Friday nights at the University of Texas at Austin meant The West Wing for Jimmy Talarico and his friends.
They watched the show on DVD, escaping into the fictional White House of President Jed Bartlet, imagining themselves in the corridors of power.
"We were a bunch of dumb college kids doing politics," said Andy Jones, who was part of that circle of friends. "We were all caught up in the moment of being in college and the Iraq war and the financial crisis and all this stuff."
But even among these political obsessives, Talarico stood out. He was unusually polished, smooth and deliberate, almost as if he had been preparing for a U.S. Senate campaign since elementary school.
Nearly two decades later, he's within striking distance of becoming the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. Public opinion polls suggest a neck-and-neck race between Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton in the Nov. 3 election.
"I could tell from the very minute he stepped on campus that he had big aspirations," Talarico's college friend Zack Hall remembered from 2007. "The way he dressed like he looked like Bill Clinton."
Hall, who took Talarico under his wing at University Democrats, sometimes thought his younger friend could loosen up a bit.
"You look too much like a politician right now. You're acting too much like a politician," Hall remembers telling him.
Talarico's four years at UT Austin, from 2007 to 2011, became a political apprenticeship. He helped register thousands of voters, organized protests, lobbied lawmakers and ran a bitterly fought campaign for student government.
Along the way, he made political decisions that left some of his closest allies feeling betrayed.
Interviews with former classmates, archival video and coverage by The Daily Texan reveal a young man who cared intensely about political causes and who was also fiercely ambitious.
"I look at Jimmy as being very idealistic, but very calculated," Hall said.
Talarico's campaign declined to make him available for an interview and did not answer specific questions from KUT News about his years at the university.
Learning politics
When Talarico arrived at UT after graduating from McNeil High School in Round Rock, he quickly became active in University Democrats.
Jones, who was a year ahead of Talarico, remembers being impressed by his willingness to fight hard for the job of volunteer coordinator, "the lowest rung on the totem pole."
Jones and Talarico supported Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, when much of the enthusiasm on campus was behind Barack Obama.
"He and I were team Hillary," Jones recalled. "He eventually gets on the Obama train a lot faster than I did."
By fall 2008, Talarico was vice president of University Democrats and helping lead Hook the Vote, a campus voter registration drive involving some two dozen student groups, including College Republicans.
UT later said the 2008 effort registered more than 10,000 students.
The bipartisan relationships extended into another campaign, this one over something deeply personal to the student body: the soaring cost of tuition at UT.
A fight over tuition
In 2003, Texas lawmakers gave public universities broad authority to set their own tuition rates. At UT Austin, tuition and fees for an undergraduate rose from $2,721 per semester in fall 2003 to $4,254 in fall 2008, a 56% increase.
The backlash crossed ideological lines.
University Democrats, College Republicans and the Young Conservatives of Texas joined forces in a campaign dubbed Tuition Relief Now, which sought to bring tuition back under legislative control.
The coalition didn't always see eye to eye with UT's student government, which Hall viewed as being dominated by students more interested in building their resumes and making connections with university administrators than challenging them.
With Talarico serving as statewide director for Tuition Relief Now, the coalition pushed student government on Feb. 10, 2009, to support a resolution urging Texas lawmakers to regulate tuition.
After a lengthy debate, student representatives rejected it.
The resolution by itself wouldn't have changed state law or lowered anyone's tuition bill. But in the intensely political world of student government, the vote helped set off a fight that fractured the coalition.
Eleven days later, University Democrats, led by Talarico, endorsed Liam O'Rourke and Shara Ma for student body president and vice president.
Both candidates had withdrawn their support for the tuition resolution shortly before the student government vote.
The University Democrats' own endorsement letter criticized their votes, saying they fell short of the "political strength or moral courage" expected of leaders. Yet the group endorsed them anyway, arguing that their experience made them the best choice to lead student government.
To some of the students who fought alongside Talarico, it was a betrayal.
Mike Garcia, then president of the College Republicans, wrote in The Daily Texan that his group had "stopped participating" in Tuition Relief Now because of the endorsement.
"Our message of affordable tuition will be contaminated if we continue working with the UDems," Garcia wrote.
This month, Garcia revived the dispute with an even sharper accusation. He said Talarico pulled University Democrats out of a planned Capitol rally to ingratiate himself with university leaders and advance in student government.
"I once considered him a friend. But then he betrayed the entire student body for his own political gain," Garcia wrote on X.
Garcia — a top aide to Matt Krause, a former Republican state lawmaker who's now a Tarrant County commissioner — didn't respond to requests for comment.
Hall, who helped build the tuition coalition, also remembers being furious about the endorsement. He was in Washington on a fellowship at the time and said he warned Talarico against backing the candidates.
"My interpretation of it then and my interpretation now is Jimmy wanted to get in on the student government crowd," Hall said, believing his friend was choosing to make political connections at the cost of the coalition's efforts.
But Talarico continued publicly fighting tuition increases.
Later that spring, he helped organize a lobbying day at the Texas Capitol, telling ABC News the campaign had more than 100 appointments scheduled with lawmakers and their staff.
He also testified before a Senate committee that tuition deregulation had produced cost increases that "have hurt students in immeasurable ways."
Jones remembers marching to the Capitol with Talarico and other students, chanting for tuition relief.
"It felt like we were making a difference," Jones recalled.
In April 2009, Talarico helped author another resolution supporting state limits on tuition increases while allowing universities flexibility in setting rates. This time, student government approved it by unanimous consent.
Hall believed Talarico wanted it both ways.
"He wanted to make friends with the student government crowd and get in with them," Hall said. "But he also wanted to say, 'I'm opposed to tuition increases.'"
The disagreement strained their relationship but didn't end the friendship. Hall still wrote Talarico a recommendation letter for Teach for America. Later, Talarico got Hall a front row seat for a visit from President Obama to campus.
"It was the coolest thing ever," Hall said. "That was because of Jimmy."
A vicious campaign
One of the coauthors of that April 2009 tuition resolution approved by unanimous consent was Justin Stein. A year later, Stein found himself on the opposite side of a bruising student government election run by Talarico.
In spring 2010, Talarico was campaign manager for Scott Parks and Muneezeh Kabir for student body president and vice president. Their main opponents were Minator Azemi and Stein.
"It was vicious in some ways, as vicious as a student government campaign can get," recalled Natalie Butler, another student government leader who described Azemi as one of her best friends.
Coverage in The Daily Texan shows what she meant.
Azemi's campaign accused Parks and Kabir of campaigning before the rules allowed it. Talarico acknowledged holding meetings but denied soliciting votes, saying candidates would "push right up to the legal parameters."
The election board found that Parks and Kabir had improperly distributed campaign materials and fined them $45. The penalty was mocked by a Daily Texan columnist as the cost of "about half an economics textbook."
Then Parks and Kabir's side filed complaints against their opponents for sending unsolicited campaign emails to thousands of students and distributing fliers in dormitories.
The election board found violations and temporarily barred Azemi and Stein from campaigning. An appeals court later shortened the punishment.
Azemi and Stein led the first round of voting, but Parks and Kabir won the runoff.
Parks appointed Talarico executive director of student government, a top student government position under the president and vice president he had helped elect.
Talarico 'was always very polished' at UT
Butler, who later became student body president, supports Talarico today and has donated to his Senate campaign.
She remembers his political ambition clearly.
"He was always very polished," Butler said. "I sort of feel like he wasn't doing some of the same dumb stuff that I was doing as a college student. Maybe he was, but I don't know."
Asked whether Talarico seemed like someone who, even then, imagined himself becoming a senator someday, Butler didn't hesitate.
"Very much, yes," she said. "I do think that he has had an ambition."
One difference stood out to Butler. She doesn't remember Talarico talking much about his faith in college, though she said it might have been important to him privately. Christianity has since become a centerpiece of Talarico's political message and U.S. Senate campaign.
"You can watch the stump speeches and whatnot and see he's talented on the campaign trail. He's good at talking to people. He relates to people. But he actually really does care," Butler said.
From campus to the Capitol
By Talarico's final year at UT, his political apprenticeship was taking him to the Capitol even more frequently.
Texas lawmakers entered 2011 facing a major budget shortfall. Talarico helped organize Invest in Texas, a student coalition fighting proposed cuts to higher education and financial aid.
Nearly 100 students marched from UT to the Capitol, according to The Texas Tribune.
During the 12th hour of a marathon House hearing, Talarico was invited to testify.
"I do think we lowered the mean age of the hearing pretty significantly," he joked, drawing groans and laughter from lawmakers.
Then he made his pitch.
"UT Austin is not just an expenditure, but an incredibly lucrative investment," Talarico said, before rattling off statistics about the economic benefits of the flagship campus.
As students finished testifying, Republican state Rep. Geanie Morrison offered them a prediction.
"We know that you are going to be the leaders of tomorrow," Morrison said. "You will be the ones sitting up here that will be having to make some tough decisions."
Seven years later, voters elected Talarico to the Texas House at age 29. He was the youngest member of the Legislature at that moment.
Now he's asking Texans to send him to the U.S. Senate.
Copyright 2026 KUT News
