Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett

Thoughts on Texas and the First Big Primary Night

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Well thank God that is over…

Before I go all in depth about a primary that I’ve been imploring people to ignore for months (I really can’t see a Democrat winning the Texas Senate race unless everything goes right), let’s take a look at the big picture on the night. For the most part, last night’s primaries were largely inconclusive as to whether or not we’re in an anti-establishment, insurgency election year. Talarico appears to have defeated Crockett in a race where both sides claimed to be something different and new. Christian Menefee, a brand new incumbent Congressman, leads long time incumbent Al Green in Texas 18, but who knows how much we should attribute this to any one specific thing (Green is a lightning rod in many ways). Julie Johnson trails in her Dallas area Texas 33 seat, but she trails former Congressman and Senate nominee Colin Allred, and like Texas 18, it’s most likely heading to a runoff. Embattled Texas 28 incumbent Henry Cuellar smacked his opposition by 15% and avoided a runoff. Over in North Carolina 4, Valerie Foushee leads by about a thousand votes as I write this, or just about 1% against Durham County Commissioner and leftist darling, Nida Allam. There was a ton of spending here, and the late money favored Allam. So yes, there were some very competitive primaries tonight, and some incumbents are going to lose, but not all of them, and some of them are essentially losing to other incumbents. Let’s call it basically what it is, an inconclusive round.

The Republicans had a much more insurgent election, which is remarkable after a decade of the most insurgent movement in modern political history. John Cornyn was very nearly the Senate Majority Leader like 15 months ago and today he’s heading towards a runoff against a guy who almost got impeached and sent to jail (Ken Paxton), and may not even ultimately hold much of a lead when the count is done. In Texas 23, Tony Gonzales “survived” the scandal for having an affair with a staffer who lit herself on fire then, but will go to a runoff. Dan Crenshaw got crushed in Texas 2. In North Carolina, the Senate President Phil Berger is apparently losing his primary by 2 votes. Despite the best efforts of nearly every significant Republican in America to bend over backwards for Donald Trump, the GOP’s cultural purge continues. I’m not even sure what the policy beef is at this point, nor do I think it matters. Republican voters don’t like the people doing Trump’s bidding, even as they like Trump and replace them with harder line candidates.

Now with all of that said, we can have dessert. Obviously the most important Senate nomination of the night was Roy Cooper in North Carolina, the best Democratic challenge candidate for Senate in the country this year. Texas had all the passion though. Now look, I don’t see either of them as winning, but it fired people up. There was a perception of Talarico as the progressive left’s candidate and Crockett as the “establishment” left’s candidate. This is kind of news to people actually important in both wings, but we digress. Crockett’s strategy was simply to double down on the last decade of Democratic strategy, leaning into the base vote hard and confronting Trump’s GOP on all fronts, especially culturally. Even so, many establishment folks privately didn’t see how it would work here. Talarico seems to want to be less culturally abrasive and try to persuade more moderate Republicans and Evangelicals with progressive Christianity style. I’ve said for a while I don’t think either will work, and this is a battle over whether it’s better to lose by 7% or 9%. While I generally do side with candidates like Crockett, I think that Talarico’s strategy has a slightly better (think 0% vs. 5%) chance of victory. I don’t think you can “turnout” your way through a rough electorate, in either a red area or bad year, and I definitely don’t think you can do that in Texas where you’re losing as many Latino votes as you’re winning. Talarico essentially won in any part of the state that doesn’t have a sizable Black population, and his campaign’s work on Latino voters clearly did pay off. Ultimately I don’t think the House Oversight Committee is a great place to launch any statewide campaign unless you’re in a very blue or red state, and Crockett was quite good at her job on that committee- which is probably the wrong skillset for a Democrat to win statewide in Texas. Again, I don’t think it will matter, so I stayed out of this fight largely. My guess is the somewhat bitter tone of this primary will make it hard for Talarico to turn out Black voters in November, but I also think he’ll lose for more reasons than that.

In the one set of bad news from the night, super douchebag and former Yankees First Baseman Mark Teixeira won the GOP nomination in Texas 21 and will probably win big now. I wasn’t a fan as a ballplayer and I’m not a fan now.

Jasmine Crockett, Voter Persuasion, and Reality

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

I’m under no illusions- I do not think any Democratic candidate can win the state of Texas for Senator or Governor in 2026, and probably not in 2030 either. Texas is a red state, more red than the nation as a whole, because Texas Republicans have been more competitive with Latino voters than their national party has been overall. Yes, Democrats could very well do better in 2026 because of actions Trump has decided to take, but what does that mean? Kamala Harris lost the state by nearly 14%. Joe Biden lost it by 5.5%. Hillary Clinton lost it by 9%. So I guess we’re just debating how bad the loss will be. Beto got kind of, sort of close in 2018 against Ted Cruz, but still lost by a margin well beyond a recount. I’m giving you the reality up front- Texas is red, and it’s not going to change very soon.

I have no strong opinion about Jasmine Crockett as a candidate. She will raise money and motivate the Democratic base, probably more impressively than her primary opponent, James Talarico. Does it really matter though? One may argue that she’ll maximize turnout and therefore be closer. Another might say a Democrat can’t possibly win Texas without persuading some Republicans, and Talarico may be better to do that. In the end, I think they both lose. You would need to be prime Bill Clinton to even have a chance to do both strategies at once, and even then you probably lose Texas.

So I’m not losing sleep over Jasmine Crockett supposedly saying something about persuading Trump voters. To be clear, she said the following:

Q: How will you win over Trump supporters? Crockett: “I don’t know that we’ll necessarily convert all of Trump’s supporters. That’s not our goal.” Q: “Do you need to?” Crockett: “No, we don’t. We don’t need to.”

Let’s start by saying she’s factually correct. You don’t need to convince all of the other side in almost any election. Most Republicans are going to vote Republican. She doesn’t need them all. All true. Now, she was asked how she is going to win them over though, and she did dodge that question. She also doesn’t really need an answer in December of 2025. The election is 11 months away. She may be running against a very corrupt Ken Paxton. She also may not. There’s a lot of variables here.

The problem with Crockett’s answer is that largely after 2012 the Democratic position became to not do persuasion, and to instead focus on base turnout. That worked fine for President Obama, but he still did persuasion. The electorate has grown considerably since 2012, and the truth is that the lowest propensity voters don’t vote Democratic anymore, or at least it’s a lot more murky than it used to be (Biden’s super high 2020 number confuses things, but he was a persuader). Trump’s share of the vote grew with each election he ran. I think what a lot of people want to hear is that a candidate is thinking about why the Clinton or Harris campaigns didn’t work, and is going to try something different, and well, she didn’t say that. “Demographics are destiny” was an entirely failed approach, and we have to get back in the game of winning the hearts and minds of the impressionable voters out there. Ignoring them is a losing strategy.

Voter persuasion is expensive and hard. Yes, racial and gender bias can make the road even harder. It’s not impossible to do, it just probably requires a lot of luck in this case that is probably not going to happen. Math is math. For a state like Texas to flip, there has to be some societal level movement against the Republican Party, and I know you want to believe that’s going to happen, but it’s probably not. America is simply not offended enough by him to become a clearly center-left to liberal nation like it was before the 1960’s. They simply don’t like Democrats enough, when push comes to shove in an actual election. Some argue we need to move left, or pick more white guy candidates to fix that, but those things are not going to work. Republicans hate white Democrats plenty, and you’ll lose some of your base chasing them.

Look, what I’m saying is that people are going to get up in their feels about this primary. They shouldn’t. If Democrats have a chance at Texas, they’re probably already spending heavily in Ohio and Iowa, maybe even Florida, and just won’t have the resources to go into Texas. If we win this race, it won’t be because of which candidate wins the primary. At that point, it’s an act of God.