Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-50th District) had an easy way to shut down the rumors about his disappearance this week, and his campaign refused to take it.

As we previously reported, Talarico, the Democrat candidate for the Senate, vanished from public view a month before the election, and multiple people say sources are telling them that he checked himself into a mental institution following some kind of breakdown. Those claims remain unverified. The absence, however, is real, and the campaign is being quite aloof about it.

Talarico last appeared in Texas at a football game on Sept. 26. Invitations show New York City fundraisers with Robert De Niro on Sept. 28 and 29. Then, on Sept. 30, he appeared by video at a Hispanic business event he had committed to attending in person, blaming the flu and saying he had visited a Dallas clinic. GOP strategist Caroline Wren points out that this story places him in a Dallas clinic on the same night he was supposed to be working a room in Manhattan.

Nobody has seen him in public since.

"I'm hearing that he checked himself into a mental institution, that he had a full-blown mental breakdown sometime around, I guess, September 29th or September 30th," Wren said. When Bannon suggested Talarico might just be off raising money in New York or Los Angeles, she countered that photos from those events would have surfaced by now.

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"So, I heard this from someone in Texas," Wren said, adding, "I have no idea what the truth is." She called on investigative reporters to chase the story down, and she's right to do so. A claim like this about any candidate of either party needs proof.

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A local news outlet tried to get that proof, and it came up empty.

Fox 7 Austin reporter Rudy Koski said the station offered the campaign a Zoom interview and explicitly framed it as a proof-of-life request.

The campaign declined.

"Apparently he was really knocked out by this flu bug," Koski said, passing along the explanation he received for the candidate's absence.

It’s hilarious that the media still pretends that the flu story is legitimate. Talarico could show up at a campaign event tonight, and that still wouldn’t explain the campaign’s bizarre behavior. Whatever the situation is, it’s not the flu. A man with the flu can sit in front of a laptop for five minutes. Talarico already proved that himself on Sept. 30, when he managed to record a video for the business event while supposedly sick, even though he didn’t look sick.

Former Democrat strategist Dan Turrentine is clearly skeptical of the campaign’s explanation.

"Talarico's team watched this take off yesterday," Turrentine said. "You're in a close race. Right? So whether it's true or not, whether you're on your deathbed or it's 'other' — right, as the conspiracy theories are kind of hinting there's something else. You're in a tight race; you have 25 days to go. You would get out last night with something, even if it's a photograph of the guy. That makes me nervous that it's Friday morning and there is still [nothing] other than one person saying, 'Nothing to see here.'"

He has a point. Even a sick candidate can wave at a camera and say he's okay, as Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) managed to do.

Why would the campaign pass up the Fox 7 offer? It has every reason to kill the rumors, and it's choosing to let them run. Silence is a decision, and it’s usually based on the calculation that saying anything at all is worse. Talarico's team will now need a real explanation to quiet the questions.