Last Monday, just hours before the candidate filing deadline, Dallas Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett made it official: The high-profile political flamethrower is running for the U.S. Senate. The move was not a surprising one, but it did finally bring resolution to the weeks of her very public consideration of whether to get into the race, which had previously featured both ex-Congressman Colin Allred and state Representative James Talarico.
Crockett’s impending announcement prompted Allred to drop out, setting up a head-to-head contest with Talarico, a much-hyped political figure in his own right who’s built a large social media following around his personal religiosity and rhetorical skill.
Crockett rose to political fame in Washington, D.C., as a fiery MAGA foil after succeeding longtime Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson in representing the historically Black 30th Congressional District, but Crockett got her start by winning a state House seat back in 2020.
A former public defender, she’s a polarizing figure—beloved by many in the national Democratic rank-and-file as a brash fighter and derisively mocked by Trump and his faithful. She wasn’t widely seen as a potential statewide candidate in Texas, which has been uninterruptedly red since the 1990s, until her name started popping up in polling atop every other Dem in the state. It was then that she started really considering the case.
Her decision to get in the Democratic race to face off against either incumbent Senator John Cornyn or one of his challengers, who include Attorney General Ken Paxton, has sparked backlash among both armchair analysts and Dem apparatchiks who think she’s uniquely positioned to lose the state in disastrous fashion—potentially risking any down-ballot upside from a predicted 2026 blue wave. Crockett, meanwhile, says that she’ll be uniquely capable of rallying the party’s base and mobilizing millions of non-voters to come out for her.
The Texas Observer spoke to her last week about her decision to run, the Democratic Party’s struggling brand, and her potential GOP opponents.
TO: You had been publicly contemplating whether or not to jump into the Senate race for a couple months. Why did you ultimately decide to run?
So as we were analyzing trends and, you know, one of the things that I’ve spoken about publicly was the fact that we wanted to determine whether or not we felt like there was a candidate that could extend the electorate. We know that Texas has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the entire country. And so trying to figure out if there was a candidate that could get some of those people that are just not engaging to get more engaged, I felt like was gonna be our best path to making sure that we could flip the seat. And we were able to see some trends and evaluate some things and believe that that could happen.
What issues do you plan to make the centerpiece of your campaign?
I think affordability, end of the day. We’ve not raised the minimum wage in quite some time, yet costs keep going up. So I think that we will use images of what’s actually happening. So for instance, when we had the shutdown, we saw images of people lined up at food banks trying to get food, many of them working folk.
And so we have a problem in this country where we’re giving as many tax breaks as we can find, permanent tax breaks, to go to the top and therefore limiting the amount of money that’s coming into our federal government—to the extent that we say, “Well now we can’t afford to do Medicaid and Medicare.” But at the same time that we are putting more money into the top one percent of pockets, we also are footing the bill for the fact that they are not paying their workers a livable wage.
I think that that is what you do is you connect the dots of the entire ecosystem. You talk about how this is an ineffective way to go about using our tax dollars. You talk about the fact that while you may not be on SNAP benefits, everyone’s cost of food is going to go up. You talk about the fact that they’re pulling this money away from those that are just trying to eat and that also impacts our farmers—as we’re seeing record bankruptcies with farmers and ranchers.
I think there’s always been this kind of like, “Oh well that’s a rural problem or oh that’s an urban problem,” instead of connecting it all together, because a lot of our struggles are the same no matter where you live.
Frankly, I think I think people probably who don’t know me probably may not know how connected I am to rural Texas.
You were a public defender for many years in Texarkana and Bowie County, right?
Yeah. So I understand the struggle. I understand what it means and how scary it is when they’re talking about, say, shutting down one of the chicken plants and how that impacts the entire economy.
Do you think it’s a valid critique of the Democratic Party kind of writ large that they’ve lost touch with everyday working people in their messaging and their priorities?
I don’t think the priorities, I mean, I can go through a gazillion bills that we’ve got for working class folk, right? I do think that we’ve not been able to keep up with the communication standards, so to speak.
I think that as far as our ability to reach people, and as far as our ability to speak kind of plainly, I think that because we’re not reaching them where they are, because we are behind the eight ball, and because when we do end up in those spaces, many people are still speaking as if they are on CNN or MSNow or whatever—they sound like they’re on cable news versus the more relaxed atmosphere that it is to be on social media or on a podcast.
So I think we’ve got work to do, but I don’t think it has anything to do with our policies. When you think about labor protections, you can only associate that with the Democrats. Even though I was really stunned when the vice president [Kamala Harris] was not getting some of the union support. That really stunned me. And I don’t know if that is a trend that we will start to see or if things will shift back. That’s an interesting thing that I’m watching for.
Democratic statewide candidates in Texas have been losing and for the most part, by large margins. Is there a key thing that you can point to about why Democrats have continuously been losing and what you specifically plan to do differently?
There’s a lot of things I can point to. Texas is a large state, land mass-wise, as well as population. And so I think that people underestimate how big we are, but also we’ve been under-invested in. People have not believed in Texas. And so the investments have not rolled in to make sure that we are organized.
We always have amazing candidates, but I do think that we start with candidates that are not known enough and therefore they struggle to get known enough to win. When you think about the fact that this election is taking place in 11 months or so—this is a lot of territory to cover in that amount of time. And so I think that people underestimate just how much time it takes to actually break through. And while historically we’ve had amazing fundraising candidates, it takes a lot of money. It’s a $100-million-dollar raise.
I think that one of the things that put me into a different position is that I started with a name ID that was high. To be polling as high or higher than people who had already made those investments, had potentially run statewide once or twice, that spoke volumes to me because to me that meant that I was at a floor and not at a ceiling. And having only represented one thirty-eighth of the state and never made investments in a statewide election, to me that meant that I had a lot of room to grow. And so I think that we just start off and we’re already on second or third base.
You’ve achieved this high name ID in part from your ability to spar and go toe-to-toe with Trump and his MAGA allies in Washington. Some have said that that might work well in Congress and on cable TV but not to win a statewide race in Texas. Do you think that’s something that can actually be an asset?
I absolutely do think it’s an asset. And again, we can continue to try things like we have historically, and I think it may lead to the same result. You know, what we do know is that sadly enough, there are plenty of people that have described the Democratic brand as weak. And what we have found is that most people want someone that they believe will be strong on what it is that they believe. And even when and if they disagree with them, they can respect them because they don’t feel like they’re gonna waffle.
I think that ultimately it comes down to whether or not people believe that they are getting an authentic and real person. People don’t want a robot. They want somebody that they believe is just as frustrated [as they are] and is going to call out what is wrong.
The first step in the campaign is obviously the Democratic primary. You’re running against your former Texas House colleague James Talarico. What would you say is the argument for Democratic primary voters to vote for you?
Number one, this comes down to experience. You mentioned that we were on the state House level together, and we were. I’ve done that. But obviously by the time we get through the Senate race, [I will have had] about four years on the federal level.
I’ve already built relationships on the House side, built relationships on the Senate side, and I’ve obviously already filed federal legislation. And so this allows us to kind of continue to pound the pavement.
When it comes down to it, I think that we should be looking at who it is that can expand the electorate so we can win. We have spent a lot of time doing the philosophy lessons of who it is that we believe can win—and we keep losing, versus being willing to do something different.
If we want to see something different, then we have to do something different. And I can offer that difference.
Is there a Republican opponent you would rather run against, Ken Paxton or John Cornyn?
I don’t know. I’ll tell you that they are gonna have a long race. Knowing that they are going to be going until May [runoffs], I have no idea.
But I hope whoever comes out victorious has been severely weakened and is in their most weakened state.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Credit: Source link
