U.S. Senate hopeful Colin Allred criticizes rival James Talarico for accepting billionaire donations

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The Texas Democratic primary for U.S. Senate heated up on Friday with former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred directly criticizing his rival, state Rep. James Talarico, for the first time, and calling him out for accepting donations from casino magnate and megadonor Miriam Adelson while railing against billionaires’ influence in politics.

“I like James, but when I see him say that he’s running against billionaires, but then when nobody was looking, his top donor was Miriam Adelson … That contributes to the cynicism that folks might experience,” Allred said during an event at The Texas Tribune Festival.

During his 2024 reelection campaign for the Texas House, Talarico accepted $59,000 from Texas Sands PAC, a pro-gambling group funded by Adelson. Talarico has also accepted donations from billionaire Charles Butt, the H-E-B chairman who supported candidates from both parties opposed to private school vouchers. 

Texas Sands PAC has spent about $7.5 million in Texas since its inception. The PAC, in addition to the Texas Defense PAC, another Adelson-backed group, spent around $7.2 million supporting 90 pro-gambling legislative candidates in the state.

Talarico has said that he accepted those donations as a state lawmaker because he supported the causes of the groups that contributed to him, including legalizing gambling, opposing private school vouchers and fully funding public schools. 

Talarico, who, like Allred, has pledged not to accept donations from corporate PACs, also said that he refuses to “unilaterally disarm while Republicans play by their own rules.”

“It certainly would be easier just to accept everything,” he told the Tribune in August, adding that he introduced state legislation to cap campaign contributions. “I am in this broken system like everybody else is. I, at least, am trying to put forward ideas for how it could be different.”

The Austin Democrat has centered his Senate campaign around opposing the influence of big money in politics, arguing that billionaires who control politicians, social media platforms and the media “want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same.”

“As I travel this state, I really get the sense that people are tired of being pitted against their neighbor,” he said at an event earlier Friday at TribFest. “That’s what I’m trying to build in this campaign: a politics of love that can heal what’s broken in our country.”

Allred’s comments marked the first time either candidate publicly disparaged the other. Talarico on Friday declined to criticize Allred, saying that he was running a “positive campaign” in the primary.

Allred backed his criticism up by saying that the eventual Democratic nominee has to have the “ability to withstand what the Republicans are going to do in the general election,” arguing that he is most qualified because he previously underwent a multimillion dollar statewide race against a high-profile Republican. In 2024, Allred fell short of toppling U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz by 8.5 percentage points.

“That’s the armor that I have,” he said. “I’ve been through that ringer.”

Allred and Talarico also both condemned the small band of Democrats in the U.S. Senate who defected from their party to approve a stopgap funding measure ending the longest government shutdown in American history — without securing Democrats’ central demand of extending broader Affordable Care Act subsidies, earning intense backlash from others in the party.

“We need national Democrats to fight with everything they have for working people in the state and across the country,” Talarico said. “That’s our job as Democrats. We’re the party of working people, and so if we’re not able to do that, and if Senate Democrats are going to cave so easily, we shouldn’t wonder why voters don’t trust us in the ballot box.”

Both candidates argued that the compromise revealed the party’s main fault line.

“The biggest divide I see in the party is not between progressives and moderates, or even by age. It’s by whether you recognize the moment that we’re in and the fight that it requires, or whether you don’t,” Allred said. “That’s the test that was failed in this instance.”

Allred and Talarico also aligned on several policy issues, including restoring the speaking filibuster and legalizing marijuana, and opposing a mandatory assault rifle buyback program and decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

National Republicans have tried to tie Talarico and other Democrats to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York City. On Friday, Talarico said he was not a democratic socialist and that he planned to run a “Texas campaign to serve Texas.”

“The beauty of the last election night was that you saw Democrats of all kinds winning in very different parts of the country, and that’s what’s going to be necessary if we’re going to revitalize the Democratic Party,” he said. “If we’re going to win in places like Texas, we have to have candidates who actually represent their communities.”

Talarico and Allred also both defended their decision to run for the same office, even after they met with former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro in May to hash out their plans for 2026.

Talarico, who was earlier floated for governor, said he believed the skills he’d honed in the Legislature — including passing legislation, questioning witnesses and debating bills — were the most transferable to the Senate.

Allred said that “we have a lot of talent in this state that doesn’t have a whole lot of places to go sometimes, and people will feel like they should run for what they can run for. And that’s okay.”

At a separate panel on Friday, Castro said that all four Democrats in the meeting were initially interested in the Senate race. Castro offered to run for Texas attorney general if the others could split up the remaining statewide offices instead of running against each other for Senate.

In the end, he said, “we just couldn’t get there.”

Disclosure: H-E-B has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.