Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (D) on Wednesday responded to the "crazy" conspiracy theories that circulated during his time away from the campaign trail with the flu, saying he learned of one rumor "that I had died." CNN's Erin Burnett asked Talarico about the theories during a town hall event, asking if the flu was...
Page F119From§Eachthe morning edition — 15 October 2026
THE LEDGER
Rumor that Talarico died collapses in hours; his record $64 million quarter doesn't.
As it ran on the front
The campaign press release went out Wednesday with a number: $64 million in the third quarter. By Thursday every outlet from the Daily Caller to NBC News was using the word "record," because it is one — the most any Senate candidate has raised in a single quarter this cycle. The campaign's own accounting adds the detail that matters: ninety-seven cents of every dollar came in at $100 or less.
Ken Paxton, the man standing between Talarico and the seat, raised $18 million over the same three months. That is less than a third of what his opponent brought in, and it is already Paxton's high-water mark — double the $9 million he raised the quarter before. He is accelerating. He is still losing the arithmetic by a factor of more than three.…
…(cont) Run the larger ledger and the quarter gets stranger. The campaign says it has raised $134 million since Talarico announced his candidacy last year. Subtract this quarter's $64 million, and the three quarters before it — the ones that built the campaign from nothing — brought in roughly $70 million combined. One quarter, by itself, came within six million dollars of matching everything the campaign had raised in all the quarters before it. The fundraising is not decelerating toward the finish; it is compounding.
Then came the other number nobody put in a press release: zero. By the weekend the rumor had an audio clip attached, allegedly an Ohio facility employee confirming a discharge. By Sunday night it had collapsed — in mere hours, the lifespan a false story gets when the only thing standing between it and the public record is a phone call to the man's own campaign, which will tell a reporter, accurately, that the candidate has the flu.
Ninety-seven percent of a record quarter came in small enough to be lunch money. The rumor built to bury it didn't survive the weekend.
“Ninety-seven cents on the dollar from regular folks and he's still outraising the Attorney General three to one — that's not a fluke, hon, that's what happens when the con stops working on people who read their own bank statement. They couldn't kill him off at the bank, so they tried to kill him off online, and it took one phone call to prove that was garbage too. You can't out-raise small checks with a rumor that doesn't survive a weekend.”
“Look, raw dollar totals don't measure enthusiasm — Paxton's donors are quieter, more strategic, they give once and mean it. And nobody "spread" anything, people were asking legitimate questions about a candidate who vanished for nine days, that's accountability — okay, it was an anonymous audio clip about a mental health facility, that's not really accountability, that's — did I say accountability? Forget I said that.”
The receipts
Claims that James Talarico suffered a mental health crisis spread across rightwing media, offering a warning about disinformation ahead of the US midterm election Where is James Talarico? The question ricocheted around rightwing echo chambers before metastasising into a conspiracy theory – and a reminder of the persistent danger of…
Texas Democratic Senate hopeful James Talarico’s campaign says it raised $64 million in the third quarter of 2026, a staggering haul that would set a new record.
The Talarico campaign said that brings his total fundraising to $134 million since he announced his candidacy last year.
‘The bill is about our elections, right?’
James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Texas, says that his near record-breaking fundraising haul in the third quarter—one built almost entirely on small-dollar donations—is proof that grassroots energy is on his side as he faces off against the full weight of the Republican Party's money machine, including the world's…
Senate Democratic candidate James Talarico is clearing up the timeline of his "nasty" flu diagnosis after missing more than a week of in-person campaigning in the critical Texas Senate race and sparking widespread online speculation.
A right-wing smear campaign against Texas Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico fell apart in mere hours on Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, MAGA influencers Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher posted a 45-second audio recording on social media that they claimed was of an employee at an Ohio mental health center stating that Talarico had…
Democrats are running an average of 11.5 points ahead of their 2024 baseline across 2026 special elections MultiState Elections, 2026 special-election tracking
James Talarico Raises More In Third Quarter Than Any Senate Candidate In HistoryTalarico raised record-breaking amounts of money
· Paxton raises $18M in third quarter from the morgue, 5 Oct 2026
· Trump fuels rumors about James Talarico’s campaign trail absence from the morgue, 8 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.