For the better part of two weeks this fall, the most expensive Senate race in America had only one visible candidate. Ken Paxton led a San Antonio crowd in the chant “Where is James Talarico?” The Democrat nominee’s last in-person Texas event was a September 26 press conference, and his last in-person event anywhere was a September 28 New York fundraiser with Robert De Niro. On September 30th, he joined a U.S. Hispanic Business Council event by video, saying he had the flu. Then nothing, until he turned up at Austin City Limits on October 9th.
The left and right have spent the days since arguing about where he was. Both are missing the bigger story, which is that two weeks is a short absence by the standards of James Talarico (CIS). Vanishing when the work gets hard is the through-line of his public career. He has walked out on the Texas House twice, missed more than 800 votes by one count, and now wants a 6-year term in a chamber where one vote can decide the fate of a nominee or a bill. Texans should take his record at its word and send Ken Paxton to Washington instead.
The Texas Constitution requires two-thirds of the House to be present before it can conduct business. The rule assumes something modest: that members will show up, argue, and lose votes like adults. A legislator who flees the state to break a quorum cancels the votes of 149 colleagues and the 30 million Texans they represent. Paxton put it in words any welder in Odessa would recognize: “If you don’t show up to work, you get fired.”
In July 2021, Governor Greg Abbott called a special session to pass an election integrity bill. On July 12th, Talarico boarded a private jet to Washington with more than 50 House Democrats. The House Democratic Caucus paid for the planes, the Mexican American Legislative Caucus helped cover meals and lodging, and Beto O’Rourke’s Powered by People wired $600,000 to keep everyone comfortable on the Potomac. Talarico stayed gone until August 9, a 28-day quorum break that ran 38, and even his return left the House 5 members short. His monthly salary kept arriving throughout. Imagine telling your boss you will be gone a month, on someone else’s dime, so nobody else in the office can work either, and then cashing the paycheck.
In August 2025, he did it again. This time the destination was Illinois and the target was a new congressional map, and the House again issued civil arrest warrants while Paxton asked the Texas Supreme Court to declare absent members’ seats vacant. Powered by People again helped pay the freight. Talarico stayed away 15 days, and the walkout finally came with a bill: $8,354.25, covering 12 unexcused days at $500 apiece plus his share of what the Department of Public Safety spent bringing Democrats back. Talarico sat on the House Administration Committee that set the penalty. He voted to erase his fines entirely, a motion that failed 5 to 6, and then voted against the final assessment. The payment deadline was May 5. A month later, he was still on the list of Democrats who hadn’t paid, and I found no record of him paying since.
Then there are the ordinary absences, the kind that don’t require a private jet. The Daily Signal counted more than 800 missed House votes between May 2019 and May 2025, and the Texans for Fiscal Responsibility scorecard shows him absent in 2025 for the vote on a constitutional amendment requiring citizenship to vote. When the record came up on The View, Talarico waved it off as a “Republican talking point” and pointed to the redistricting walkout. That walkout began in August 2025. The count ends in May 2025. An alibi that arrives 3 months after the absences it is supposed to explain explains little.
Nor can he plead a crushing schedule. The Texas Legislature meets 140 days every other year, which is why everyone calls it a part-time job. Talarico’s outside work included consulting for MAYA Consulting, an Austin firm that collected millions in Texas Education Agency contracts while he sat on the House committee that oversees the agency; by his own disclosure, the firm paid him $83,333 in 2025. His Senate financial disclosure lists a single checking account, held jointly with his mother. For more than two years after buying his own house, he kept his voter registration at his parents’ address and voted from it 5 times. A man carrying that light a load still could not make the votes. Send him to Washington, and the only question is whether he leaves the Senate floor as easily as he left the Texas House.
The October disappearance fits the pattern. After the September 30 video call, the schedule went dark: the October 5 Central Texas African American Civic Engagement Symposium was canceled, and so was the October 6 “Final Austin Fundraiser for James Talarico.” Candidates in races this close do not cancel their own October fundraisers lightly. His influencer army fretted in a private Slack channel about the missing candidate and the momentum he was losing, according to messages the New York Post obtained. Even his friends were nervous.
Into that silence stepped Rhein Amacher, an independent reporter acting on a tip that Talarico had been at the Lindner Center of Hope, a psychiatric hospital outside Cincinnati. Amacher started dialing, and over several calls, a woman answering for the facility told him on tape that he “was just discharged this evening.” Nick Sortor took the recording to his audience, and Sortor says his attorneys reviewed Amacher’s carrier records and confirmed the calls reached Lindner at times matching the audio. Nobody has produced evidence that the recording was altered or manufactured. Sara Gonzales made follow-up calls and demanded that the facility explain what its staff had said.
The response came fast. The campaign said Talarico had been home in Austin with the flu, and Talarico said he had never even been to Ohio. Lindner posted on 𝕏 that “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.” The campaign shared selected home-security stills with the New York Times and CBS on terms it set, rather than putting them out for everyone to examine. Frank Luntz called for retraction graphics from Sortor and Gonzales, and the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media pronounced the matter debunked.
Debunked means shown to be false. What has been shown is that everyone with a stake in the answer denies it. Neither the campaign nor Lindner has claimed that the Lindner staffer on the phone didn’t say what the tape records her saying. Lindner’s stated practice is to neither confirm nor deny whether someone is or has been a patient; it set that practice aside for Talarico and has offered no account of what the person who answered its phone was looking at, or why she said what she said. Maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she read the wrong screen. Amacher accurately reported what the voice on Lindner’s line told him, and that reporting stands, while the question of whether Talarico was ever a patient remains open. Nobody owes a retraction for a recording that exists and says what it says.
Talarico’s defenders have a sympathetic reply. He has lived with type 1 diabetes since a 2018 emergency that put him in intensive care for 5 days, and the flu is no small thing for a diabetic. Perhaps a sick man stayed home and is being hounded for it. If so, it would take an afternoon to prove: a letter from his physician, the urgent-care record from September 29, the camera images handed to an independent examiner, and a day-by-day account of his whereabouts. Presidential candidates release medical summaries as a matter of course, and a man asking for a 6-year Senate term can manage a doctor’s note. Instead, the campaign gave a few sympathetic newsrooms a private look and called the Ohio story a lie meant to promote a “pathetic conspiracy theory.” A campaign that wanted this closed would have closed it.
Democrat money has been hedging on this nominee all fall. Republicans have spent more than $190 million on Texas ads from September through Election Day, compared with $52 million reserved by Democrats over the same stretch. In fact, after Talarico reappeared, advanced television ad purchases for him had been slashed to just $5.5 million for the last 20 days of the campaign compared to $55 million for Ken Paxton. As late as August, Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC hadn’t booked a dollar of Texas airtime past September 1, even as it bought time in other battlegrounds. Two quiet weeks in October are hardly the thing to change the minds of the people writing those checks.
This week’s CNN town hall in Fort Worth gives Talarico a stage to start setting things right. He should pay his $8,354.25 before asking Texans for a promotion, and he should release the records that would settle where he spent his two-week vacation from the campaign trail. The Legislature has homework too. Current House rules withhold 30% of a delinquent member’s office allowance, which has plainly not been enough, and it is embarassing that a fine can sit unpaid for months while the man who owes it runs statewide, so next session lawmakers should make the penalty self-executing and pull it from salary and office accounts the day a member crosses the state line so that no committee vote can wash it away and no member can treat it like an out-of-state parking ticket that nobody will ever bother to collect.
Washington offers no Illinois. The Senate needs only a simple majority for a quorum, so a senator who dislikes the agenda cannot stop the work by leaving; he can only stop showing up, and the roll gets called without him and without the 30 million Texans he was sent to speak for. In a chamber where majorities are counted a seat or two at a time, that empty desk is a gift to the other side. At the end of the day, Ken Paxton has spent his career in the fight, sometimes more combatively than his critics would like, and no one has ever needed state troopers to walk him back to his desk. Texans who want a senator they can find on a Tuesday should vote for him in November.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
A Senate seat is a responsibility to represent people when decisions are made, including when the votes are difficult and defeat is possible. Muse’s strongest argument concerns deliberate walkouts: leaving to prevent legislative business substitutes obstruction for the duty to debate, vote, and answer for the result. That record deserves scrutiny before a candidate receives six years in Washington. Speculation about private medical care adds nothing to the case that attendance and performance must matter. Paxton’s willingness to confront political opposition is a strength in a chamber where consequential votes can turn on one member. Voters should demand a senator whose commitment survives an unfavorable agenda and a hard fight.
Hmm, $83,333 paid to Talarico. Funny number, the same exact amount Hunter Biden received every month for much of his Burisma board "directorship."
Second, about that polymarket odds on Talarico over Paxton. How easy would it be for Soros, Singham, Reid and co. to launder influence money to flood that market with bets?