Whether or not Talarico was in a mental institution or home sick with the flu the past two weeks is almost irrelevant. If you’ve worked on a major senate race and your candidate got sick in the home stretch you would immediately spring into action, start calling surrogates to come stand in for planned events, be aggressively pitching media oppo on your opponent, etc etc. But that isn’t what happened here. Not only did Talarico go dark for two weeks, so did his entire campaign. I’ve talked to tons of reporters who regularly cover the Texas Senate race and they all say the Talarico campaign is usually very responsive but they couldn’t reach ANYONE on the campaign for the past 7-10 days. My theory is the campaign went dark because nobody on the campaign had a damn clue where their candidate was or what the messaging was about his whereabouts and so they had no choice but to go completely dark.