With Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) now officially launching her run for the Democratic Senate nomination in Texas, the stage is set for one of the stranger primary cycles we’ve seen in a while.
Now, I’m not going to assume she’s destined to flame out. As we learned from the New York City mayor’s race, there’s seemingly no floor to how low a Democratic candidate can go and still get votes. But this is Texas, not Manhattan. The voters, the culture, the instincts, and the expectations are different — and Crockett is about to find out just how different.
Crockett’s first hurdle isn’t even the general election — it’s Democratic state Rep. James Talarico. And that matchup alone could get messy.
Talarico has already sprinted out of the gate with the kind of rhetoric that plays well in faculty lounges but lands like a lead balloon in Texas. He’s been busy demonizing Elon Musk — one of the state’s largest employers — and calling for trillionaires to be taxed out of existence.
Crockett’s announcement video said it all — and not in a good way. Instead of outlining what she plans to do for Texas, her entire pitch revolved around herself, capped off with a clip of President Donald Trump calling her “low IQ.”
That’s the message she thinks will win over voters in a state Trump carried by nearly 14 points in 2024? She’s essentially running the Kamala Harris playbook: “Trump bad — vote for me.” And we all saw how well that strategy worked out.
Nothing in her rollout speaks to Texans’ priorities. Nothing shows she understands the state. Nothing answers why voters should choose her over anyone else. It’s a vanity pitch dressed up as a campaign launch — and in Texas, that’s not a winning formula.
It got worse at her announcement event, with a rap performance by Cameron McCloud. It was bizarrely bad, including the line, “I can’t wrap my head around someone who votes Republican,” before trying to drop an Epstein smear:
We now go live to Jasmine Crockett's Senate announcement where a rapper just performed a song about her. pic.twitter.com/gcArf3U4mb
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 8, 2025
I’m sure insulting Republicans in a deep-red state is going to go over beautifully. Nothing wins over Texas voters like sneering at them. It’s almost as if Crockett forgot to include the part of her message that actually explains why Texans should want her representing them.
What she’s really demonstrating is that she isn’t serious — not about the race, not about the state, and not about earning anyone’s trust. And yes, every time she opens her mouth, she reminds voters of her spectacular blunder earlier this year, when she tried to smear Republicans for supposedly taking money from “Jeffrey Epstein”… only for it to turn out that she was referring to people who merely shared the same name as the notorious financier. Guess they forgot about all the times Bill Clinton hung out with Epstein and that infamous Clinton Lewinsky painting…
And to top it off, Crockett went on CNN with Laura Coates and confidently declared that she doesn’t need to persuade all Republicans or Trump supporters to flip. Translation: she’s already writing off the overwhelming majority of Texas voters.
Coates: "How will you convert Trump voters into voters for you?"
Crockett: "I don't know that we'll necessarily convert all of Trump's supporters. That's not our goal."
Coates: "Do you need to?"
Crockett: "No, we don't." pic.twitter.com/w2JOB7lXdE
— CJ Pearson (@Cjpearson) December 9, 2025
“Our goal is to definitely talk to people. No, we don’t, we don’t need to. Our goal is to make sure that we can engage people that historically have not been talked to, because there’s so many people that get ignored, specifically in the state of Texas. Listen, the state of Texas is 61% people of color. We have a lot of good folks that we can talk to,” the lawmaker said.
Well, that’s certainly a tactic — openly blowing off Trump voters in Texas, of all places. Maybe that explains why Crockett doesn’t seem bothered by insulting them. If she’s already decided those voters don’t matter, it makes sense she isn’t wasting any time trying to win them over.
Instead, she’s banking on the idea that she can cobble together a coalition of people who “don’t normally turn out to vote.”
And then there’s her decision to announce that she’ll be focusing her pitch on “people of color” because they have a lot of “good folks” they can talk to. That’s a tactic, sure — but it’s also a great way to signal to every other voter that they’re not really part of her coalition.
That’s not how you launch a statewide campaign, especially not in Texas. It’s political tunnel vision, and it shrinks her potential base before she’s even left the gate.
The hard truth is this: yes, she absolutely does need to win over at least some Trump voters if she wants even a theoretical shot at a Senate seat. Pretending otherwise isn’t confidence — it’s self-delusion.
