“Don’t get me wrong, I like her, but I just don’t feel she’s electable.”

Even before Jasmine Crockett entered the Democratic U.S. Senate Primary in Texas on December 8th of 2025, there was a cacophony of commentary surrounding her potential electability.  I know if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say they liked her but worried she wouldn’t excite the electorate enough to turn out in 2026, I’d… I’d have had enough money to cover my car repairs a few weeks ago, which isn’t small change.

Some of these individuals were well-meaning voters, who watched as Kamala Harris was defeated on election night over a year ago, but comparing the two women solely for being Black women, does a disservice to both of them and fundamentally misunderstands how challenging the 2024 climate was, overall.

Most of them, however, were saying the quiet part out loud, maybe even with a little projection through talking points aimed at trying to thwart her candidacy in favor of a favorite son from the Texas Legislature who has mastered the art of saying very little by sprinkling in a little Christian speak, so that he can appeal to the other Christian, straight, white men in the state.

For the most part, I can understand this thinking. Ever since a tan and rested JFK strolled across a debate stage with a visibly nervous and sweating Richard Nixon, image has become everything in politics and there are far too many defectors from the Republican Party trying to push their white, male hegemonic leadership to the forefront of the Democratic Party.

The reality is, that many of these people fail to understand how a candidate actually gets elected, and it all comes down to: how you turnout the vote.

This is the biggest debate raging across social media channels, with people who have never worked on a campaign or so much as canvassed pushing James Talarico as the only possible choice, thinking he will appeal to Republican and Independent crossover voters. Make sense, right? How could Jasmine Crockett hope to compete with that rhetoric?

The problem is, that’s not where we’re going to pick up the majority of the votes we need to win Texas. Don’t believe me?  Chris Tackett of See It. Name It. Fight It. did a deep dive on where the votes came from in the State Senate District 9 Special Election at the end of January.  In that post, Tackett talks about while there was a small percentage of Republican and Independent crossover voters, the reality is, more Democratic voters coming out to vote for Taylor Rehmet is what made the key difference, based on the belief they could actually win.

So, doesn’t that prove that James Talarico is the right choice?

Not in the slightest.

When we look at the 2018 campaign and look at where Beto O’Rourke fell short: he didn’t take the time to understand and talk to Black communities in Harris and Dallas Counties and the down ballot helped him enormously with the reach there, especially considering this was the last year you could vote a straight ticket by party in Texas.

Beto ran his race almost exactly like James Talarico plans to run his, only Beto had far more name recognition by this time, had incredible social media reach all across the country, based on the road trip he and Will Hurd took from D.C. back to West Texas, and during the primary, Beto was out front and visible in most counties in this state. He had fundraising capabilities that surpass James Talarico’s, because he was a known quantity at the federal level and with federal donors.

So, what makes Jasmine Crockett better?

This is the question. If James Talarico is the nominee come March 3rd, we’re going to see the same playbook that Texas Democrats have been running for over 30 years. The same appeal to the imaginary wide swath of crossover Republican and Independent voters who have not materialized. This strategy is akin to Lucy holding the football and telling us Texas voters to be Charlie Brown and accept that outside consultants know best about Texas despite not living here or understaning our culture and they won’t pull the football away at the last minute and we’ll be successful this time.

Crockett seeks to change that and upend the routine up ballot down strategy and move the focus to a down ballot up strategy. She seeks to run an organizing campaign, which is how we were getting closer and closer to shifting the power dynamics in Texas in the Obama years, before outside consultants came in and tried to tell organizers how to be organizers, instead of listening to Texas organizers tell them how it’s done here.

Crockett has already committed $600,000 to down ballot candidates in this effort, knowing that if you can get people to the polls for local races like County Judge races, state races like State Reps, and federal races like Congressional Districts, they’re more likely to vote for the Senate race, instead of the lower races struggling to get money and recognition to make sure people go all the way down the ballot. This may be the one area where trickle down economics actually works to achieve the goals economic theory has always said it would.

Crockett seeks to turn out a bigger electorate which is what favours Dems and while she has said she won’t court Trump voters (why would you waste time and money doing so, when you would quite obviously get a 0 return on investment?) she is trying to appeal to the broadest coalition of voters by keeping her Texas values as a Congresswoman, a fighter who you know where she stands.

It’s important to note that the strategy to turn out marginalized registered nonvoters in minority-majority districts is where we’ve seen the victories and bright spots over the years in Texas.  It’s how we finally got Harris County over the hump of being a solid Republican county to a Democratic stronghold and, its how we flipped the TX-7th in 2018. That Congressional District had never been in Democratic hands before LIzzie Fletcher defeated John Culberson and Republicans are still smarting about that loss to this day.

Ignoring the need to focus on organizing and on marginalized voters who have fallen into apathy instead of beginning hard conversations with these voters, necessary to turnout, speaks to a willingness to not understand where it’s possible to win Texas.

More than that, ignoring Black voters in both Harris County and Dallas County, not sitting down to listen to them about their specific issues, not understanding them before meeting them with a group, makes James Talarico, not Jasmine Crockett, the person who has a lower chance of being electable in a state like Texas.

As Trump continues to poison his party and the effect is on full display in this country, running any kind of campaign where you don’t run against Trump at the federal level is a nonstarter. Not willing to answer questions about whether you would be a vote to impeach in the Senate, like James Talarico is refusing to do, is quite honestly a misnomer for the person that would be the highest ranking Democrat in Texas. We know how hard Crockett is going to fight not just for our values, but against a steamrolling force like the Trump administration.

She’s a proven quantity. She has the experience. She has always been electable.

If you want to win Texas, the choice isn’t even a competition: you vote for the person who is going to build up the party around her, build up the state around her, build up the electorate around her.

The only one who is electable in the U.S. Senate Democratic Party is Jasmine Crockett. Any other choice is just unthinkable.