Since Barack Obama’s first victory in 2008, Democrats have long been obsessed with the idea of turning Texas blue. And in this year’s midterms, they could finally get a chance to elect the first Democratic senator in the Lone Star State since 1993.
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The Republican incumbent, Senator John Cornyn, is being challenged at the primary by two strong candidates. Meanwhile the Democrats have two big stars: the incendiary congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and the pastor and state representative James Talarico.
John Cornyn, the present senator
AP/ERIC GAY
Crockett, 44, is a left-wing firebrand who was endorsed by the former vice-president Kamala Harris on Friday and has drawn the spotlight for her sharp attacks on Republicans. She has made it clear she will lead the Trump resistance. Her campaign strategy is identity-based, biography-based and “anti-Trump”, which has been the Democratic playbook since 2016.
Talarico, on the other hand, is a candidate with an actual vision. He rails against billionaires, admits the failures of both parties and uses his background as a Christian pastor as a basis for his views on hot-button topics such as immigration. He wants a closed border, while at the same time he advocates for a system of compassion.
He has real policies, whereas Crockett is leaning on the same old script. Crockett has even suggested that Talarico is racist, while Talarico has refused to cave to the wars of identity politics.
Crockett’s campaign leans heavily on identity politics
AP/LM OTERO
This month, Talarico went viral after claiming CBS censored his appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In the first six weeks of 2026 he has raised $7.4 million, bringing his total war chest to more than $20 million.
But despite all that, Talarico won’t win the primary. Crockett has the better name recognition and she is leading in the polls. And that is bad news for Democrats.
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If the party really wants to turn Texas blue, they need candidates with wider appeal like Talarico who can bring in independents and, yes, even Trump voters, while also energising the base. Crockett is a “base-energiser” candidate. Only the Talaricos — candidates who can deliver both persuasion and turnout — have a chance of beating Republicans in the general.
Crockett doesn’t believe this. Like many Democrats, she thinks “demographics are destiny” — that black and Latino voters will automatically vote blue if only they can be reached.
James Talarico
ALBERTO SILVA FERNANDEZ/GETTY IMAGES
She laid out her strategy on MSNBC with Chris Hayes. “We don’t need Trump voters,” she said. “We need to talk to the people who are with us but don’t normally vote.”
“They tell us that Texas is red; they are lying,” Crockett added. “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.”
But when you dig into the data, her theory doesn’t hold up. In October, Deciding to Win, a group of Democratic insiders and pollsters, released a memo that showed Democrat voters who turn out less often actually lean more conservative than those who always vote.
The data found that a Democrat who didn’t vote in the 2024 election was 12 per cent more likely to believe the US should “deploy the military to help with border security” versus a Democrat who voted for Kamala Harris. They are also 14 per cent more likely to define sex as binary and 13 per cent more likely to think a person should require an ID to vote than the average Harris voter.
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And while Crockett may not believe she needs Trump voters to win, experience from other red states the Democrats have flipped proves she is wrong. Take Georgia, where Democrats such as Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their US Senate races: in both cases there was a concerted effort to reach across the political aisle, particularly to Republican women. But Crockett is indignant about having to do this in her campaign.
She has even gone so far as to claim that Hispanic voters who supported Trump have a “slave mentality”. And she has said she is tired of “white tears” and “mediocre white boys” — all signs that she is disinterested in bringing former Trump voters into her fold.
Crockett on the campaign trail earlier this month
AP/LM OTERO
Ignoring these voters is a huge mistake. Trump won Texas by 56.2 per cent — the largest margin for a president in 20 years — and exit polls in 2024 showed that the majority of Latinos in Texas (55 per cent) voted for him. And with public opinion shifting on ICE and the optics surrounding immigration raids, there is an opportunity to pick off some of these voters — especially Texan Latinos who care deeply about this issue.
In order to do that, Democrats still need to moderate their stance on cultural issues, such as being soft on crime and against single-sex spaces for women, as Latino men especially trend rightward on these topics.
Based on my ten years as a political strategist, I believe Jasmine Crockett will reign victorious in Tuesday’s election. And if she does, the Democrats will have squandered their opportunity to flip Texas — going back to their failed blueprint that has damned them in the Trump era.
Evan Barker is a former Democratic campaign operative who worked as a Democratic consultant on a US Senate race against John Cornyn in Texas in 2020. She is the author of the upcoming book Nothing Left: Confessions of A Democratic Operative, available now for pre-order. Follow her Substack and on X @Evanwch