The Dream Of The Blue Texas
If you love somebody, set them free of this fantasy.
Any suspense over whether Jasmine Crockett would run for Senate probably ended when the MAGA Supreme Court ruled that Texas Republican could go ahead and racially gerrymander themselves to their shriveled hearts’ content. Now, Crockett is definitely leaving the House in 2027. The only question is whether she simply moves offices in the Capitol. It’s not a particularly suspenseful question, either. Crockett announced this week that she’s running for the Senate, in Texas, the one from Dallas. It’s almost impossible that she could win, but here’s her campaign launch teaser.
No, sorry, that’s the Supergirl teaser trailer. I have too many windows open. Crockett’s teaser is similar, though it doesn’t hold back on revealing the villain — Donald Trump. Crockett strikes a pose while audio plays of Trump insulting her. (Watch below.)
Crockett’s is so Trump-focused, it doesn’t mention any major policy issue — such as affordability, which Trump considers a “hoax” — or even clarify that she’s running for Senate in Texas, which gave us Beyoncé. I know teasers worry about revealing too many spoilers but give us a little something here.
Democrats have dreamed of a blue Texas since 2016, when liberals imagined that Hillary Clinton might flip the state because Trump was so viciously anti-immigrant (liberals have believed a lot of kooky things but that one ranks up there with the efficacy of paper straws). Beto O’Rourke came within a couple percentage points of unseating Ted Cruz in 2018. The 2020 polls showed a tightening race between Joe Biden and Trump, who went on to win decisively after Biden underperformed in Latino border counties. Cruz beat Colin Allred last year by almost 10 points, while Trump carried the state over Kamala Harris by 14 points. There is no compelling reason to believe that Crockett will do any better, and actually a lot of reasons to think she’ll do much worse.
Democrats have roughly a 12-point disadvantage in Texas compared to Republicans, so if a candidate maxes out the Democratic vote, they would need to not only win center-right indies overwhelmingly but be competitive among Republicans. That is not Crockett’s brand. She’s gone viral hurling barbs at Republicans. She referred to Marjorie Taylor Greene as a “bleach blonde bad built butch body,” a phrase she sought to trademark as part of her “Crockett Clapback” t-shirt collection. She called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels.” (He’s a wheelchair user.) Biden and Harris both narrowly won Texas independents, although that wasn’t enough to offset the Republican advantage. There is zero evidence that partisan “clapbacks” appeal to this critical demo. Perhaps that’s why Republicans reportedly planted overly generous polls encouraging Crockett to enter the Senate race.
Most Democrats who’ve tried to flip Republican-dominated states have run as “independent” voices, who often distanced themselves from national Democrats, especially leadership. Not long after clinching the Democratic nomination in 2018, Krysten Sinema announced that she wouldn’t vote for Chuck Schumer as Senate leader. She focused her campaign on protecting health care and didn’t make a point of attacking Trump. Of course, even by 2018, Arizona was shifting Democratic. Biden flipped the state in 2020 and Mark Kelly beat professional Senate race loser Martha McSally. But even in swing states Democrats have a record of winning, elected Democrats try to avoid appearing too partisan or outright liberal. Michigan’s freshman Sen. Elissa Slotkin has said that identity politics need to “go the way of the do-do” and advised her fellow Democrats to speak in “plain English.” She’s criticized Biden’s economic policies. Whereas, Crockett is a hardline, partisan Democratic cheerleader. She’s not a regular guest on Fox News like John Fetterman or Pete Buttigieg, who at least tries to defend Democratic policies in a hostile environment. Crockett’s positions on most major issues are indistinguishable from the national Democratic Party. If she could flip Texas, she might as well use that genie’s wish on a presidential run.
Crockett seems to think she can flip solid-red Texas without converting a significant number of Trump voters. She insists that Texas isn’t a Republican state at all.
“When they tell us that Texas is red, they are lying,” Crockett said. “We are not. Reality is that most Texans don’t get out to vote. The reality is that the people that I used to work with in the Texas House did everything that they could to make sure that they could suppress voices.”
It’s true that Texas Republicans have attempted to marginalize Democrats (and thus voters of color), and it’s a sad fact that Texas has both the most restrictive voting laws and, not surprisingly, some of the lowest voter turnout in the nation. However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that increased voter turnout would turn Texas into Big Oregon. Studies have shown that 2024 non-voters were more likely to have voted for Trump than Harris. This is not surprising because the Democratic coalition now includes more college-educated and high-propensity voters. It’s not 2008.
Meanwhile, working class, non-college voters of all races (particularly Black and Latino men) have shifted right. Crockett hasn’t directly appealed to those voters. Worse, she stated in print, where people can read, that Latino Trump voters had fallen victim to a “slave mentality.” During a podcast interview this summer, she said “Most people voted the wrong way [in 2024] because they were uneducated.”
“And that’s not to call them dumb,” Crockett clarified, the way politicians do whenever they’re calling people dumb. “You’re trying to keep a roof over your head, keep food on the table, trying to make sure that your kids have what they need. And so you’re not tuned in.”
Still, the argument is that if you were “more tuned in,” you would vote “correctly.” This almost always alienates voters, and it lacks the necessary humility of conceding that maybe Democrats didn’t materially deliver for these voters. Crockett’s fans have compared her campaign to Zohran Mamdani’s upset in the New York mayoral election or Graham Platner’s insurgent candidacy in the Maine Senate race. I think this misses the key fact that despite what you think about Mamdani or Platner, they don’t act as if Trump voters are fools. Mamdani in particular genuinely engaged with Trump voters in his district. He didn’t have a Gorillas in the Mist discussion about them on a podcast.
Crockett remains convinced that she can win through a primarily base-centered approach rather than actual persuasion. This almost never works, but as Tobias Funke once said, “people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... but it might work for us.”
Crockett has pointed to Mamdani-Trump voters as an example of how her approach could work, but Mamdani prioritized affordability — not just running the dozens on Trump. He also presented himself as a stark contrast from the Democratic establishment, which didn’t support him.
Even Cruz’s 2012 race targeted the GOP establishment just as much as Barack Obama. The message was that if voters sent him to Congress he would do a better job standing up to Obama than a fossilized GOP leadership. Crockett says she’s “coming for Trump,” but she has expressed no issues with Democratic leadership.
Crockett mentioned that both Trump and Obama “energized” new and irregular voters, but they also were direct challenges to their party’s existing status quo. You could understand how Obama and Trump might inspire voters who’d never paid much attention to politics previously. Crockett’s entire persona appears geared toward those who regularly watch MSNBC.
Those very online, MSNBC-viewing Crockett fans have argued that any skepticism about Crockett’s chances are based in her race and gender — although Texas has rejected Democrats of all shades and gender expressions for most of my adult life. No, my own skepticism about Crockett’s chances has everything to do with math. What Democrats achieved in Georgia in 2020 was the direct result of changing demographics that were ideal for the current party. The partisan gap is much less in Georgia than Texas. Georgia has almost twice as many Black voters, and Texas’s well-off suburbs are far more conservative. There is no turnout mechanism that can turn Texas into Georgia.
Doug Jones pulled off a miracle in the 2017 Alabama Senate special election when he narrowly defeated a child predator, but Jones was not a national, polarizing figure. So, while he dominated the Black vote, which was 29 percent of the electorate, he managed to lose the white vote by just 38 points. (Yes, white voters preferred the sex pest.) Kamala Harris managed about 33 percent of the white vote in Texas, but she outright lost Latinos. Now, Latinos are arguably the new swing vote — not a sure bet for either party, but winning them over might require more nuance than lines about “slave mentality.”
It's an uphill battle for any Dem, but Talarico has a much better chance of mounting a strong challenge, IMHO.
The trick in a red leaning state is to draw a clear distinction between you and the Republican (running as “GOP lite” just makes voters prefer the clear Republican and confuses your own base) but to make sure you are closer to the targeted median voter in that distinction—making the Republican the out of step oddball. Copium like “well he’s not just need to get more nonvoters to the polls” and “most voters agree on our issues, they just don’t vote that way for some reasons” is not going to work.
A Texas Dem candidate could run hard on Trump failing on his promises, getting us to where prices are higher than ever and growing, while businesses are failing and jobs are stagnating and disappearing. And while you’re looking for work, you have to worry about being kidnapped by ICE and having no due process is your skin tone is a bit dark. Texas Hispanics have long been more conservative than national Hispanics but Trump may be losing that demo. It’d still be a hard race though as Cornyn presents as a reasonable pre-Trump conservative and not the weird serial killer that Cruz seems like.
The divide now is getting to be more about college vs noncollege voters rather than race, but either divide is bad for Democrats because they’re on the minority side of both divides. Better figure out how to expand our appeal before we get locked out.