The first votes of the 2026 midterm elections are still months away from being cast, and Democrat Senate nominee James Talarico appears to already be insulating himself against a potential loss by blaming it on voter suppression.
He recently appeared on a podcast with Jamie Kern Lima and was asked whether or not he was worried about our elections being fair. In response, he said: “We already have a lot of voter suppression in Texas. It’s baked into our laws. I fought fiercely against those laws. It’s why we see such low voter turnout.”
He’s now being called out for that claim by State Senator Paul Bettencourt, who formerly handled voter registration for Harris County in his role as Tax Assessor-Collector and has influenced much of Texas’ recent election integrity legislation.
“In Texas, we had the highest voter registration roll ever and the highest turnout in the last presidential election,” Bettencourt said. He credited that turnout to the exact same election integrity measures that Talarico claims are suppressing voters.
He went on to say: “The only thing that the Republicans try to do is make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. There’s no factual basis for any claim of voter suppression by James Talarico or any other leftist progressive socialist on the ballot.”
Bettencourt also pointed out that the majority of voter registration and election administration is being carried out by either Democrat-elected officials in major cities or officials appointed by Democrats in major cities. Therefore, any actual voter suppression would have to be at the hands of the Democratic Party, not Republicans.