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James is an eighth-generation Texan, former middle school teacher, and Presbyterian seminarian. As a state representative, he’s led the fight against the billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians who have taken over Texas.
Now, he’s running for U.S. Senate to take his fight against corruption to Washington and win power back for working people.
Before I was a politician, I was a public school teacher. I taught sixth grade Language Arts at Rhodes Middle School on the westside of San Antonio.
The westside is a beautiful, historic Mexican-American neighborhood. It’s also one of the poorest zip codes in Texas. Every day, my students struggled heroically to overcome poverty and systems designed to hold them back.
Growing up, I saw that same fight in my mother — a preacher’s daughter from Laredo who left home at 19 and met my birth father, whose drinking problem sometimes led to violence.
One night he became abusive again, but that night my mother’s love rose to meet it. She packed all our stuff into her little Ford Escort and took me to the hotel where she worked. The manager let us stay in one of the rooms until we found a small apartment of our own in East Austin.
Like my students, my mom was a fighter. And she passed that fighting spirit along to me.
I first ran for the Texas House in 2018 to fight for my constituents — people like my mom and my students. It was a district no one thought we could win, but together we flipped a district Donald Trump had won just two years earlier.
As a legislator, I’ve passed major legislation to fund our neighborhood schools, expand job opportunities for young adults, and lower the cost of child care, housing, and prescription drugs.
I’ve led the fight against the billionaire mega-donors that have rigged the system against working Texas families. And I’m the only member of the Texas Legislature who has never taken corporate PAC money.
Now, as those same billionaire mega-donors take over the federal government, we need more fighters in Washington who will take power back for working people.
That’s what my mom showed me on the eastside of Austin. That’s what my students showed me on the westside of San Antonio. And together, that is what Texans will show the country in 2026.
Why I’m Running
There’s something broken in America.
Our economy is broken. Our politics are broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken.
That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.
The biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.
The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and power. So their cable news networks and their social media algorithms tear us apart.
They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so we don’t notice they’re defunding our schools, gutting our healthcare, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the oldest strategy in the world: divide and conquer.
But we will not be conquered.
We’re underdogs in this fight. We’re going up against these billionaire mega-donors and their puppet politicians. We’re going up against a rigged system. And we’re going up against a lot of money.
But I’m a former middle school teacher — I don’t scare easily. And Texans don’t scare easily.
My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas. He taught me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments: love God and love neighbor. Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Every single person bears the image of the sacred; every single person is holy — not just the neighbors who look like me or pray like me or vote like me.
Those billionaires want to keep us from seeing all that we have in common. They want to keep us from realizing there’s far more that unites us than divides us. Because once we do, we’ll come together — across party, across race, across gender, across religion — to fix what’s broken in our country and take back power for ourselves and our communities.
2,000 years ago, when the powerful few rigged the system, that barefoot rabbi walked into the seat of power and flipped over the tables of injustice. To those who love our country, to those who love our neighbors:
It’s time to start flipping tables.