts in his stated positions, and how he answers for the gap between the two versions of James Talarico.

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Last updated June 24, 2026