Rep. Jasmine Crockett entered the Texas U.S. Senate race this week. Since her election to the House of Representatives in 2022, Crockett has built a national profile off viral confrontations with MAGA figures like President Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her forthcoming campaign will force a long-deferred strategic argument into the open: whether the real blue barrier in the Lone Star State is Republican strength, or the limits Democrats have placed on their own tactics and ambition.
Crockett has already made clear she isn’t going to twist herself into a pretzel to try to win over previous Trump voters at the margins. She hopes to build bridges to new voters, arguing she can run as a progressive and outperform Beto O’Rourke, who fell just short of victory in his 2018 Senate bid. While that approach has earned her enthusiastic support with parts of the Democratic base, it has also left others questioning whether she can compete in a Republican-leaning state like Texas.
This skepticism surrounding Crockett’s campaign rests on the same risk-minimizing logic that Texas Democrats have relied on for decades—a logic that has produced zero statewide victories since 1994. She deserves the chance to make her case to voters without the party pre-deciding that her candidacy is a liability.
The Democratic primary she has joined, until now, has been defined by two sharply different candidates. Colin Allred, a 2024 Senate nominee (who lost to Ted Cruz) was running again with the party’s preferred playbook: strong résumé, disciplined tone, heavy donor backing, and a focus on appealing to suburban moderates. But following what he characterized as a “professional, friendly conversation” with Crockett, Allred announced he was dropping out of the race to pursue a congressional seat instead, just hours before she entered the race.
James Talarico, a young state legislator with a fast-growing national media profile, remains. A digitally fluent progressive insurgent pairing viral reach with an unusual ability to reach conservative-leaning audiences, Talarico reflects an understanding of how fragmented political identity has become for younger and nontraditional voters. At the same time, he has limited statewide infrastructure and a much shorter list of accomplishments.
Crockett represents a third lane. It’s one rooted less in persuasion at the margins and more in mobilization, with a message of political urgency aimed at voters who rarely see politics as relevant to their lives. (Talarico has his own version of this message, that the greatest divide in the country is between those at the top and the rest of us.) Crockett’s appeal to many Democrats is not ideological—it’s methodological. Her policies are moderate, but her messaging is built around emotional investment, media intensity, and a sense of urgency that procedural campaigns have failed to produce.
The structural problem Texas Democrats face is not mysterious: In 2022, nearly 10 million registered Texans did not vote. Any strategy that does not meaningfully grapple with that scale of disengagement is operating on a shrunken map by design, and Crockett has been credited with reaching voters who may usually tune out Democratic talking points. Moreover, the state is home to the largest population of Black voters—a key bulwark of the Democratic base—in the country. Expanding the tent while driving out the base in larger numbers could absolutely be a viable path to victory.
But instead of engaging that theory on its merits, much early criticism has leaned on a familiar vocabulary: Crockett is too risky, too polarizing—labels that are not neutral assessments but serve as preemptive disqualification. Let’s be clear, this rhetoric has the power not only to shape media narratives, but donor behavior, institutional backing, and whether a campaign is treated as an experiment worth investing in or a mistake to be contained.
This online discourse has already led to infighting among progressive factions. The temperature has been dialed up so high that Talarico himself put out a video to his supporters emphasizing the importance of treating Crockett with respect.
There’s no doubt that Crockett has real vulnerabilities in a general election. Her confrontational style, both in speeches and on social media, has produced moments that will be replayed mercilessly in Republican attack ads. Earlier this year, she earned bipartisan backlash for referring to wheelchair-bound Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as “Hot Wheels.” A statewide race will require message discipline, and Republicans will also be quick to paint her as more interested in getting attention than serving the people of Texas. (Many are already pointing to her launch video as self-centered.)
Some on the left have even accused her of being duped by Republicans eager to run against her. According to NOTUS, the National Republican Senatorial Committee circulated a poll showing Crockett dominating in the race as a strategy to encourage her to jump in. Ironically, though, many of those same left voices used NRSC polling to boost Graham Platner’s candidacy in Maine earlier this year.
Of course, Crockett’s candidacy will not be a silver bullet. For Democrats, nothing in Texas is. What it will guarantee, though, is a test of whether Democrats still believe voters who have never been courted can be mobilized at scale, and whether the party is willing to accept instability as the price of growth. Jasmine Crockett deserves her shot—and so do the millions of disengaged voters that Texas Democrats keep promising they will reach someday.
