The GOP has succeeded in luring U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett into entering the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Time will tell if they regret getting their wish, but progressives should be under no illusion about her politics.
I have already encouraged NC readers to follow this race because the GOP primary between incumbent RINO Sen. John Cornyn and MAGA avatar Attorney General Ken Paxton is THE battle between Bush and Trump era Republicans for control of the party.
I have also written about Crockett here previously, here’s what I had to say in July:
A number of outlets have breathlessly covered “dark woke” but no one has done it with the heft and staggering cluelessness of The New York Times.
The NYT piece is subtitled “Democrats are trying out a new attitude. It’s provocative, edgy and perilously toeing the line of not being too offensive” and it platforms “Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, has on more than one occasion directed name-calling and insults at her political opponents.”
Interestingly, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has been promoting its poll claiming that Rep. Crockett is way ahead in the Texas Democratic Senatorial primary, although she hasn’t actually announced her candidacy.
Do I really need to say that Democrats should run screaming from any tactic encouraged by both The New York Times and the Republican Party?
Crockett’s MSM-Driven Rocket Rise
Perhaps, like me, the reader wonders how a 44-year-old Missourian with one term as a state representative in Texas and one-and-a-half terms in Washington, has risen so fast.
It’s not hard to explain, she’s made herself a darling of the mainstream media.
Here’s a Google Trends comparison of news coverage of Crockett vs. California Rep. Eric Swalwell, a first-term congressman and, like Crockett, handpicked by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ to rep the Dems on the Jan. 6 subcommittee.
pic.twitter.com/3cv1NYlDGN
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) December 10, 2025
Now let’s take a look at MSM coverage of Jasmine Crockett to set the scene and see what the normies are hearing about Jasmine Crockett, and rest assured, they are hearing a LOT about her.
Here’s a quick screengrab of the top stories on my Google News feed:
pic.twitter.com/eDxCNEsOcO
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) December 10, 2025
Talk about a few thousand words in a single picture. The CNN coverage sums the Crockett value proposition to TV-watchers who love to hate The Donald. The NYT sets the broader electoral context, and FOX is licking its chops.
Jasmine Crockett Takes the Stage
Let’s hear what Rep. Crockett chose to say in her campaign launch tweet:
Texas, let’s win this thing. #JasmineForUS #TexasTough pic.twitter.com/VthTb93kur
— Jasmine Crockett (@JasmineForUS) December 8, 2025
Transcript:
Donald Trump: She’s the new star of the Democrat Party, Jasmine Crockett. They’re in big trouble.
Trump: But you have this woman, Crockett. She’s a very low IQ person. I watched her speak the other day. She’s definitely a low IQ person.
Trump: Crockett. Oh, man. Oh, man. She’s a very low IQ person. Somebody said the other day, she’s one of the leaders of the party. I said, you got to be kidding. Now they’re going to rely on Crockett. Crockett’s going to bring them back.
There you go, she excels at trolling Donald Trump and baiting him into talking about her. Note that his criticisms are empty and meaningless.
She’s also been willing to criticize Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes.
In fairness, she’s capable of more substance, from an October interview with Politico:
Asked about the government shutdown: Crockett: Honestly, this has probably been the most effective messaging that we’ve done as Democrats. When we look at the numbers, it is clear that whether you’re MAGA, Republican, Independent or Democrat, you believe that it is wrong to limit people’s access to health care in the form of getting rid of or allowing the expiration of those tax subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. And so I do think that, number one, it’s been very effective messaging. But number two, it is clear that the Democrats are fighting for the basic humanity of all Americans.
She also has some interesting comments on her communications approach, her rapid rise, and her frenemy Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the most interesting thing to me was her commentary on the varied responses she’s gotten from the different political generations in the Dem party:
Crockett: (The day after my first confrontation with Marjorie Taylor Greene) there are two little women in their eighties that are high-fiving me. It is Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi. Two very well-known, fierce, yet definitely what you would probably consider to be older-school kind of politicians. They have been in politics forever and they’re older, but they are feisty and they know how to get things done.
And then I would say that the middle-aged group, those that I would consider to be aunties, those that are in their sixties were really like, “Uh, we don’t know about this.” They were the ones that were like, “Ahhh.”
Then of course the people that are in my class and near my class, they were all fine, but it was very interesting to see that.
That’s one of the things that people don’t understand about where we are is that there are these generational groups.
The woman is smart and smooth.
She’s also dropped a video of her speaking out against ICE during a congressional session yesterday.
You don’t need to be a Democrat to know this is wrong — you just need a conscience. If you can hear what these people survived in ICE custody and feel no outrage, then we are not standing on the same side of right and wrong. pic.twitter.com/cqXKnDRQQZ
— Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (@RepJasmine) December 10, 2025
Some key quotes:
Jasmine Crockett: We are living in some of the scariest times that this country has ever seen yet you have not backed down.
I have seen your faces more than once. You refuse to go silently and into the dark. You are the light that they are afraid of, and I am so grateful for you being so heroic at such a scary time.
When the history books are written, they will know your stories because you decided to be brave in the face of those cowards.…I’m the type of person that is constantly looking for how do we come up with solutions. I became a lawmaker because as a lawyer, I just didn’t feel like it was good enough to stand in the courtroom and just argue each case at a time. I wanted to change the laws.…So I don’t care what your color is. I don’t care what country you came from. We are a country of immigrants. It is time for us to unite and stop allowing people to divide us.
I’ll give her points for this one.
How D.C. Sees Jasmine Crockett
Now let’s see what the “savvy insiders” are reading.
The team at Axios does a bang up job of documenting how the race is seen from D.C. in their piece titled Dems face a Tea Party-style revolt in Texas and beyond:
Hours after former NFL star Colin Allred quit the Texas Senate race Monday, rabble-rousing Rep. Jasmine Crockett jumped in — the latest sign that Democrats are facing a Tea Party-style revolt by progressives.
Senate Democratic leaders this year have tried to tip the scales in favor of their favorite 2026 candidates in several states — but they’ve lost some power as much of the party’s base has turned on them in President Trump’s second term.
The Texas Tribune has the view from Austin in their piece “Is Jasmine Crockett’s Senate campaign an asset or a liability for Democrats? It depends on who you ask.“:
In the eyes of some pundits and politicos, the Dallas Democrat’s nomination would spell doom for her party’s chances of winning a statewide race for the first time in over three decades. To others, she is a fighter and gifted communicator whose expand-the-electorate strategy is worth trying in a state where Democrats of all stripes and styles have failed.…At stake is not just the U.S. Senate race, but competitive seats further down the ballot for the U.S. House and the state Legislature. Though Texas Democrats are still smarting from another round of blowout defeats last year, 2026 marks the first midterm with Trump in the White House since 2018, when Beto O’Rourke’s narrow Senate loss generated a wave of down-ballot wins for Democrats.
Fiery, quick-witted and adept at generating viral moments, Crockett is well-known to the Democratic base in Texas and around the country. As Democrats have struggled with unscripted forums, finding their digital voice and authentic presentation, Crockett, a frequent presence on cable television and in long-form interviews, is regarded among the base as an invigorating and clear communicator, never robotic or boring. Operatives agree she will be a strong fundraiser and a formidable primary candidate. And her backers argue her status as a household name — including in the White House — is a strength.
“Jasmine Crockett is the most talked about member of the United States Congress, House or Senate,” Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a bastion of Houston politics, said at Crockett’s launch event. “And why are they talking about her? Because she talks back. She will expand our base. She’s a great communicator. She has shown that she can raise money.”
Readers should note that Crockett’s policy positions and legislative accomplishments go entirely unmentioned.
The Progressive Media Has Some Thoughts on Jasmine Crockett
Now let’s hear from the alt media types.
Matt Stoller:
Jasmine Crockett has explicitly modeled her career on Barack Obama, from the corporate-friendly politics to the focus on celebrity over substance. It’s a well-worn anti-populist lane now in black politics.
Crockett is very smart, I hope she realizes this model is a dead-end.
The Young Turks zero in on Crockett’s position on the Gaza genocide:
Ana Kasparian: In April of last year, she voted to send over $26 billion in US taxpayer money uh to Israel as security assistance. That same month, she voted yes on a resolution condemning the phrase from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free as anti-semitic. According to Americans for Justice and Palestine Action, Crockett has not called for a ceasefire in Gaza.…Last year Crockett was asked how she feels about Americans who are tired of sending money to Israel. And here’s what she had to say about that.
Crockett: I understand. I also think that if people are going to vote as it relates to foreign affairs, which typically is not how people vote, when you start talking about foreign affairs, if that is going to be kind of like the precipice for determining whether you vote or who you vote for, then I want people to really dig in to foreign affairs, right?
Like, and ask Crockett on Israel the question, which I think is a fair question. I think it’s a fair question of all the money. If I’m being one thousand about this, when you think about and because of the conversations that I’ve had, if the United States says we will throw away our 75 plus year relationship with Israel because we don’t like their leader, then if we end up with Trump, we set a precedent for all these other allies to throw us away.
It will set a certain precedent for allies potentially leaving us potentially if we were to disagree and just be like we don’t like your leader. It’s all about the relationship between the people and the countries.
Kasparian: That answer was horse crap. Like what was that?
Ryan Grim has a lot to say:
Ryan Grim: Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett is running for Senate in Texas. And if you haven’t followed her closely, you probably assume that she’s running as something sort of like a Bernie Sanders style, like squad type candidate, one of the sort of like the the radical progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
And that’s because she’s very good at getting a lot of media attention and savaging And that’s because she’s very good at getting a lot of media attention and savaging Donald Trump and Republicans. You’ve probably all seen her doing that on MSNBC or CNN at one point or another.
But if you actually look closely at her career, it’s quite wild. She’s actually basically just a corporate Democrat who is just looks and acts a little bit differently. I covered her first race in 2020.
I have an anecdote about that race in my book about the squad in which she’s confronted with the question of what to do about crypto because these crypto guys are going around the country. They were going after anybody that they thought was going to regulate them and they were supporting anybody they thought would be friendly. And, you know, multiple people on her campaign told me that she just said, “Look, what do I have to do? Just tell me.”
And they’re like, “Well, if you sign this policy statement and post it on your website, you know, they won’t go after you and they’ll probably give you a lot of money.”
She’s like, “Cool. do it.”
That same campaign, she also attacked her Democratic opponent for taking corporate PAC money, bragging that she had taken no corporate PAC money.
Within months of that, she started taking corporate PAC money and since then has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars of it.
And of course, if you’re going to capitulate on those issues, you’re also going to cave on Israel. She went to visit Israel on a trip paid for by AIPAC.
There she is. And has overwhelmingly just voted the party line when it comes to sending weapons to Israel. So when it comes to corporate power, crypto, Israel, she’s a very standard Democrat. When it comes to style, not so much. So we’ll see how that goes.
Now let’s get to the angle I chose for the headline.
The GOP Dirty Tricks Campaign to Draft Crockett
As mentioned up top, I picked up on this gambit immediately and posted about it in July. Working in Texas political campaigns and corporate affairs from 1997 to 2005 made me very attuned to this kind of thing because it’s how Karl Rove’s GOP took over the state and then the nation.
But NOTUS.org has a piece headlined “An ‘AstroTurf Recruitment Process’: National Republicans Propped Up Jasmine Crockett to Push Her Into a Senate Run” that really hammers home the case.
Key points:
Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has actively worked behind the scenes to encourage Rep. Jasmine Crockett to jump into the Senate Democratic primary in Texas, believing she will be the easiest opponent to beat.
Just a month ago, there was grave concern among Republicans about the Senate race, where incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is running for reelection. Democrats were running two formidable candidates, and Cornyn was caught in the middle of a bruising three-way primary that Republicans were concerned would weaken the eventual nominee.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) put out a poll in July with Crockett’s name included, which showed her as the leading Democrat in a hypothetical matchup.
“When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” a source familiar with the process told NOTUS.
The fact that Crockett was included in the poll was no accident.
In June news broke that Texas Democrats Colin Allred, James Talarico, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro met to discuss the 2026 election. Operatives at the NRSC realized that Crockett — whose political stock had been rising — wasn’t included in that meeting and also hadn’t been included in any credible poll. So they decided to change that.
Following the NRSC’s polls, other surveys began to include Crockett and showed similar results: She was surging in the primary.
The NRSC then worked to amplify those polls and is taking credit for helping “orchestrate the pile on of these polling numbers to really drive that news cycle and that narrative that Jasmine Crockett was surging in Texas,” the source said.
The NRSC remains a stronghold for Rove-style RINO types and pulling off this caper shows they ain’t dead yet.
There are other reasons to believe John Cornyn still has a chance to come back for another six years of empty-headed impotence in the U.S. Senate.
Horserace BS
I’m not writing for the betting pool/politics-as-sports types, but I will quickly handicap the race for interested readers.
Real Clear Politics has a round up of the polling which shows that the GOP primary is neck-and-neck following incumbent John Cornyn’s months-long negative ad blitz against the flagrantly corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
This is a dramatic change from this summer when Paxton was enjoying double-digit leads over Cornyn. One “biblical ground divorce” and several million dollars in attack ads later, and it’s neck-and-neck. Cornyn has an expanding fundraising and cash-on-hand advantage as well.
The polling shows both Cornyn and Paxton ahead of Crockett or her remaining Democratic opponent State Rep. James Talarico.
Oh yea, Talarico, let’s talk about him.
Joe Rogan’s Favorite Texas Democrat Turns the Other Cheek
Crockett is far and away better known outside of Texas than Talarico, her main remaining primary opponent, per Google trends:
pic.twitter.com/noejwYLscZ
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) December 10, 2025
But as the chart above shows, he’s also capable of generating attention and money.
His campaign launch hauled in a massive $6.2 million in the first few days after his October launch.
For comparison, Crockett had about $4.6 million in the bank before she launched, and we should know soon how much her launch brings in.
Some of Talarico’s mojo is due to his chief advisor, Lis Smith, a D.C. operative best known for making Pete Buttigieg a national figure in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
He also landed a booking on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and performed reasonably well, garnering 1.1M views on YouTube and likely many more on Spotify and Apple.
Talarico’s angle is like a smarmy white preacher version of Crockett. He’s also icky on Gaza (and took quite a bit of money from Miriam Adelson in his last State Rep. race.)
Talarico responded to Crockett’s entry into the race by turning the other cheek a bit:
“I want to welcome Congresswoman Crockett into the Democratic primary race,” said Talarico, 36, who said he is pursuing the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Sen. John Cornyn because “people deserve someone who knows how to fight and knows how to win in Washington.”
Seemingly acknowledging how challenging it will be to defeat a high-profile Democratic star like Crockett, Talarico continued, “We always knew this was going to be hard, and I am so proud of what we’ve built so far.”
The former public school teacher and theologian said, “We’ve shattered grassroots fundraising numbers. We’ve built an infrastructure of 10,000 volunteers, just like all of you who are already putting in the work to win in November.”
However, as intraparty divisions were already being created amid Crockett’s entrance into the U.S. Senate Democratic primary race, Talarico urged his supporters not to attack his new opponent.
“We have always maintained that we are pro our campaign, not anti anyone else’s,” he said. “We will make the case for why we are best positioned to win this race in November and take power back for working people, but we will always treat Congresswoman Crockett with the utmost respect. She is my colleague, and she is a leader in our state. She deserves nothing less.”
So far I’ve got the Maine Senate race pitting outsider Graham Platner or Governor Janet Mills against incumbent GOPer Susan Collins and Katie Porter’s battle with the California Dem establishment ahead of this one on my “must watch” list, but I’m betting Crockett, Paxton and company will give us reason to return to this race before it’s all over.
