Democrats Are Playing with Fire in Texas

Jasmine Crockett’s candidacy could all but end their chances of flipping a much-needed Senate seat next year.

The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be a good one for the Democratic Party. They are overperforming in special elections and off-year contests up and down the ballot. Their lead in the generic ballot poll is growing, albeit marginally, and they may even be winning the gerrymandering battle.

But they have a tougher task ahead as they try to win back the U.S. Senate, an institution that has long had a pro-rural bias and where Republicans have increasingly built an edge. For Democrats to flip the chamber, they’ll not only have to defend all of their current seats and win two Republican-held “toss-up” seats, which would get them to 49. They must also pick up at least two more seats¹ from states that voted for Trump by double digits just last year, such as Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, or Texas.

One of those states, however, may already be in jeopardy. Last week, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett announced her candidacy for the Texas Senate race. One of the most liberal members during her time in the Texas House, Crockett has made a name for herself since arriving in Washington in 2023, largely by grabbing the spotlight and lobbing rhetorical bombs in every direction.

In some of her more notable statements, she:

• Mocked Texas Governor Greg Abbott for using a wheelchair, leading to pushback from disability-rights organizations;

• Said that Hispanics who voted for Trump—roughly 50 percent of the Hispanic electorate in Texas—have a “slave mentality”;

• Incorrectly accused that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on the floor of Congress of taking money from Jeffrey Epstein (and later claimed she never made that accusation);

• Dismissed white critics of DEI programming as “mediocre white boys”; and

• Said that black Republican Congressman Byron Donald, who married a white woman, had been “whitewashed,” adding, “Some of our skin folk are not our kin folk.”

Even in a state or district that leaned slightly Democratic, these comments would be nonstarters for most people. And to state the obvious: Texas, which backed Trump last year by 14 points, is not a Democratic-leaning place. Crockett’s highly charged comments seem to have already made an impression in Texas—and not a good one. According to a recent poll from the Democratic group Change Research, fully half (49 percent) of Texas voters say they would “definitely not” vote for her in the race.

So, how does Crockett plan to win? Many Democrats running in Republican-leaning places have a strategy for reaching out to at least some Trump voters. But Crockett has a different view. When CNN anchor Laura Coates asked her how she would win over Trump supporters, Crockett said it “wasn’t her goal” to convert them. Coates followed up, “Do you need to?” To which she replied, “No, we don’t.”

Crockett instead said she prefers a strategy of mobilizing a lot of “non-voting” minorities who, in her mind, would obviously vote Democratic if only someone convinced them to turn out. A handful of other progressive Democrats running in red (or at least swing) states have favored this approach in recent election cycles because it doesn’t require them to moderate in order to appeal to voters across the aisle. The problem is that there is no evidence from any of these previous candidates that such a strategy works.

One of the more high-profile adopters of this thinking was Stacey Abrams, who ran two campaigns for governor in battleground Georgia. Her team made a conscious decision to follow this playbook rather than try to win over moderate white voters. However, the theory didn’t pan out. She was not only one of the few swing-state Democrats to lose a high-profile statewide race in a “blue wave” year (2018), but she lost by an even wider margin the second time around (2022) following essentially the same roadmap.

Democratic candidates in Republican-leaning Texas have also tried to find success with this formula—to no avail. The one candidate who came close to winning statewide, Beto O’Rourke, took a completely different approach in his 2018 U.S. Senate campaign, visiting all 254 counties in the state (many of which are deeply Republican) and embracing liberal-but-not-far-left positions.

Crockett has shown little interest in doing those things—or even in pitching an agenda to voters. This was apparent in the first ad of her campaign, in which she not only failed to take the opportunity to introduce herself to those who don’t know her and those who might be skeptical of her candidacy, but she didn’t talk at all. The 45-second ad instead simply trained the camera on her and overlaid insults that Trump has made about her.

Like other trendy “resistance” candidates of years past, Crockett is almost certain to attract extensive media attention and raise large sums of money. But history shows that this success can be meaningless when a candidate is a bad fit for their state. Crockett also begins the campaign trailing both of the top Republican candidates in the race by eight to nine points.

Democrats have one viable alternative to Crockett in the primary in Texas State Representative James Talarico. Though he too has fashioned himself as a progressive, he has taken a very different approach in the Senate race so far compared to Crockett: engaging directly with conservatives in the state and specifically making his religious faith a core part of his pitch.

The two candidates’ differences may be best summed up in comments they each made about immigration. Speaking to a group of undecided conservative Texas voters recently, Talarico argued that “immigration makes America stronger,” engaging the room with a positive case while simultaneously acknowledging the need to have a secure border and, importantly, his own party’s shortcomings on the issue:

I’m an eighth-generation Texan. My family has been here since it was Mexico. My mom actually grew up in Laredo, right on the Texas-Mexico border. I feel like we Texans understand immigration more than people outside of Texas because we live with it every day—the benefits and the challenges. The more I travel the state, the more I’ve realized that most Texans are in the same spot on this issue.

The metaphor I’ve used is that our southern border should be like our front porch: there should be a giant welcome mat out front and a lock on the door. We can both welcome the stranger—welcome immigrants who want to contribute to this economy, who want to live the American dream, who want to make us stronger and richer—and we can keep people out who mean to do us harm.

I will say what I think not enough Democrats have been willing to say: Joe Biden failed us on our southern border. I remember talking to my colleagues in the Texas legislature who represent border communities. They told me about the utter chaos on the border. And that failure by Joe Biden paved the way for Donald Trump to come in, with masked men in unmarked vehicles, secret police tearing parents from their children, kidnapping people off the street.

I think both parties have failed us on this issue. I think we all should all come together and finally pass comprehensive immigration reform—more immigration judges, more border patrol, modernize our ports of entry where most of the fentanyl gets in, reform the asylum system, relieve the visa backlog. We should finally fix this problem instead of grandstanding on it.

By contrast, here is Crockett in a speech she gave before a black church congregation this past April, which circulated again on social media this week:

So I had to go around the country and educate people about what immigrants do for this country, or the fact that we are a country of immigrants. The fact is ain’t none of y’all trying to go play farm right now… You’re not. We done picking cotton. We are. You can’t pay us enough to find a plantation.

Democratic voters will choose next year between two candidates running two very different campaigns. Early polling suggests Crockett is a favorite to win the party’s nomination, even as nearly half of registered voters in the state say they are a “no” on her from the outset (compared to 40 percent who say the same thing about Talarico). Texas may be a long shot for Democrats no matter what. But in a cycle where flippable Republican Senate seats are at a premium, running a candidate as polarizing as Crockett may all but take this one off the map.

Editor’s note: a shorter version of this piece first appeared in UnHerd.

1. Democrats will need to win an outright majority of at least 51 seats to flip the Senate, as Republicans control the White House and thus have the tie-breaker in the chamber.