Jasmine Crockett Is Breaking An Unwritten Rule In Texas Senate Race

Defeated Democrats in bitter primaries have mostly moved on quickly this cycle. Francesca Hong backed David Crowley for Wisconsin governor within 12 hours of her shocking loss. Haley Stevens endorsed Abdul El-Sayed despite having accused him of antisemitism. Alex Vindman let his primary opponent, Angie Nixon, use his massive email list to raise money for her campaign.

Outgoing Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) hasn’t followed that pattern.

Crockett endorsed James Talarico the day after he defeated her in Texas’ U.S. Senate primary in March, and even agreed to campaign for him, but has appeared to walk away from that promise. Instead, she’s offered a string of comments suggesting that Black voters aren’t sold on him, raising questions about whether her remarks themselves undermine Democrats’ chances in a race they need to win to preserve their path to regaining a Senate majority.

On Thursday night, Crockett again repeated her pledge to campaign for downballot candidates instead.

“Black voters are practical. So at the end of the day, I don’t know that they’re going to have to be the most excited,” Crockett told CNN’s Laura Coates. “But I will tell you that you always want voters to be excited.”

Earlier this month, she told a reporter she didn’t know if he could win, even as his fundraising has soared and public opinion surveys have repeatedly shown him leading the GOP nominee, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

“I personally don’t feel like the excitement necessarily exists within the Black community,” Crockett said last week during an appearance on the “Front Page” podcast, referring to Talarico’s candidacy. “Right now, I don’t feel like they’re excited.”

Crockett argued that Black voters carry a broader distrust of politicians they don’t know well, Talarico included, and that her energy is better spent boosting Black candidates in downballot races.

It wasn’t the first time Crockett has doubted Talarico’s chances. Her criticisms have been eagerly highlighted by Republicans, while they have generated eye-rolls from many Talarico allies and surprised others in Texas and Democratic politics. Most polls of the race show Talarico with a substantial lead among Black voters — a Fox News survey last month gave him an 87% to 13% edge.

“I don’t know who is in her social circles, or who she’s talking to,” Kendall Scudder, chair of the Texas Democratic Party, told HuffPost. “The people I talk to seem very excited, but you know, her lived experience is different than mine.”

A recent University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll of registered voters in Texas found that 60% of Black voters have an overall favorable opinion of Talarico, while 69% of Black voters said they would support Talarico if the U.S. Senate election were held that day.

The stakes are high — Republicans threw out longtime incumbent Sen. John Cornyn to nominate Paxton, a scandal-plagued loyalist of President Donald Trump who has struggled to raise money and gives Democrats a rare chance to turn a red seat blue and capture the Senate majority. (Trump traveled to Houston on Thursday to attend a Paxton campaign fundraiser.)

Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama aide and previous executive director of the Democratic National Committee, offered a scathing response on social media to a clip of Crockett’s “Front Page” interview.

“At some point, we have to ask who exactly you’re working for. Black folks across the country know what time it is and are turning out in super high numbers. James Talarico is a phenomenal candidate who is appealing across Texas. It’s gross to suggest that our voters will only come out for black candidates,” Gaspard wrote.

Other Democrats have been similarly caustic. “At this point I’d respect Crockett more if she just admitted that a settled vendetta is more important than beating Paxton,” Rodericka Applewhaite, a Democratic operative who works for the Talarico-backing Majority Democrats, wrote Friday on X.

Shea Smith, a Houston-based Democratic strategist who coordinated some outreach for Crockett’s campaign, was initially skeptical of Talarico’s efforts to reach Black voters, but walked back some of his previous critiques.

“I think that was my entire issue. At first, he was not doing that from the primary in March until about a couple of weeks ago,” he told HuffPost. “I think he is doing that now, and I think that pivot, that sort of positioning, will hopefully bring him success come November.”

Smith said he believes Crockett’s recent comments, while framed around Talarico’s campaign, are more focused on enthusiasm around the broader statewide ticket in Texas — gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa, nominee for lieutenant governor Vikki Goodwin, and nominee for attorney general Nathan Johnson, among others — being composed of largely white and Latino candidates that Black voters are not widely familiar with.

Crockett did not respond to requests for comment.

Other Black Democrats in Texas have acknowledged the party could do better with Black voters.

“I don’t think anybody in this party disagrees that Black voters have been taken for granted for a long time within the Democratic Party, and you know, Jasmine has made the case forcefully, and I think she’s very right about that,” Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) told HuffPost.

Menefee made the point while speaking before Talarico at a Houston town hall with Black voters in July, and Talarico accepted the criticism, calling it a “hard truth.” Menefee said Talarico’s campaign has followed through with extensive Black voter outreach.

“You’re not going to find a statewide campaign in recent memory in a general election that has done more to go out to talk to Black voters, even when the conversations were going to be tough, to meet them where they’re at, to hear their issues and then to advocate for them,” Menefee said. “You are never going to catch Ken Paxton coming to a Black neighborhood in any city in Texas.”

During the Senate primary, a debate about whether Talarico would be more “electable” than Crockett in the general election — an important question in any primary election — carried an obvious racial subtext. It came to a head when a Crockett supporter claimed Talarico told her he had expected to campaign against “a mediocre Black man” — a reference to former Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who wound up running for the House instead of the Senate this year. The reported remark infuriated Allred; Talarico said he’d only meant that Allred ran a mediocre campaign when he ran for Senate against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2024.

Even though Crockett endorsed Talarico immediately, her apparent refusal to campaign for him raised eyebrows following the difficult primary, which included unsuccessful legal challenges by her campaign against Republican-led changes to polling locations she said disenfranchised voters.

In a June selfie video, Crockett suggested the fixation on what she was doing for Talarico was counterproductive to beating Paxton.

“If you have this urge to be like, ‘Oh, Jasmine this, Jasmine that,’ maybe use that energy towards ‘Ken Paxton this, Ken Paxton that,’ because last time I checked, no matter how much I end up being a part of the conversation, there is one person that is guaranteed not to become the next senator in the state of Texas, and that’s Jasmine Felicia Crockett,” she said.

And in the “Front Page” interview last week, Crockett said she did not actually have the power to control Black voters in Texas.

“There are those that believe I have an underground railroad popping off in Texas, and that I’ve been telling all the Black folk on the underground railroad, ‘Don’t do this or don’t do that,’ and it’s so far from the truth,” Crockett said. “I frankly stopped doing as many TV interviews because I don’t want to talk about the race, to be perfectly honest.”

Talarico, for his part, has defended Crockett since their contest.

“People need to leave the congresswoman alone. She is doing incredible work. She is a leader in our state, in our country, and she deserves the utmost respect,” Talarico told SiriusXM’s “Urban View Mornings” in July. “Anyone who claims to be my supporter who’s online talking trash about the congresswoman — they don’t represent me.”