📢 TOP STORY: As Jasmine Crockett confronts Ken Paxton head-on, Texans watch a rivalry unfold that reveals deeper truths about the state’s political future ⚡.NH

What is a member of Congress for? Within living memory, they were kind of important. These days they pass a couple of bills maybe once or twice a decade and, apart from that, everyone is sitting around trying to fill the days, like a bunch of seniors who have grown tired of their bocce ball court. They won’t even meet for weeks or months while the emperor handles everything. It’s starting to feel a bit Roman up there.

This reality slowly sinks in when new members arrive, and plenty of them soon retire. Not worth it. Morgan Luttrell fought hard to win his seat, and he’s coming home voluntarily after two terms. Troy Nehls is coming home after three terms, Jodey Arrington after five. And those guys are Republicans, who are currently in the House majority, which is when you’re supposed to be having “fun.”

Democrat Jasmine Crockett, who announced her run for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate yesterday, made a name for herself by doing one of the only things a new member of Congress can do to get attention: making viral videos of her fights with members of the other party. She’s hardly alone. People in both parties do this, and they regularly ride it to higher office. California Democrats Adam Schiff and Katie Porter both premised their runs for Senate on their viral moments from Trump’s first term. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene were among the most famous Republicans in Biden’s term, even though they accomplished nothing at all.

Crockett is capable of engaging in long, substantive discussions in the new-media outlets Democrats have been fixated on since the 2024 election loss, where she has been able to effectively explain goings-on in Congress. But it’s her jousts with other powerless members of Congress that have won her spots on late-night shows, a worldwide fan base, and a position of prominence in the national party. She was invited on Stephen Colbert’s now-cancelled Late Show to discuss her “epic clapback” to Greene, which consisted of Crockett describing Greene as a “bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body” at a committee hearing. 

On Colbert’s show, Crockett said she shares other people’s bafflement about how the incentives in politics work now. “When you sign up for public service, you expect that you’re going to go in and hopefully effectuate the policies” that will help people, she said. “And then you end up in random fights with random people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And you’re thinking, am I back in high school or elementary?”

This stuff doesn’t materially benefit anyone, and in a way, it reflects Congress’s actual powerlessness and pointlessness. But it’s a mistake to dismiss it. At the end of the day, what voters seem to want from their elected officials is those “epic clapbacks” and the catharsis they provide—a reflection of the fact that no one hates the American people as much as other American people. And Crockett is really good at it. This is an important part of how political communication works now, as cringeworthy as it often is.

It is partially on this basis that Crockett is running for Senate. She was running for the upper chamber, she announced with admirable frankness, because there she would be able to deliver even greater moments of catharsis on a bigger stage. “There are a lot of people that said, ‘You’ve got to stay in the House. We need your voice. We need you there,’” she said at a campaign launch event. “But what we need is for me to have a bigger voice.”

Democrats who were personally begging Crockett to stay in the House likely had an ulterior motive: In private, and a little in public, Texas Democrats are fearful of Crockett’s Senate bid, which they think could wreck the party’s chance, even if it’s a small one, to win the Senate this year. Their sense is that Crockett’s celebrity with the Democratic base gives her a leg up in the primary against her opponent James Talarico, even though Crockett may be a weaker candidate in the general election. (Colin Allred, previously Talarico’s only real opponent, dropped out of the race in anticipation of the Crockett news.) 

This directly parallels the situation in the GOP, where the strategists want John Cornyn to win the primary, but the base is more likely to select Ken Paxton or Wesley Hunt. It levels the playing field. As soon as Crockett launched her campaign, national Republicans came out of the woodwork to gloat that their campaign to goad Crockett into running had been successful. GOP consultants ran push polls to exaggerate her support and encouraged Democratic voters to call her and endorse her candidacy, while Republican elected officials like Greg Abbott trash-talked her, trying to push her into the race.

Democrats—and Republican interlopers—are probably right that Crockett is a meaningfully weaker candidate, although we should say that Talarico has not exactly established himself as a powerhouse candidate. The UT Texas Politics Project has polling out on both of them. So far, very few people have a sense of who Talarico is. Crockett is better known but more polarizing, and nearly a quarter of independent voters already have a “very unfavorable” opinion of her. Head-to-head polling should be taken with a pile of salt at this point in the year, but an October poll by the University of Houston actually had Crockett doing slightly better against possible Republican nominee Ken Paxton than Talarico—although both lost, by two and three points respectively.

And Talarico, it should be said, is a social media candidate too. Faced with the same issue Crockett has in Congress—there’s not much to do as a Democrat in the Texas House—Talarico has tried to hone his skills communicating to the people directly. He just has a much different approach. He carefully maintains an attitude of moral seriousness and tries to lawyer his opponents on their hypocrisy rather than calling them out directly.

That said, there’s a good reason to think Crockett really is the weaker candidate, and one reason for Democrats to be worried about her campaign so far is how she has communicated its mission. Facing the question of how she’s going to win over what has been a pretty red state, Crockett fell back on the old Texas Dem dream. “So they tell us that Texas is red, they are lying,” Crockett said. (Who is “they?”) “We’re not. The reality is that most Texans don’t get out to vote. The reality is that the people that I used to work with in the Texas House did everything that they could to make sure that they could suppress voices.”

Many Democrats have said this over the years. But it just isn’t true, and to the extent Crockett believes it—if she believes that she can turn out a bunch of new, dispirited liberals with her fighting spirit—it will lead her astray. Democrats can find new voters from among the disaffected, but so can Republicans, and the available evidence from recent years is that turnout is not the thing holding the party back. Neither is voter suppression. It should be easy to vote, and the Legislature is often wrong in trying to change that, but it is still easier to vote in Texas in some significant ways than in blue states.

The closest Democrats have come to winning a Senate race in Texas was Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate bid, when he held Senator Ted Cruz to within 2.6 points. This was an astonishing new benchmark for Democratic performance. And the 2026 election will likely have many features in common with the 2018 race—it’s Donald Trump’s midterm, and he’s more unpopular than before. The Republican candidate may be Ken Paxton, who is even more of a flawed candidate than Cruz was.

Because some time has passed, it has become common to see observers conflate the O’Rourke of 2018 with his flop 2020 presidential race, when he swung to the left on many issues. Was he a fighting liberal in the vein of Crockett? It’s true that he was outspoken and willing to stake a strong position on cultural issues like Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling in 2018. But the brilliance of the O’Rourke campaign that year, which proved many of his doubters wrong, is that he found a way to be perceived as both authentic and passionate to liberals, and a man of integrity and practicality to moderates. He went out of his way to campaign in red areas and talk to conservatives across the state. He was a more complicated and adept candidate than you might remember if your lasting image of the man is the Vanity Fair cover.

That didn’t get him over the top, but it got him close. And the way he got close was by convincing some 400,000 Texans who voted for Greg Abbott to vote for him also. The idea that Democrats need to court Abbott voters and Trump voters, and not nonvoters, is a hard pill to swallow, so many prefer not to believe it. But if that is the way to win in 2026, it is a reasonable belief that Talarico would be more likely to do it than the woman who has called the wheelchair-bound Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels.”

On the other hand, perhaps the more likely path to a Democratic victory in 2026 is a big ol’ deus ex machina. Maybe a terrible recession is coming, and Trump’s approval rating is 20 percent on election day; maybe Ken Paxton wins the Republican primary and is caught in bed with both a dead girl and a live boy. In that event, it would hardly matter what nominee Dems put up.

And perhaps we’re heading for the election that Texas deserves, in which both parties—in a race which may determine Senate control for the entire country at a moment when Congressional oversight is absolutely essential—nominate the less-electable candidate and subject the fate of the nation to a coin toss. It will be entertaining, at least.