All My Ex–Democratic Saviors Live in Texas
Do Texas Democrats want to win statewide elections? I’m sure they’d prefer it to losing them. But the question is whether they actually care enough about winning to take the necessary steps—or even whether winning elections ranks among their top, say, five priorities.
The state is holding a Senate election in November that is, or could be, a pivot point in the chamber’s control. Yet Texas Democrats have lost every statewide election since 1994.
During the Obama era, Democrats pointed hopefully to the state’s growing Latino population as a source of strength that would propel them inevitably back into majority status. This expectation of an emerging majority may have paradoxically caused the party to avoid making any accommodations to the state’s conservative-leaning electorate—why compromise their values to win when they could just ride the demographic wave?
In recent years, these hopes have faded. Latino voters swung rightward in 2024. They turned out to have more moderate views on issues, especially immigration, than do the progressive activists who influence Democratic positions. But once again, Texas looks winnable. Over the past year, Donald Trump has driven away the voters he gained. Every ingredient is in place for Texas to swing back, and potentially give Democrats a Senate majority, except one: the Texas Democratic Party.
The party’s latest and most egregious circular-firing-squad behavior transpired earlier this week, when the Democrat Colin Allred, who’d previously dropped out of the Senate race, endorsed Jasmine Crockett, one of the two remaining major competitors. He gave his reason for doing so in a video he posted to social media on Monday. “I understand that James Talarico had the temerity and the audacity to say to a Black woman that he had signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, meaning me, not a formidable, intelligent Black woman, meaning Jasmine Crockett.”
Allred didn’t hear Talarico’s statement directly, which is why he had to say “I understand” that Talarico said it. Allred’s apparent source was a TikTok post by the activist and influencer Morgan Thompson, who said that Talarico had uttered the offensive remark in a private conversation.
Talarico denies having said it. “In my praise of Congresswoman Crockett, I described Congressman Allred’s method of campaigning as mediocre—but his life and service are not,” he wrote in a statement. “I would never attack him on the basis of race.”
Talarico would obviously have a motive to deny making an offensive comment in private. Thompson, however, has a motive as a Crockett supporter to paint her opponent in an unflattering light. She also appears to have an expansive definition of what constitutes an offensive statement. In the same TikTok video, Thompson complained that Talarico described Crockett’s political strategy as involving “attack ads.” As she explains, “Using this language when you have the privilege of being a white man, when people across the political spectrum are also using the ‘angry Black woman that’s aggressive’ trope to attack her, is microaggressive.”
Allred did not have to record and share his response to Talarico, nor was he required to take the allegation at face value. He chose the most inflammatory response. “We’re tired of folks using praise for Black women to mask criticism for Black men,” he said, describing Talarico’s comment as “taking off the mask, telling us who you really are and what you really think.”
Everything about this episode reveals levels of pathological incompetence. Crockett and her supporters are prying open fissures that will scar whichever candidate emerges. They are expressing themselves in social-justice jargon that might be effective in a student-council race at Wesleyan but sounds completely alien to most Texans.
More grim than this particular episode for the Democrats’ electoral prospects in Texas is that, over the past decade, candidates have not typically even tried to appeal to a majority of the state’s voters, because the incentives run in the other direction. Candidates can easily mobilize donors and activists across the country if they go viral on social media. Democrats do this not by highlighting local issues, nor by distancing themselves from the unpopular national party, but by inspiring people who either fervently support the party or wish it were even more progressive.
And when these candidates fail to win office, their fealty to party doctrine brings its own rewards. Texas Democrats have routinely raised massive sums, turned themselves into national political celebrities, lost, and then gone on to work in the progressive movement. Wendy Davis is the archetype: She ran for governor in 2014 in a campaign emphasizing abortion rights; she was featured in a New York Times Magazine cover story; and she lost by 20 points. She went on to found a nonprofit and now works as a political-fundraising consultant.
Beto O’Rourke ran a close but losing race for Senate in 2018. Then, two years later, he ran for president, a campaign in which he adopted uncompromising progressive stances such as confiscating assault weapons. In 2022, O’Rourke ran for governor and lost by double digits. He currently heads a nonprofit organization called Powered by People.
Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who served as housing and urban development secretary in the Obama administration, was once considered a promising future Democratic talent in Texas. Instead, he ran for president in 2020, during which he endorsed Medicare for All and a pullback of border enforcement. He is now the CEO of a nonprofit group dedicated to empowering Latinos.
This year, the party has another chance to try something other than nominating a conventional liberal who loses and then gets to run an NGO. The Trump administration has created a national backlash at least as large as the one in 2018, when O’Rourke came within a few points of victory. Latino voters have turned especially hard against the administration’s indiscriminate mass-deportation policy.
The task has a unique urgency. Federal courts represent the last major impediment to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation, and the Senate is the gateway to controlling those courts. Should Republicans hold the upper chamber, they will have two more years to fill the judiciary—including the Supreme Court—with pro-MAGA jurists. Democrats can stop them if they retake the Senate, but this requires winning deep-red states, of which Texas is among the most promising.
At least in theory, anyway. The closest thing Democrats have to a viable nominee looks to be Talarico, a 36-year-old state representative and former minister who rocketed to prominence last summer when he impressed the podcaster Joe Rogan with his invocation of religious themes. On policy, Talarico has positioned himself as a conventional Democrat, and his efforts to expand his appeal beyond the base consist mostly of biography and messaging style.
But Talarico’s half-hearted gestures to winning are about 50 percentage points more heart than his opponent has put into the enterprise. Crockett, a representative from a deep-blue district that includes much of Dallas, has attained fame with snappy put-downs of Republicans, many of which have gone viral on social media. Crockett once described Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as “Governor Hot Wheels”; dismissed complaints about DEI as the laments of “mediocre white boys”; and said Latinos who voted for Trump have “almost like a slave mentality.”
Crockett was lured into the race by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, NOTUS reported in December. The GOP Senate arm conducted a series of polls showing Crockett, who had amassed high name recognition and Democratic enthusiasm, performing strongly in a hypothetical race. Crockett has said the polls, and others that confirmed their findings, helped encourage her to jump into the race, to the delight of Republicans.
Crocket has suggested that she can help drive turnout of infrequent voters. The belief that there is a hidden reservoir of left-wing voters who will bother to show up at the polls only if a sufficiently progressive candidate activates their interest is a decades-old myth. In reality, nonvoters have views that are less ideologically coherent than those of regular voters—which is to say, they think more like swing voters than base voters.
Last month, Crockett told The Washington Post that she doesn’t believe in what she called the “mythical Republican crossover,” and framed her campaign as more of a fun journey than a laser-focused attempt to flip a Senate seat. “My theory of the case is this: If you believe we’re going to lose anyway, then what difference does it make if it’s me or anybody else?” Crockett said. “If you think it’s a losing cause, then who cares? But at least you could say we tried something new and we learned something from this experience.”
Even in a state party that has conditioned itself to the notion that winning an election is less important than the friends and donors you make along the way, that is a shocking confession.
You might suppose that Democrats would recoil from a candidate who broadcasts indifference, at best, to winning over the votes you need to form a majority in a state Trump won by 14 points in 2024. Yet Crockett has continued to attract endorsements, including from Allred, once seen as a relatively moderate candidate, and who ran five points ahead of Kamala Harris in 2024.
Rather than allay the concerns about her electability, Crockett has treated them as illegitimate and even racist. “I really do think that the host said the quiet part out loud, which basically was: If a white man couldn’t do it, then why would a Black woman even have the audacity to think that she could?” Crockett told the Post. “We’ve tried, I don’t know however many white men, and they’ve all lost. The only thing we know for sure is that a white man can lose.”
Crockett’s supporters have made the charge she is floating more explicit. “When they talk about electability, it’s dog whistles, and it’s allusions to speaking about her race, speaking about her being a woman,” Shea Jordan Smith, a Crockett supporter and Democratic political strategist, recently told The New York Times. “They want to call her ghetto and Black and trash so bad, but they don’t say that.”
[Read: A Democrat for the Trump era]
The comedians Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang breezily observed on a podcast last month that donating to Crockett is a waste of money. A procession of comments proceeded to label them racist. One TikTok post called the remark “structurally violent,” because the pair were telling “Black people, or people in general, not to financially support a Black woman who is running for office.” It received more than 250,000 likes. Yang and Rogers issued obsequious apologies, and Rogers promised to “be better.”
But electability is neither a code word for, nor tantamount to, white-male-ness. Female candidates do not generally face an electoral penalty. Black candidates who meet the electorate where it is on messaging and policy can win swing voters. Barack Obama won millions of voters who later flipped to Donald Trump.
One fatal flaw of progressive identity norms, which treat women and people of color as experts on racism and sexism whose charges of bias cannot be refuted, is that they insulate bad arguments from scrutiny. The belief that swing voters in Texas are too racist and sexist to be compromised with implies that defeat is the only morally acceptable option.
Allred seems to have flung his wild charges at Talarico in genuine anger. But you cannot say that Allred acted stupidly. He is running in a contested primary for a House seat in an overwhelmingly Democratic district, so he probably made his political future more rather than less secure. And if he eventually loses his seat—always a risk in a state that Republicans control and gerrymander at will—what more promising candidate could there be to run a shiny new nonprofit organization?