How James Talarico’s team “wrote for the internet.”

Democrats bagged no bigger prize last week than Texas, where the party’s candidates won up and down the ballot in a ruby-red state that many believed was out of reach. At the top of the ticket was James Talarico, the 37-year-old state representative who ran a disciplined, hopeful campaign for U.S. Senate that broke through to key audiences online and off. Talarico’s team built an organization on another level, one that looked more like a presidential campaign than a Senate race in scale and sophistication, and core to that operation was a 26-year-old staffer from San Antonio named Antonio Esparza.

Esparza first met Talarico as a student at Southwestern University, when the future senator was a little-known local politician. He joined Talarico’s team five years ago as an intern and scheduler, until his boss realized he had a gift for writing and social media. Flash forward to this year, and Esparza ran the winning campaign’s social media, video and creator programs as creative director and speechwriter, where he helped the candidate “write for the internet” and become a larger-than-life figure in Texas and nationally.

I caught up with Esparza this week to hear how they did it, from the platforms they prioritized to the audiences they targeted, and to hear what he thinks future campaigns should take from it. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

Kyle Tharp: You started out working for Talarico as a scheduler, and now you just led one of the biggest and most successful digital programs in politics. How did you get here?

Antonio Esparza: I started off working for James as a scheduler, which is hilarious to think about now. But when I was scheduling, I was asked to write some tweets, and they figured out that I was pretty good at it. I've always been a writer, that's always been kind of my thing. And so from there, I was still scheduling, but half the time I was actually writing, and social media posts eventually turned into speeches. 

During one legislative session, Gov. Greg Abbott was pushing for private school vouchers for the first time, and that became a big fight for us because James is a former teacher. It was around that time when I started pitching us to get on TikTok, because our operation was still very Twitter heavy. Twitter was the center of the universe, and I strongly disagreed with that and was like, "Yo, we have to make a shift to short form vertical video. There's way more people there, way more important people there, actual voters." I pitched pretty hard, and they ended up saying yes, and the very first video we posted ended up going viral overnight. 

It was a speech about the 10 Commandments. It's a really pixelated, grainy video. The cameras were bad quality. And it was nothing crazy, but it had a good hook and told a story. Anyway, [it] got a million views overnight, and then it kept growing. I think it's at, like, five or six million views now, which for a state rep from Pflugerville was the craziest thing ever.

After that, my team was like, "Antonio, you can get whatever you want. You're not scheduling anymore. This is all you're doing." And that's been what I've been doing ever since. That’s what started our unique approach to short form vertical where I'm both the speechwriter and also the guy who manages social media.

Kyle Tharp: You were in charge of the Senate campaign’s digital efforts. What was your formal role and what did your team manage?

Antonio Esparza: My title was creative director and speechwriter.

My team ran all organic socials, from the principal account, to the Team Talarico accounts, and the Spanish accounts. We led our creator program. We had a whole production crew under us. We had a couple camera guys and multiple editors. And then all speechwriting, whether it was written for the internet or not, anything that he was saying in a speech format lived under us.

Because everything lived under one roof, I’m able to work backwards from virality — everything from the speech delivery to the edit of the cut to the text on screen, all that stuff was owned by my team, and not siloed like they are in a lot of campaigns. Everything fed off each other.

Something I'm really proud of is that we also cooperated really closely with press on a ton of stuff. We would set up press for things, press would set us up for things. And by that, I mean, if James was doing a TV hit, we would write clips that he would deliver on TV for the purpose of posting on social media. And so anytime he was on camera, me and my team were involved.

Kyle Tharp: I feel like that style of “writing-for-the-internet” is going to be a major takeaway from this campaign, and you saw it happening elsewhere this year among potential 2028 campaigns, like Jon Ossoff.  

Antonio Esparza: It makes things a lot smoother, much less siloed. We also just generally [in the Talarico] camp, we believe that comms is collaborative. We get a lot of people's thoughts and opinions. I will say the asterisk to all of this is that James is the most gifted, in my opinion, one of the most gifted communicators in the party, and so much of this comes from him and his special sauce and his magic. And so our job is to package it up and make it easy for him, but he's the talent.

Kyle Tharp: There was a lot of talk about your success with the Latino vote in Texas, and obviously you guys did tons of stuff with Carlos Espina, and a bunch of stuff with now Congressman-elect Bobby Pulido in the Rio Grande Valley. What different audiences online did your team prioritize reaching?

Antonio Esparza: We made a huge push with different audiences, and there's two specific areas where the goal was reaching Latino voters. One was launching our “Talarico en Español” accounts, which had a decent volume and audience growth. I have to look at the numbers, but I believe it's at over 100,000 followers on TikTok. A ton of Spanish-speaking folks are on the platform, and we built that for the purpose of reaching people who speak Spanish and only Spanish, but also for those who tend to consume English audio with Spanish subtitles, which is very, very normal, particularly here in Texas. 

We also made a pretty major push on YouTube, where lots of Latinos consume the news. In Q3, we had the fastest growing YouTube channel of any political campaign account.

Kyle Tharp: I think that’s my data you’re citing.

Antonio Esparza: Haha, that's right, it was. I was so happy when your graphs came out. I was like, "Validation, this is awesome."

We put a pretty major investment into our YouTube channel, because part of it was driven by just knowledge that Latinos are there, but also because we made a pretty big push for young men as well. YouTube Shorts is a huge platform for young men, and so when we would do content down in the Valley or wherever, we would package it with the intention of it being [viewed] by Spanish-speaking folks on YouTube. And then we also did a ton with local creators in the Valley and in Houston and in El Paso that had Spanish-speaking audiences or had heavy Latino audiences. Carlos Espina is incredible. He was a huge help.

Katey Parham led our creator strategy, which was very locally focused, non-political, culture first. And I think that particularly for Latino voters who maybe vote every four years, you're not gonna reach them through a political creator, most likely, but you could reach them through someone who talks about sports or talks about food or whatever. 

So that was kinda the three-pronged approach to reaching Latino voters online.

Kyle Tharp: On the creator front, did you guys prioritize doing big national political creator interviews, like MeidasTouch stuff? Or was the focus on local? What about that Joe Rogan interview?

Antonio Esparza: I think we did a lot of national stuff in the beginning, in the primary and pre-campaign. Later on we might've done an occasional MeidasTouch thing, but in the general election, not really. I think Carlos [Espina] might have been our only major national political creator we worked with consistently.

I'm really proud of the fact that we worked pretty consistently with small to medium-sized local Texas-based creators. As an example, there would be a San Antonio-based food influencer, their whole shtick is San Antonio food. And they'd have 45,000 followers. But if you follow someone named SA Foodie or whatever, you're probably in Texas and more specifically in San Antonio. And so those are very valuable eyes.

If you were just looking at a raw follower count, I think some people would tell the candidate that it's not worth the time. But we pushed pretty hard and James totally was bought in doing local creator interviews. We would step into their niche instead of having the creator step into politics. James would talk about things like his favorite food in San Antonio and stuff like that to show that he's more than just a politician.

We did Rogan during the pre-campaign, I think that was in June 2025. We finished the legislative session, and then we received an email from their team, it just showed up in my inbox one day. The reason Rogan found out about James was because he saw one of our viral 10 Commandments videos online, and he was like, "I wanna talk to this guy." And so again, we're creating these viral videos that then set up opportunities for other things, like a Rogan appearance, which then creates press. There's a whole domino effect, and it's all the same ecosystem.

Kyle Tharp: What were some of the biggest online moments for you guys in the race that national political watchers could have missed? 

Antonio Esparza: We would put out these videos that were attack ads on Ken Paxton, but they were kind of funny. They would take a ton of work, a ton of our capacity, and we would bounce around ideas and it was a pretty heavy editing job, but they always performed well. I think a lot of people in the political world saw the Paxton stealing someone's pen video. People really ate up that one, and it performed really well. I'll have to pull the exact number, but I wanna say it was, like, 15 million views across platforms. 

We had multiple others that performed just as well. I think my personal favorite was attacking Paxton on how many properties he owns. (15!) We made a parody video off of House Hunters. By raw numbers, it was on par with the pen video, but it didn't get nearly as much attention from the national press. That one resonated for people who consume daytime cable or broadcast TV, and who would be entertained by something on House Hunters. And those are the kinds of voters that we needed. 

The thought process with this stuff is that in focus groups and in testing, when you show people negative ads, voters do not like negative ads. They have a negative reaction to the existence of the negative ad. They sometimes work, but voters don't like them. And so typically on social media, if you release a negative ad, it doesn't perform well because people don't typically wanna share it because it's not entertaining, it's not funny, it's not interesting.

We really wanted to figure out ways to repackage the attacks we had on Paxton, his hits, in ways that would break through the political bubble and would be shareable. We landed on this humor-first approach. Humor is the most deadly weapon in politics, and if wielded like a scalpel, it can be really, really damaging. 

Kyle Tharp: What else did you learn about the social platforms and thet algorithms that was noteworthy this cycle? Where were you seeing a lot of engagement, and where were you putting a lot of your focus?

Antonio Esparza: Facebook actually is a huge platform for reaching people who, specifically, the data indicated we needed to reach. We would post the same repeat viral videos over the course of the whole campaign there. It’s kind of like watching your favorite movie or TV show. Yes, I've seen Batman four times, but I like Batman, and so I'm gonna watch it again. And so we would repost old content, and more so compared to TikTok and Instagram, we would have way old Facebook Reels that were still getting pickup months and months later.

Even if we could not post for a whole week, we'd probably still get tens of millions of views on Facebook, which ended up being by far our biggest platform in terms of both views and followers on both the team account and the @JamesTalarico accounts.

Facebook is where it's at. There's a ton of voters on there [in] ways that aren't on Twitter, specifically voters that are general election voters. So, yeah, I'm a Facebook evangelist now.

Kyle Tharp: My last question: There was a lot of hot takes and online national discourse about your race. You had haters and doubters within the Democratic Party who said Texas could never flip blue, or not this cycle.  How did your team handle that?

Antonio Esparza: We didn't let it impact us at all. This campaign was run by Texans and for Texans, and chattering class or people who are political observers would have commentary, and we did not let that get in the way or affect strategy at all. We know how to reach people, we know how to reach Texans specifically, and we just executed.

We wrapped ourselves in Texas culture, truly from top to bottom. Everything's bigger in Texas, including the culture. And so some of our most vital moments were with The Chicks, Willie Nelson, Kacey Musgraves…We talked to voters in H-E-B, which, I don't know how much time [you've] spent in Texas, but that's the go-to grocery store in Texas. We went to Buc-ee's, which is an iconic, massive gas station. We did a couple Whataburger stops. We went to Austin City Limits and engaged the bands there.

And so in an attempt to keep us grounded here in Texas, talking to Texas voters, we wrapped ourselves in the Texas flag, in Texas culture, and didn't let any of the commentary or any people on the outside, whether it was criticism or praise, did not let that make us change course.

My OG readers know that I’m proudly from East Tennessee, the heart of Southern Appalachia, where we invented Mountain Dew and the MoonPie and claim Dolly Parton as our patron saint. That also means I’m from a place where Democrats have been all but wiped off the national electoral map. When Heath Shuler, who represented Western North Carolina in Congress, left office in 2013, he became the last Democrat to hold a Southern Appalachian seat in the House of Representatives, and for nearly 14 years nobody in his party followed him. 

Voters in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee ended that losing streak last Tuesday by electing not one but five Democrats from the region: Jamie Ager (NC-11), Chuck Hubbard (NC-5), Lakesha Womack (NC-14), Zach Dembo (KY-6), and Victoria Broderick (TN-4).

They didn’t do it by abandoning their values, either. If you haven’t seen this video of Chuck Hubbard that has been making the rounds online, you should watch it today.