Why I Got Thrown Out of a Jasmine Crockett Rally
Right before armed guards escorted me from the rally and left me on the edge of a Texas-county road, I was informed that I was no longer welcome at an event that I had already attended. For the past hour, I’d watched as Representative Jasmine Crockett riled up her supporters in deep-red Lubbock, where voters were thrilled to receive a visit from the Democratic Senate candidate. But afterward, as I attempted to join the other reporters interviewing the lawmaker, a woman with a badge approached me.
“Are you Elaine?” she asked. I recognized her from the entrance of the event, where I had identified myself as she’d waved me into the building’s press area. Yes, I answered. “Her team has asked you to leave,” she said. When I asked why, the staffer looked at her phone and read dutifully: “They just said, ‘Elaine from Atlantic, white girl with a hat and notepad. She’s interviewing people in the crowd. She’s a top-notch hater and will spin. She needs to leave.’”
I will, of course, own up to being a white woman wearing a Menards baseball cap. But “top-notch hater” is a distinction that I had never considered for myself. Last year, I wrote a profile of Crockett that displeased the congresswoman. I interviewed her several times for the story, but after she learned that I’d called some of her colleagues in Congress without asking her permission, she told me that she was “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.” (In retrospect, I suppose this was a helpful signal that Crockett does not have a firm grasp on the First Amendment, or at least does not particularly care for it.)
As security guards began to materialize around me, I wondered to myself what distinguished a top-notch hater from a middling one. I agreed to leave, and four guards, including at least one who was armed, escorted me out of the building, through the parking lot, and right to the edge of the nearby highway, where they waited as I ordered a car. A spokesperson for the Crockett campaign did not respond to my request for comment on these events or for elaboration on the tiers of haterdom. A spokesperson for her team told Semafor that I had not been removed from the event. Crockett told CBS News there is “no evidence” that a reporter had been removed from an event. She added that there is a “specific journalist” who has a “history of being less than truthful,” and that this person had been sued for defamation and lost. Perhaps she was thinking of someone else, because that’s not something that has ever happened to me.
Perhaps my—very real—ejection shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Crockett is not known for calm restraint. This, in fact, is core to her appeal. For the Democrats who are sick of their leaders wilting before President Trump like cut hydrangeas, Crockett is a refreshing exception. The two-term congresswoman has established herself as the most anti-MAGA candidate in the race and is unafraid to match the president’s vulgarity with insults of her own, such as when she referred to former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body” and called Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, “Governor Hot Wheels.” Crockett’s supporters believe that her pugnacity makes her well suited for this coarse, high-stakes political moment.
Her primary opponent, 36-year-old James Talarico, is responding to this moment very differently. On the campaign trail, the state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian bypasses Trump roasts in favor of quotes from the Gospel of Luke. Like Crockett, Talarico appears to be channeling the anger of millions of Democrats, but the target of his ire is not necessarily the president—it’s the billionaires who, he asserts, are rigging America’s economic system and rending its social fabric.
With five days to go until the primary, the two candidates seem fairly evenly matched in the polls. Since November 2024, Democratic voters have been clamoring for a fighter, but it hasn’t always been clear what they mean by that. On Tuesday, Democrats in Texas will have a chance to decide.
Online, at least, the Texas primary seems to get uglier every week. Last fall, Talarico launched his campaign for Senate against former Representative Colin Allred. But when Crockett entered the race in December, Allred bowed out. Earlier this month, Allred slammed Talarico over allegations that Talarico had referred to him as a “mediocre Black man” in a conversation with an influencer. Talarico denied having said this. On social media, proxies for Crockett attacked him as racist—Crockett personally accused a pro-Talarico super PAC of darkening her skin in an ad—while Talarico’s supporters accused Crockett of weaponizing the situation to smear him. This week, more news: The New Yorker reported that Talarico had ignored requests from other prominent Texas Democrats to run for a different office and that Crockett, after jumping into the race, had asked him to jump out. The anecdotes were used by both candidates’ online proxies as evidence of their opponents’ hubris.
But as I traveled through Lubbock, Dallas, and Tyler this week, not a single person I interviewed mentioned any of this drama. They liked both candidates, they told me. They felt lucky, in fact, to have two great options. Rather than policy, their preferences came down to style—and not much else.
The rally in Lubbock was full to bursting with Crockett superfans. When the 44-year-old congresswoman finally emerged through a set of shimmering silver curtains, the crowd, which for half an hour had been smoldering with anticipation, detonated. People shouted and shrieked and chanted. A few elderly women near me wept while, at the front of the room, Crockett embraced the teenage girl who had invited her to town. Attendees spoke about Crockett with reverence, and used words such as ferocious and direct to describe her.
Most had first encountered the congresswoman on television or social media, where they’d seen clips of her insulting Trump allies or questioning witnesses in committee hearings. “I like how she manhandles Pam Bondi,” Tammy Lowrey, a retired Navy chief petty officer, told me before the event, referring to Crockett’s questioning of the attorney general earlier this month. Crockett, who is an attorney, “brings the Texas,” a woman named Dawn, who declined to share her last name, told me. “We are not weak people. We are strong, and she brings that out of us.” For many people in the crowd—which was almost entirely Black, in a county with a Black population of roughly 8 percent—Crockett is also an inspiration. Mothers and daughters wore matching T-shirts with Crockett’s face emblazoned on them. At least a dozen members of Crockett’s sorority, Delta Sigma Theta, posed for group photos in their crimson-and-cream ensembles.
[Read: What happened to Pam Bondi? ]
Crockett is less interested in persuading Republicans or independents to vote for her than she is in energizing the Democratic base. During the hour that Crockett answered questions onstage, she reminded voters that she already has experience on the national stage. “It can’t just be conjecture. I’ve been out there,” she said, alluding to Talarico’s inexperience on the federal level. She reminded them, too, of her willingness to go toe to toe with the president. “I am that girl!” she said. When Democrats are back in power and “it’s time to prosecute some folk, we’ll be ready!” Around me, audience members nodded in agreement. Two people yelled, “Lock ’em up!”
The vibes were very different the next day in East Texas. Rather than frustration or outrage, the general feeling among Talarico’s fans in Tyler was something closer to desperate optimism. The crowd was younger, mostly white and Latino. Many of them had discovered Talarico, like Crockett, in clips on social media; some hadn’t heard of him until his conversation with The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, who claimed earlier this month that CBS had refused to air the interview at the request of the Federal Communications Commission.
Onstage, Talarico stuck to an earnest, aspirational message about love and economic populism. “It’s not left versus right; it’s top versus bottom,” he said, an oft-repeated line that has helped him earn the endorsement of major progressive groups. Within seven minutes, Talarico was quoting scripture and reminding his audience that human beings are called to care for their neighbors. At the end of his speech, he quoted the late singer-songwriter John Prine: “‘I really love America. I just don’t know how to get there anymore.’” Although parts of Talarico’s speech occasionally verged on corny—“Hate can’t teach a child to read!” he said at one point—people seemed grateful for the change in tone.
Brad Ingram, who wore a cowboy hat and held his fiancée’s pink purse while she posed for a photo with Talarico, told me he’d voted for Trump before but wouldn’t do it again. “Being a fellow Christian, love is central to what we believe,” he said. “Republicans and the MAGA movement have gotten away from that.” A group of nine women in their 40s had come to the rally together; many of their husbands were Trump supporters, they told me, but they themselves wanted a change, and they were hopeful that Talarico might reach some of their family members. One woman told me that her conservative teenage son had recently called Talarico his “GOAT,” short for the “greatest of all time.” Talarico’s “message of hope is appealing to everybody, because everybody’s just tired of the negativity,” Faye Comte, one of the women in the group, told me.
Most of Talarico’s fans liked—or even loved—Jasmine Crockett. But they’d chosen him because they appreciate the way he talks about his faith, and because they believe that he’d have a better chance of appealing to Texans in a general election. Part of that is because of Crockett’s identity; some people I interviewed told me that they weren’t confident that Texans were ready to elect a Black woman to the Senate. But it’s also about Talarico’s appeal to kindness and respect—an easier sell for some of these voters than Crockett’s bombast. Patrick Bonds, an 84-year-old Vietnam veteran, cried as he explained to me that he’d voted Republican all his life but that Trump was “ruining this country.” Bonds is voting for Talarico, he said, because “his thinking is more like me; his behavior is more like me. The way he holds himself is more like me.”
For Talarico, bipartisan appeal is kind of the whole ball game. In his first election to the Texas state House, he flipped a Republican district. Now he’s positioning his Senate campaign as a safe space for independents, moderates, and voters with Trump-shaped regrets. Even his stump speech contains an invitation: “If you have voted for Democrats, but you’re tired of Democratic politicians always folding, you have a place in this campaign,” he told the crowd in Tyler. “And if you voted for Donald Trump, but you are fed up with the extremism and the corruption in our government, you also have a place in this campaign.”
[Read: The White House urges Republicans to ignore Trump’s diversions]
It could help Talarico that the Texas Republican primary is its own elaborate mess. The longtime Republican Senator John Cornyn, who is unpopular with the MAGA crowd, is running against Attorney General Ken Paxton, who carries substantial personal baggage. Paxton was impeached (and acquitted) over allegations of bribery and corruption, including using his position to benefit a donor; charged with felony securities fraud (prosecutors dropped the charges after Paxton agreed to serve 100 hours of community service); and, more recently, accused by his wife of having an affair. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is working to reelect Cornyn, is airing a new ad calling Paxton a “wife-cheater and fraud.”
If Paxton is the Republican nominee, Democrats could have a decent shot at winning a Senate seat in Texas for the first time since 1988. At a polling place in Arlington, a purple suburb west of Dallas, I met several Texans who’d previously voted for Trump but who were casting their primary ballot for Talarico. Two more told me that if Paxton becomes the nominee, they will seriously consider voting for Talarico.
All of this is exactly what Talarico is hoping to hear. When I told him about those interviews in Arlington, he didn’t seem surprised. A lot of voters “are looking for a home in this crazy political environment,” he told me. “I’m over here waving my hand like I’ve done this before. I’ve actually built this coalition. I’ve been able to win difficult races.” Later, I asked him whether he’d ever watched Crockett speak and considered being sharper or louder with his criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement. “In my experience,” he replied, “real strength is sometimes quieter.”
Now for the betting odds. Early voting in Texas has exploded this year, sending strategists and pollsters into overdrive analyzing county-by-county demographic data. More votes have been cast after nine days of early voting than at this point in both the 2024 and 2020 presidential primaries. Still, it’s hard to say what such a surge means for either candidate. It’s possible that Tuesday’s results will be close enough to prompt a runoff election in late May. Some recent polls have Crockett and Talarico neck and neck. Others show significant gaps: A survey published this week had Crockett ahead by 12 points. In response, Talarico’s team released an internal poll showing him up by four.
Crockett has not run a conventional campaign. Instead of traditional rallies, she has opted for small gatherings and quick events. She has an enormous social-media following but a small on-the-ground operation that, some Texas operatives told me, is run almost entirely by Crockett herself. None of this means she can’t—or won’t—win. But it does suggest that if Crockett is the Democratic nominee, she might have trouble scaling up for a statewide campaign. On Talarico’s side, the problem isn’t resources—he has raised and spent much more than Crockett so far. It’s the fact that many Texas voters are still learning his name.
In the end, maybe all of this effort will add up to nothing. Countless Democratic candidates with national buzz have been here before and lost—sometimes spectacularly. But when Texans head to the polls on Tuesday, we will probably learn something about the kind of fighter that Democrats are craving one year into the second Trump presidency: a firebrand famous for being her own kind of “top-notch hater,” or an earnest preacher-in-training focused mostly on the power of love.