LUBBOCK, Texas — On the day the president landed in town for the first time in 34 years, people lined up for blocks and waited for hours in this reliably red city.
But the crowds on the city’s east side weren’t waiting for President Donald Trump. They wanted to meet Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.
“We’re all secret Democrats,” said Tim Jones, a 66-year-old emergency room doctor, laughing as he pointed to the crowds of people lining up around Tallarico before the evening rally. “A lot of people ended up getting upset about gas prices, diesel prices, inflation, lies, wars, whatever. It was corruption, tearing down part of the White House to build this ballroom of vanity. I mean, it was so sad. So people ended up deciding, ‘We’re going to go out and vote.'”
Less than three miles away, a similar scene unfolded for Trump, who held a rally at the cavernous Lubbock Memorial Civic Center in an effort to support state Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate for Senate. In a new move, Trump invited his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who received one of the loudest applause of anyone introduced by Trump.
The fiery rallies and source of voter enthusiasm in this city of fewer than 300,000 people underscore the high stakes of a Senate race that attracts hundreds of millions of dollars in spending and poses the biggest threat to Republicans’ control of bright red Texas in years. With just a week to go before the election, Talarico holds a narrow lead in the polls. His trip to Republican turf shows he is trying to win the Republican crossover votes needed to win.
At Tuesday’s rally, Democrats urged supporters to seize a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to flip statewide seats after three decades of Republican control. They harshly criticized the economy, high gas prices and the closing of rural hospitals. Talarico repeatedly cast Paxton as corrupt and a Trump sycophant. He singled out Elon Musk, saying the tech billionaire with major business interests in Texas was trying to buy out his own personal Senate seat after pouring more than $150 million into Paxton’s candidacy.
“We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis. But we can change that in this election, in this state, in this campaign,” Talarico said. “We are confronting the embodiment of a corrupt system. We are confronting the most corrupt politicians in the state of Texas.”
Meanwhile, Republicans have presented Trump with an image of Talarico, who has painted him as a Second Amendment-hating, meat-hating extremist who is out of step with everyday Texans. Minutes into his speech, Trump mocked him as “Tal-a-Freako.”
He noted Talarico disappeared from the campaign trail earlier this month when the candidate said he had the flu. Trump said he believed the cause was either “mental issues” or he had a “stomach problem” from eating meat.
While Texas has far more Republicans than Democrats, Republican strategists say they see the race as a real fight at a time when Americans are angry and unhappy with Washington, D.C. Paxton has also struggled with his own personal scandals, which have weighed on his approval ratings. Texas Republicans are still plagued by infighting after a bad primary in which Trump endorsed Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn, who has the support of much of the party’s establishment.
Paxton leans toward Trump’s views. The president has visited Texas three times this month and held two rallies on Tuesday.
“Wouldn’t it be great to be on stage with the greatest president of my lifetime?” Paxton told the crowd as Trump stood behind him and watched.
Paxton said he spent the day with Trump, first campaigning in Corpus Christi. Paxton said that when they arrived in Lubbock, the president told him that he usually doesn’t hold two rallies for any candidate: “He said, ‘I must really like you.'”
“Mr. President, I really like you too,” Paxton said.
Trump allowed Rubio to speak at the rally, as he did earlier in the day in Corpus Christi, potentially signaling the Republican’s desire to attract more voters. Rubio’s approval ratings are generally higher than others in the administration, including Trump. He is also a possible candidate in the 2028 presidential election.
Rubio, who had not attended a midterm campaign rally until Tuesday, took the microphone and kept it brief.
“Our enemies are weaker. Our country is stronger and our people are safer because Donald J. Trump is the president of the United States,” he told the Lubbock rally.
trump card Called Talarico an “anti-gun extremist” and said he and Paxton are the only things standing in the way of a Democrat becoming a senator.
“They have a lot of bad people,” Trump said of Democrats. “That’s why we can’t lose to some monster.”
But Talarico embraced the nickname and said he had never seen so many “Tarrafrecos” crammed into a room.
“Lubbock is ready for change,” Talarico shouted. More than 4,000 people signed up to attend his Tuesday night event, according to the campaign. “They’re scared. They’re scared. They see what we see – we’re going to win this election.”