Did Jasmine Crockett Take Republicans’ Bait?
Tuesday, Melissa and I did a Spectacle Podcast segment talking about Jasmine Crockett jumping into the 2026 Texas Senate race this week, which is probably the best electoral news for the Republican Party we’ve had for a while. You can check that out here:
The Spectacle Podcast: Three Cheers for Jasmine Crockett! Texas Celebrates! with hosts @MelissaTweets and @RVIVRdotcom
Available on @rumblevideo and all podcast platforms. pic.twitter.com/4JlEKDfrrY
— The American Spectator (@amspectator) December 10, 2025
Crockett getting in will make for an absolutely magnificent spectacle. There is no one more aggressively obnoxious, ferociously entitled, or maliciously ignorant on the national political stage at present; she is the politician more Americans love to hate than perhaps any other. That Crockett is as fake as a $3 bill in her ghetto-queen act — she went to just about the most expensive private school St. Louis has to offer, but when she speaks to the folks in the slums of the South Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas she represents, you’d never know it — makes her an even more inviting target.
And Crockett’s launch ad will only invite even further negative criticism:
This is a perfect ad if you’re trying to galvanize support from a niche group. It isn’t an ad you want to run if you’re trying to get over 50 percent in a statewide general election.
I said in the podcast that if you’re a Republican voter in Texas, Crockett getting in and becoming the favorite on the Democrat side — after Beto O’Rourke, Joaquin Castro, and Collin Allred all passed on the race — does one specific thing for you: It gives you the freedom to vote for whoever you want in the GOP primary.
Against Allred or O’Rourke, who both raised a mind-blowing amount of money and ran reasonably good campaigns against Ted Cruz in previous Senate races (neither won, but neither lost in a landslide), an argument could be made that electability was a real issue Republican primary voters would have to keep in mind. That argument was the one incumbent John Cornyn was prepared to make.
But if RedState’s Teri Christoph is correct, Cornyn’s friends at the National Republican Senatorial Committee might have inadvertently destroyed that argument by having been too successful in baiting the race just right:
Apparently, the people least surprised by Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett (TX-30) jumping into the Texas Senate race this week are Republicans, and specifically the folks at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). And that’s because they may have secretly led a campaign to convince Crockett to throw her hat into the ring.
If true, it’s some seriously tasty and astro-turf-y political intrigue.
According to a source close to the apparent under-the-radar campaign to get Crockett to run, the NRSC decided earlier this year that the congresswoman would be the easiest Democrat to beat and began floating her name. This decision came after a summer meeting at which Texas Democrats Colin Allred, James Talarico, Beto O’Rourke, and Joaquin Castro met to discuss who was the best candidate to take on Republican incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who is seeking a fifth term. (Cornyn has his own primary worries to consider, but we’ll get to that in a minute.)
The NRSC allegedly decided to follow up that Democrat confab by putting out a poll that showed Crockett leading the field.
Crockett leads a hypothetical primary field with 35% of likely Democratic voters, followed by former Democratic Texas Rep. Colin Allred at 20%, former Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro tied at 13%. Just 18% of voters said they were undecided about their preferred nominee to challenge Republican Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who is seeking his fifth Senate term.
Other surveys done by the NRSC showed Crockett as the runaway favorite to nab the nomination, so they reportedly took that information and ran with it. “When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,'” a source close to the process revealed. They then decided to “orchestrate the pile on of these polling numbers to really drive that news cycle and that narrative that Jasmine Crockett was surging in Texas.”
The electability argument is the one the Cornyn camp has started to use against Texas’ controversial but extremely effective attorney general, Ken Paxton, who leads the polling on the GOP side. Paxton is an unapologetic conservative with a messy personal life; conservatives in the Lone Star State generally excuse his foibles because Paxton is willing to do the dirty work others won’t — whether filing the Texas v. Pennsylvania case over the 2020 election irregularities, fighting abortion and transgenderism, hammering the Biden administration over its tyrannical censorship efforts, slapping down local governments for trying to lock down cities and counties with COVID restrictions, fighting voter fraud, and going after Antifa following an attempted assassination of ICE officers.
Making him precisely the right candidate for the Senate from Texas.
But a viable Democrat, given the backing of the legacy corporate media, would make Paxton a heavier lift than the milquetoast Cornyn or the relatively non-controversial Wesley Hurd, the black conservative Houston-area congressman who is also in the Senate race. Hurd has also climbed over Cornyn and now sits second in the GOP primary race, according to a new poll by John McLaughlin that has Paxton at 33 percent, Hurd at 28, and Cornyn at 27.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if Paxton’s support grows. He’s less of a risk against Jasmine Crockett — because no matter how divisive or aggressive Paxton might get, he’ll never hold a candle to the obnoxious craziness and idiocy flowing out of Crockett like a machine gun over the next several months.
It’s hard to image the NRSC has grown competent enough to fix a race on the Democrat side. Maybe they’re just lucky. But however the result was achieved, saddling the Democrats with Jasmine Crockett would go down as one of the signature feats of starting fires in the enemy’s camp that the Republicans have pulled off over the past 100 years.
It isn’t a done deal that Crockett will be the Democrats’ candidate. A state representative from Houston whose name is James Talarico is also in the race; Talarico has raised more than $6 million so far, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. But Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and middle school teacher before he got into politics, doesn’t carry the kind of oomph among national Democrats that Crockett does. He has all the bona fides — the fake progressive Christian veneer while pushing the cultural Marxist abortion/LGBTQ/climate change agenda, but effeminate white guys like Talarico who swear they aren’t gay are far too low on the intersectional totem pole to mobilize a Democrat electorate.
No, it’ll be Crockett on March 3, barring something unforeseen. And if the NRSC could bait her into the race, it’s a pretty good bet they can get her the nomination. Especially since the national Democrats can’t get enough of her.
But Texans absolutely can.
And that’s good news for Republican voters. Particularly if they’re for Paxton.
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