I wish we were a real party, with real primaries, said the Texas Democrat. And lo, the monkey’s paw curled. On Monday—approximately 48 hours after the state Senate District 9 election results put the party in its best mood in years—the simmering conflict between state Representative James Talarico and Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, which has been building since late last month, escalated in an explosive way. Early voting starts February 17 for the March 3 primary, when Democratic voters will try to select who they think is the best candidate to run in what is perhaps the party’s best chance to win a U.S. Senate seat since the 1990s, especially if Republicans nominate frequent philanderer and sometime attorney general Ken Paxton.

Monday’s escalation came when a TikTok influencer charged that Talarico privately described former Congressman Colin Allred, who dropped out of the race, as a “mediocre Black man.” Allred cut a video condemning Talarico and endorsing Crockett. Talarico, in a statement, said he had used the word “mediocre” to refer to Allred’s method of campaigning, not Allred as a person. A fact-checker has no way of evaluating the claim, because no proof exists in either direction. But the fight seemed to be spreading out of control, drawing in national Democratic commentators who are desperate to find some path to win control of the U.S. Senate in 2026. Partisans online then started arguing about whether Allred’s campaign really had been mediocre. Democrats, as always, have an almost superhuman ability to plunge themselves into despair.

Some of the grievances voiced are legitimate, and some darts have been thrown by Republicans—we’ll cover those too—but the mudslinging of the past week has mostly been Democrat-on-Democrat, with Talarico supporters mostly on the defense and Crockett supporters mostly on the attack. It has also largely been a proxy war, waged in part by an army of influencers, many of whom don’t even live in Texas. And many of them don’t care or don’t know about the specific political context they’re making claims about.

This puts us miscellaneous uncs in the Legacy Media, whose job it is to produce context for those still able to read, in a strange position. Normally, we would try to litigate between the claims of the campaigns. But there are few such claims. And some of the claims made by influencers, like the one involving Allred, are uncheckable. But others are, and the context of those claims says a lot about what is actually going on in the race.

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Republicans Accuse Talarico of Falsely Taking Credit for a Bill to Reduce Insulin Prices

This one precedes the Democratic infighting, but it’s helpful in analyzing the race. On January 23, Talarico dropped a new ad. In it, he recounts his experience being diagnosed with diabetes and learning how much it would cost him. He walks toward the camera and boasts that after he was elected, “I took on Big Pharma and capped insulin at $25 a month.” In response, Republican state Senator Lois Kolkhorst tried to “set the record straight” on social media. In a broadside reposted by many Texas Republicans, Kolkhorst wrote that the 2021 bill capping insulin prices was primarily hers, and that the effort was a “Republican-led policy change.” She names a different Democrat, then–state Representative Eddie Lucio III, as her “House sponsor,” her partner in passing the bill in the other chamber. But a quick look at the record shows that she had two House sponsors, and one of them was Talarico. 

What Kolkhorst knows but is leaving out is that in the Lege, it’s common for popular Democrat-led policy initiatives to be appropriated by Republicans who want to deny Democrats credit. In this case, one of the earliest insulin-cost-control bills to be filed in the 2021 legislative session was House Bill 82, all the way back on November 9, 2020. Its authors: Talarico and Lucio III. Early in the session, discussions began with Republicans in the Senate about how to get the bill passed. The Talarico campaign provided The Texas Tribune with a record of communications between him and Kolkhorst on February 5, 2021, about the insulin bill. “I can’t wait to work with you on this insulin issue,” Talarico texts Kolkhorst. “So happy to work with you,” Kolkhorst replies.

On February 25, 2021, Talarico’s bill was referred to a House committee, where it would die. The next day, Kolkhorst filed a Senate companion to the bill—essentially an identical copy. This bill would go on to pass both the House and the Senate. The House sponsors were Talarico and Lucio III, which indicates that they remained intimately involved in the bill.

We’re going into the weeds here because the Kolkhorst-Talarico exchange is an important indicator of what’s actually going on in this race. Perhaps most important, Republicans are playing preemptive defense against Talarico in a way they are not against Crockett. For years, Texas Republicans hit Crockett for her wayward public statements, like that Hispanic Trump supporters possessed a “slave mentality.” Then they gloated about goading her into this race, at which point they got quieter about her. They’re not likely to start dumping out the oppo file again unless she wins.

National discussion of the race has emphasized not-very-useful distinctions between the candidates that fit into preexisting national discourses. Is one a progressive and the other a centrist? Is the important thing about the race that one candidate is Black and one is white? Is this a battle between “popularism” and “identity politics”? None of these distinctions are quite right. The actually important one is that one candidate is a member of Congress—a dead institution in which there’s little to do but fight and farm clips for social media—and the other is a state legislator who, while also doing his fair share of clip farming, works in a functioning legislative body in which compromise is sometimes necessary. Both are playing to the incentives around them.

The Battle Begins

A warning flag went up last week: The D.C.-insider publication Punchbowl News published a story about a Zoom call held by the Crockett campaign on January 22 in which upcoming media strategy was discussed. A Crockett supporter named Jason Lee warned that there were some “troubling” lines of attack possible against Talarico, and that Crockett would make “contrast information” available. Voters had heard some “negative things” about Crockett, he said, but they still liked her. “The other candidate needs to go through the same vetting.”

This was not particularly ambiguous, but in case you’re unsure: This is how campaign guys talk when they’re about to throw a brick through someone’s windshield. (Throwing bricks, of course, is an entirely fair and accepted campaign tactic.) Talarico released a statement on Crockett’s “leaked negative attack plans,” saying that he planned to defend his record.

Attack ads from Crockett’s camp haven’t materialized, though an anti-Crockett attack ad has since been released by a pro-Talarico super PAC (more on that later). “Leaked negative attack plans” was an essentially fair description of the material in the story. But the responses of some folks to Talarico’s statement were, in hindsight, a sign that things were about to get ugly. “I’ve tried to do everything to bite my tongue, but to prompt an accusation against a black woman based off of gossip and rumors is to promote the stereotype that Black people are ‘aggressive’, and that we are not,” posted state Representative Christian Manuel, who had endorsed Talarico at an early stage of the primary, before Crockett jumped in.

This was an early example of a pattern that is familiar to anyone who follows intra-Dem disputes. Supporters on both sides were speaking different languages, not understanding one another, and then accusing one another of not listening in hurtful ways. They zeroed in on the most obnoxious member of the other team, pretended that person spoke for the candidate, and then dug in deeper and harder. There were examples of this on both sides, but what happened next was mostly a one-way street.

Enter the Influencers

On January 24, two days after the call described in the Punchbowl story, someone registered a website called TalaricoFacts.com. The website contains no information about who put it up. If a campaign had done it, it would have been legally required to add a disclaimer. The site features virtual note cards with “facts about James Talarico,” really talking points and suggested language to use to post about them. It could as easily come from Republicans as from Crockett’s supporters, but most folks using the website and mirroring the language on the note cards are pro-Crockett, with some of them linking to the site directly. To put a point on it, the website looks like the kind of tool you would use to coordinate decentralized attacks from influencers.

The talking points on the anonymous website got a strenuous workout in the following weeks—mostly, it seems, from out-of-state influencers in places like California, New York, New Jersey, and D.C., who used increasingly heated language. “I told myself I wouldn’t talk negatively about any of the Democrats in the Texas Senate primary, but you know what, f— it,” says creator 2RawTooReal, before going in for the kill. Someone from Sacramento, California, posted a video that argued that recent events proved Democrats had a “wyt male problem.” They argued that the supposition Talarico was more electable than Crockett was a racist dog-whistle, and it activated some of their worst suspicions about the Democratic party. A common refrain, which seemed to originate in the suggested language on TalaricoFacts, was that Talarico was a John Fetterman, which is to say, a conservative in progressive clothing. (Of course, Fetterman, if he were elected in Texas, would be the most liberal senator to be elected here since Ralph Yarborough in 1964.)

Underneath this, there had to be some fact-checkable complaints. Here are a few, with necessary context added.

Claim: Talarico Missed Eight Hundred Votes in the Texas Legislature . . .

Perhaps the most impactful talking point—it ended up in a TV interview—to come from TalaricoFacts.com is the allegation that Talarico missed 842 total votes in the Texas Legislature over his four terms in office. He showed “a pattern of abandonment,” the website says. This sounds like a lot if you don’t hang out around the Legislature, and congratulations to you if you don’t. But in the Texas House, where dozens or even hundreds of votes may occur in a single day, it could mean a relatively small handful of sick days.

But that isn’t the full story either. The list of missed votes on the website is either deliberately sloppy or was made by someone with no familiarity with the Legislature. Strangely, it includes times when Talarico “flashed white,” or voted “present, not voting.” Despite the name, these are votes and indicate Talarico was present. The list also counts times when Talarico was absent but formally excused because he was attending to committee business. These should not be on there either—they mean he was in a different part of the building on official business. There are only 131 votes for which Talarico was marked absent and that absence was considered “unexcused” by the House, along with 542 votes for which an absence was considered excused.

The great majority of the absences come from a handful of days in April and May 2025. Talarico has almost perfect attendance records in prior sessions. For a lawmaker who has served seven years, this is not particularly notable. Some other folks hardly show up for weeks at a time.

. . . Then Lied About It on TV

The list of missed votes, though, circulated enough that Talarico was asked about it when he went on ABC’s The View this week. He responded that he missed votes because he broke quorum and went to Illinois last summer. Legeheads dinged him for this, appropriately so. Legislative business doesn’t happen when there isn’t a quorum: There wasn’t anything to miss. Most of the missed votes came during the regular session.

This was a misrepresentation. But, confusingly, the TalaricoFacts website offers a mitigating factor: A few of the “missed votes” it lists were attempted motions made while the Democrats, including Talarico, were out of town. Which effectively means that Talarico is being punished in the metrics for not showing up to facilitate Abbott’s gerrymandering push. (After publication, a spokesperson for the Talarico campaign said Talarico had mistakenly thought The View host was asking about his absences during the quorum break).

Claim: Talarico Shilled for a GOP Group

“In 2020, Talarico spoke at a Koch-funded think tank behind Project 2025, school vouchers, and climate denial. Talarico then said, ‘I’ll work with *anyone* and *everyone*,’ ” said Christopher Bouzy, the New Jersey guy with some 300,000 followers. This is based on one of the cards on TalaricoFacts.

Bouzy was referring to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank Texas Democrats don’t like but frequently engage with, just as Texas Republicans engage with the TPPF’s liberal counterpart, Every Texan. The TPPF stakes out many positions that are anathema to liberals and some, particularly on criminal justice matters, that liberals love. Talarico’s actual quote on social media was, “I told them I’ll work with *anyone* and *everyone* to strengthen public education.” No one who is familiar with the Legislature could be scandalized by this.

Claim: Talarico Cut a Deal for a “Safe” District After Returning From the Quorum Break in 2021

“In 2021,” Bouzy posted, “when Republicans made James Talarico’s district competitive, he ditched his constituents for a safer Black and brown majority seat. Even worse, he helped shove aside the Black candidate who was exploring a run.” This is another TalaricoFact.

This claim appeared from others with slight variations—sometimes alongside the claim that Talarico came back early from the 2021 quorum break to cut a deal for himself and “the district.” Talarico did return early after being a vocal proponent of the break—and has been criticized by his Democratic colleagues for doing so—but the rest isn’t right. Republicans didn’t make Talarico’s district competitive, nor did they move to protect him—they redrew the state House map to put him in a Republican district, effectively unseating him.

It’s true that a Black city council member was considering running for the seat, but TalaricoFacts paints the situation inaccurately. It says Talarico robbed “a Black candidate” with “Black institutional support” of his rightful place in a “majority-minority district.” Talarico’s new district is a racially diverse part of northeast Austin and its suburbs, but it’s more accurately described as a white and Hispanic district than a Black and brown one: It’s 43 percent Hispanic, 32 percent Anglo, 15 percent Black, and 11 percent Asian. And Talarico was elected with the support of the biggest names in Texas Democratic politics, including Beto O’Rourke, Wendy Davis, and Joaquin Castro.

To be fair, there are folks within Texas advocating against Talarico online. (And, of course, a lot of annoying pro-Talarico commentators are out of state as well.) But there’s a familiar pattern here of misrepresenting and speaking without offering context. 

Claim: Talarico Voted for a Republican House Speaker

On a political news show in Austin, state Representative Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, who ran for Speaker of the Texas House last year, was asked if Crockett supporters would back Talarico as a nominee. Yes, she said, but then got off a shot: “Crockett has always stuck with the Democrats. And unfortunately, we don’t need another John Fetterman in Congress,” she said. “A year ago today, when there was one Democrat running for Speaker of the House, he stuck with the Republicans, with a Trump-endorsed Republican candidate.” That’s another TalaricoFact, though it was more impactful to have it come from a Texan.

This is another case in which Crockett surrogates seem to be relying on Democratic-primary voters not knowing much about the Legislature, and it’s missing enough context to be misleading. For almost two decades, Democrats in the Texas House have tended to vote for whoever they believe to be the best Republican Speaker candidate. In 2021, when Crockett served one term in the House, she voted for Republican Speaker candidate Dade Phelan.

Ramos ran a protest Speaker campaign last year that had no hope whatsoever of beating either Republican Speaker candidate. Then, after she failed in the first round, she also voted for a Republican, David Cook, who was in most significant respects more ideologically right-wing than Dustin Burrows, Talarico’s pick.

Claim: Talarico Took Money From Miriam Adelson, Right-Wing Las Vegas Megadonor

This is a TalaricoFact as well, although it’s been circulating more widely and for longer than just the last week. Politico reported it back in August. Here’s how the left-wing Jacobin magazine put it: “It was the Texas Sands PAC, which is working hard to expand legal gambling in Texas, that gave Talarico $59,000 from February through December of 2024. That made the PAC Talarico’s largest financial supporter during his time in the legislature last year.”

This is unequivocally true. Adelson’s Texas Sands PAC has poured millions of dollars into Texas to legalize gambling, and Democrats have received a portion of that money. Democratic state lawmakers and their leadership have at times tried to get an even bigger portion of it. In Texas, gambling is an issue that divides both parties. But the fact that it’s pretty common doesn’t obviate the fact that it’s a little strange to see a Presbyterian seminarian endorse casino and sports betting, with all that entails. 

As the news outlet NOTUS reported in January, Crockett has also accepted donations from donors who are similarly anathema in a Democratic primary, including Marc Andreessen and the Winklevoss brothers. But Talarico has made a name for himself condemning billionaire influence in politics and vowing to combat it.

And Finally: “Mediocre”-Gate

The Allred allegation that took this conflict to a new level of national attention can’t really be evaluated factually, because it stems from the word of a single influencer. She and Talarico have different impressions of the conversation they had, and there’s no recording. But the preceding week of guerrilla warfare provides necessary context to assess the strange way it blew up.

Allred weighed in without being able to know whether the accusation was true or not, in a way that suggests his video is about other pent-up resentments—perhaps the way he has been discounted by other Texas Democrats, or perhaps the way party insiders are more commonly backing Julie Johnson, the incumbent, over Allred in the new district where he’s running for Congress.

It can be tempting to think of Republican and Democratic partisans as being mirror images of one another, but they have meaningfully different psychologies. The Republican primary generally operates on the model of a wolf pack. Candidates try to establish dominance, and then, once a hierarchy has been definitively established, the betas typically fall into line, even if five minutes earlier they were calling their opponents gay pedophile communists. A candidate might sic his followers on the wife and father of his rival—as Trump did in 2016, inflicting deep personal anguish—and that rival (in this case, Ted Cruz) will, after some punishment, bare his neck and assume the submissive position.

Democratic primaries more often resemble the social battles of middle school—needling, insinuating, and petty. Democrats often prefer to demonstrate meekness and goodness of heart rather than strength or dominance. So they accuse one another of false goodness, impurity of motives, and being wicked inside. Their attacks are anguish-inducing and personal, and their tactics leave more lasting damage than the way Republicans fight. 

And the bitter, personal, unresolvable allegations here have provided a reason to commence more open and official hostilities. On Thursday, a pro-Talarico super PAC—unaffiliated with his campaign but acting on his behalf—launched an ad portraying Crockett as Republicans’ preference. “They spent money to lift her up and push her into this race,” the ad says over scare music. (This is true.)

In a statement, Crockett seemed to say she was taking this as a declaration of war. “The Congresswoman has been attacked relentlessly, even prior to entering this race, from within her own party as well as by the Republicans,” the statement read. “The system has been fighting back.” Her campaign argued that Talarico was also backed by Republicans—pointing to the Miriam Adelson money—and ended with a warning that Crockett is “Texas Tough which means she can take a hit and will punch back, when needed.”

We’ll see how much of this has sunk in with Texas voters—and what kind of damage it’s done—in just a few weeks. Meanwhile, 2RawTooReal has taken off the gloves. “He will literally stab you in the front, the back, and the f—ing side,” he says of Talarico in a new video. “He promised that he would not try to divide the party.” 

Can you imagine that—someone trying to divide the party? Democrats, baby: God love ’em.

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