Rep. Jasmine Crockett
When U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett jumped into the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Texas, she was the immediate frontrunner.
Widely known and beloved by Democratic voters, Crockett had a record of strong fundraising in the U.S. House and a knack for going viral with her brassy quips aimed at Republican foes. Her lead opponent, state Rep. James Talarico of Austin, was on the rise but lesser known among voters outside of Central Texas. Former congressman and 2024 Senate Democratic nominee Colin Allred was a rerun, who dropped out of the race in the hours before she launched.
Early Wednesday, Crockett lost the nomination to Talarico by a decisive margin — the result of a fiercely competitive primary that overwhelmed the Dallas congresswoman’s starting assets and tested the power of political celebrity among Texas Democrats. Her loss reflected both the strength of Talarico’s campaign and her own team’s inability to scale in time for such an expensive and hotly contested statewide race.
From the start, four people familiar with her campaign said, Crockett’s team deprioritized the primary race, confident that her name recognition and reputation as a fighter in Congress would be impossible for Talarico to catch up with, and would carry her to the general election. So she embarked on a primary battle with a makeshift operation that lacked a campaign manager, a developed fundraising strategy and comprehensive infrastructure for a ground game.
“What happened with Jasmine was that name ID can only take you so far,” said Monique Alcala, the former executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “You actually have to have a real campaign operation, and actually engage in measurable campaign tactics. I don’t think that we ever saw that come together throughout the entire time that she was running.”
Crockett still put up a strong showing at the ballot box, winning over a million votes — 46% of ballots cast — and ginning up enthusiasm among the Democratic base, particularly Black voters.
But she was unable to run up the score where she needed to in Texas’ biggest and most diverse cities. At the same time, Talarico trounced in his political home base in Central Texas, and with voters in heavily Latino counties — a crucial, swingy voting bloc in the general electorate.
Crockett’s relative lack of an apparatus made a difference, especially against a candidate who entered the race three months before she did and built up significant media, fundraising, volunteer and events operations, and whose political persona cultivated its own kind of gravitational pull.
“This was a close race, and so I don’t want to sound like she ran a bad campaign,” Democratic strategist Matt Angle said. “She just ran into a guy who ran a really good campaign. And it’s a really good sign for Democrats that James wasn’t just a personality that caught fire — he had a plan, and he carried it out.”
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Though she barnstormed the state and met voters at the polls during the 11-day early voting period, her campaign up until that point had largely been made up of appearances at churches, local businesses and events hosted by other groups, like unions and Black sororities.
The Crockett team member said the congresswoman wanted to meet Texans where they were outside of political settings, instead of bringing them to her events.
Crockett planned to get around the state more after she secured the nomination and while Republicans were duking it out in a runoff election, said a Democratic strategist who spoke to her directly about the matter.
“To her own admittance, Congresswoman Crockett wanted to launch and run a campaign that was different,” said [Democratic strategist Dallas] Jones, noting her emphasis on in-person politicking at smaller venues like bars and churches over standard campaign rallies and events. “It was a very untraditional campaign in how it was ran and in many ways experimental.”
“If that is the case,” he added, “then we would now say the experiment did not work.”
Crockett’s ground game also paled in comparison to Talarico’s, who has said he saw his bid as the “underdog” campaign.
Crockett largely relied on organizations that endorsed her, such as Jolt Action and Texas Organizing Project, for get-out-the-vote tactics like door-to-door canvassing, in place of a robust in-house operation to turn out her voters.
The Crockett team member said that her campaign invested in Black voter turnout through blockwalking, virtual town halls, robocalls, Black radio stations and efforts on digital platforms to target infrequent Black Democratic voters.
In contrast, Talarico brought tens of thousands of Texans out to rallies and events his campaign put on around the state after he launched his bid in September. His campaign recruited 28,000 volunteers, contacted voters in all 254 counties in Texas and hosted more than 560 voter mobilization in 75 cities throughout the race, according to a Saturday news release. In the four days before election day, his campaign and its volunteers blitzed 40 cities with 130 events.
He also had a clear-cut plan to win Latino voters in particular, running ads and social media content in Spanish, campaigning with Tejano music star Bobby Pulido in South Texas and closing his campaign with an ad featuring Latino influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina.
“He won because he showed up in communities, he ran advertising in those communities, he had an amazing field team,” Rocha said on social media Wednesday. “It’s grassroots organizing combined with paid advertising in digital, TV, radio around sporting events, and a robust Latino advertising campaign.”
Further into the campaign, Crockett suffered from relatively lackluster fundraising. She raised $8.6 million over the course of her bid, more than half of which she transferred from her House committee — a total haul dwarfed by Talarico’s more than $20 million take.
That drove a major spending deficit on advertising. Crockett spent $4.8 million on advertising, which would have been an impressive spend for a Democratic primary candidate in Texas, if not for Talarico.
Starting in January, Talarico’s campaign and his super PAC collectively unleashed $25.9 million on ads through election day, outspending Crockett and her super PAC nearly five-to-one. Talarico and his super PAC together raised more than $27.2 million through the start of the year.
Crockett’s team member recalled wondering how long Talarico could maintain his spending momentum. But as he continued to flood the airwaves, Crockett’s internal polling began to show Talarico narrowing the name recognition gap and winning some of her supporters, particularly white women, to his side.
“The fact that he did stay up at that level every week — you see the buy come in at a million dollars a week — all of a sudden, you’re like, ‘Okay, this is gonna make a big difference,’” the team member said.
Meanwhile, Crockett’s only broadcast spot, the biggest avenue for campaigns to get their message out, came five days into early voting, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. The super PAC in her corner fizzled, dropping just under $600,000 on ads supporting her and opposing Talarico.
Over the course of his campaign, Talarico invested $5.7 million in digital fundraising, hiring Aisle 518, a firm whose clients have included California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, to build out the operation.
There’s more, so read the rest. There was also this Politico story that was more focused on Rep. Crockett and her choices in the campaign, which is fine as far as it goes but is somewhat less interesting to me because any losing campaign can be picked apart afterwards. The main thing I took out of this article was how strong a campaign Talarico apparently ran. He contacted a huge swath of voters everywhere in the state, with an emphasis on reaching out to Latino voters, he raised a ton of money and ran effective ads on TV and online, he worked with firms that have worked with some of the more successful national Democrats around – I mean, what’s not to love? Running in a general election is different, and he will be the focus of a ferocious and well-funded attack network, which he didn’t face in the primary – we’ll see how he responds when one of those attacks slithers over from the wingnut fever swamps to the mainstream press – but if the primary was a test of how he campaigns, he passed with flying colors. I don’t know what more you could have asked of him.
I also think that waiting until the last minute to enter the race also hurt her. There were people who liked her, but had already committed to Talarico. If you’re already donating to and volunteering for someone, you aren’t very likely to switch candidates.
I hope she’s running for something in 2028.
My spouse and I laugh at Lainey Wilson and her contrived accent – sometimes it’s fairly normal and free of southern draw, and other times it’s ramped up to the nth degree. I see Jasmine Crockett in the same light – sometime she sounds like a fairly educated woman, and sometimes it’s ramped up solely to appeal to her core constituency.
Re: “…and a knack for going viral with her brassy quips aimed at Republican foes.”. Brassy quips are all fine and dandy when the camera is on ya, but at the end of the day you gotta be doing more than just playing to a television audience. I just didn’t see her doing that, and that’s why I voted Talarico – I had more faith that he’d actually be able to get something done.