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TYLER, Texas — After the two-car caravan carrying Rep. Jasmine Crockett parked outside an east Texas voting site, the crowd of more than 200 people who had gathered to see her couldn’t stop cheering.
Her supporters erupted as she walked to a lectern, then abandoned it, pacing back and forth in a black leather jacket and black jeans. Only a “bold and unapologetic” Democrat like her could win in November, she told the group of mostly Black women — not a Democrat who talked “like a Republican.”
Trump “tried to tell you that the immigrants were going to take y’all’s Black jobs,” she said. “Immigrants don’t take your Black jobs. Let me tell you something: 330,000 Black women have lost their jobs.”
In Crockett’s telling, Kamala Harris — who has endorsed her in Tuesday’s hard-fought primary — told the truth about the “criminal” President Donald Trump, but Democrats still lost because their leaders didn’t excite them, and their party didn’t have their backs. Crockett’s primary rival, state Rep. James Talarico, tells more or less the same story, in a far milder tone.
“I will say what not enough Democrats have been willing to say: Joe Biden failed us,” Talarico said in a Jubilee debate this year, referring to the administration’s border policies.
The Crockett-Talarico race has aggravated the national party from the moment she entered it, for reasons that are somewhat personality-based. There’s a palpable fear that her smashmouth attack style won’t work, and his collaborative politics might, in a red state where a Republican primary pileup has given Democrats a rare opening.
For Texas’ Democratic voters and the online influencers who have engaged on both sides, it’s been thrilling: Two youthful political celebrities, natives in the attention economy, battling with the kind of nimble videos and one-liners that they can share with mom on Facebook and a classmate on TikTok.
Not that Talarico, a progressive seminarian, likes to see the social-media drama that’s arisen as primary day gets closer.
“Twitter is not real life. Threads is not real life,” Talarico told Semafor. “When I’m out in the state, there is not nearly the vitriol in this primary that we’re seeing online from a lot of people who don’t even live in Texas. It feels like, maybe, this primary has become a proxy war for online people to fight about politics and fight about something other than Texas.”
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Talarico was onto something when he mentioned the proxy war; the primary is actively testing why rank-and-file Democrats think they lost the 2024 election. The former pastor has spent years calling for a new political language that can defang what he calls a GOP that’s exploiting cultural divisions to distract voters.
Crockett’s solution is simpler: She wants to take Harris’ approach a step further, summoning similar legal and rhetorical skills to prosecute a case against Republicans while managing to excite the base.
“No offense to the young man, but he is the same white, moderate male candidate that the Democratic Party in Texas has been running for years.” said D. Karen Wilkerson, a 75-year old local party leader in Tyler, who voted early for Crockett.
Wilkerson doubted that Talarico could convert many Republicans: “I don’t think you can teach a pig to sing.”
Talarico’s voters are sure that other Texans will see what they love about him. On Wednesday night, when Talarico campaigned at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, his supporters recalled seeing a video of him denouncing “Christian nationalism” or attacking corporate power, and feeling compelled to pass them on.
“We have a lot of family and friends that believe that to be a Christian, you have to be Republican,” said Veronica Cervantes, 47. Her daughter Lily had discovered Talarico on TikTok and made her a believer. “I look for a candidate that I think follows Jesus’ values, somebody who cares about people, and I see that a lot in this candidate.”
Minutes later, her candidate said he’d learned “when I was little” to “follow the two commandments that Jesus gave us: Love God and love thy neighbor.” Heads nodded when he mentioned his viral “Late Night With Stephen Colbert” interview that the host put online, citing an FCC warning not to air it on television.
Step Back
The social-media clash of identities and loyalties in Texas is especially vivid right now.
Pro-Crockett influencers (she has 2.4 million TikTok followers) portray Talarico as, if not outright racist, disrespectful to Black women, Their smoking gun is a video from an influencer, who the Talarico campaign chose not to work with, claiming that he called failed 2024 Senate nominee Colin Allred a “mediocre black man.”
Talarico disputed that, saying he had called Allred’s campaigning mediocre. Allred, who excoriated Talarico in his own video, told Semafor that he believed in “calling out bad behavior whenever I saw it.”
In an echo of the 2024 campaign, Crockett has touted celebrity endorsements (Cardi B, Kelly Rowland) and inspired a chorus of online supporters who argue, like their candidate, that Talarico is a favorite of elite liberal donors who want to push a white man with a shorter resume over a Black woman with a longer one.
Texas’s wildly divergent polls have found everything from a Talarico surge into first place to a solid Crockett lead. But they have consistently found her dominating with Black voters, and Talarico beating her with white liberals.
Room for Disagreement
While Talarico seeks to distance himself from the primary’s online battle, he’s a formidable competitor in it.
He has built a cheering section with wide access to traditional media and virality on TikTok, where he has 1.7 million followers. It tapped into popular influencers like Carlos Eduardo Espina, who introduced Talarico in Dallas, emphasizing his condemnation of ICE: “Alex Pretti can’t vote. Renee Good can’t vote, because they’re dead. But you can vote.”
Notable
- Elaine Godfrey’s ground-level look at the race for the Atlantic, beginning with her exile from a Crockett rally, gets deeper into the Democratic voter mindset.
- Time magazine’s Nik Popli looked closely at how Talarico and Crockett were working to convert their online followings into votes and good news cycles.
- In the Washington Post, Teo Armus and Liz Goodwin studied how “identity” had become such a flashpoint for Texas Democrats, with an ongoing push from Republicans.