Democrat Texas Senate nominee James Talarico has spent months trying to sell Texas voters on a moderate image. The problem is that his past statements and actions provide plenty of material that clashes with the persona now being presented by his campaign, as reported by Red State.

One of Talarico’s latest campaign advertisements shows just how urgently he wants to recast his border record. In the advertisement, Talarico declares, “I called out Joe Biden for failing us on the border.”

That claim puts Talarico forward as a border security Democrat willing to challenge a president from his own party. It is also the sort of positioning he apparently believes he needs to win over Texas voters.

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But Fox News Digital spotted a rather large hole in the campaign’s story. The outlet asked Talarico to produce evidence showing when he had publicly called out Biden over the border.

His campaign could not provide Fox News Digital with a single example of Talarico publicly criticizing Biden during his presidency. That failure leaves the advertisement’s central boast hanging without the public record the campaign was asked to provide.

The difficulty does not end with the missing Biden criticism. Talarico’s previous comments about Texas border security spending reveal a sharply different posture from the tough border image his latest advertisement attempts to project.

During a 2019 interview with The Austin Chronicle, Talarico explicitly called for moving Texas’ entire $800 million border security budget, which covered two years, into public education.

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His preferred destination for the money included the basic allotment.

“I'd rather take that money and put it back into public education and help increase the basic allotment, for instance,” Talarico said during that interview.

He also criticized the equipment and personnel deployed along the physical border. His comments targeted boats, planes, and border patrol agents while arguing that those resources were both costly and ineffective.

“Putting a bunch of boats, planes, and border patrol agents on the physical border is expensive and also does not solve the problem. [....]”

Talarico did not stop with questioning whether the spending solved the problem. He dismissed the effort as a political performance intended to satisfy parts of the Republican base.

“Everyone will admit it's just political grandstanding,” Talarico said in the interview.

He continued, “Certain lawmakers want to appease extreme parts of their base. And they do it by pumping money we don't have down to the border.”

Those remarks are not the only parts of Talarico’s record complicating his attempted border makeover.

He has called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, referred to illegal aliens as his “constituents,” and said he had “undocumented students” who were more patriotic than Americans.

That is a long way from the border security Democrat displayed in the new campaign advertisement. The campaign wants voters to focus on Talarico’s claim that he challenged Biden, yet it could not give Fox News Digital even one public example when directly asked.

His record as a state representative creates another obvious obstacle. The border security measures he attacked are the same sort of measures that have helped secure the border under President Donald Trump, according to the account presented in the source.

Talarico is now asking Texas voters to accept a version of his record that his own campaign could not document for Fox News Digital. Between the unsupported Biden boast and his past attacks on border spending, the attempted reinvention is running headfirst into his own words.

The advertisement therefore reveals more than a new campaign message. It shows a candidate reaching for border security credibility after years of statements that point in the opposite direction, and the paper trail is not cooperating with the makeover.

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