Jasmine Crockett's Quixotic Senate Bid

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX)

While most of this week online, if you've spent any time discussing Senate races, have been spent discussing what's happening in Maine, as Graham Platner takes an early lead in public polling despite a history of racist & homophobic online behavior (and a Nazi tattoo on his chest) which, honestly, is making me question my faith in the Democratic Party in a way I haven't felt in a really long time, Maine is not the only state where it appears that Democrats are self-sabotaging their chances of winning the US Senate next year.  In the state of Texas, it appears that Rep. Jasmine Crockett's flirtations with a bid for the upper house are being treated seriously by the second-term congresswoman, as she looks to be actively considering running for the US Senate seat currently held by John Cornyn.  Crockett's approach and qualifications are much different than Platner's, but the end result is going to be the same-a Republican winning a seat that could be competitive as Democrats desperately try to cobble back the majority they lost last year.

Let's start with the very clear differences between Crockett and Platner.  For starters, particularly on paper, Crockett is much better prepared for this run than Platner.  Platner does not have a long history of public activism (before running for the US Senate against one of the most powerful women in the country, no one had heard of him), but Crockett does.  She's in her second term in the US House, and before that served in the Texas State Legislature, so she has a voting record that Platner lacks.  In order to win that seat in the State House, she had to beat an incumbent (an impressive task no matter the circumstances), and then turned around and won a competitive House primary to get her seat in 2022.  Crockett quickly made a name for herself on Capitol Hill with viral verbal grillings of a number of Republicans (Crockett is a practiced public defender, and it shows given how strong she is on her feet in committee hearings), and for her verbal tiffs with figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene (whom she said had a "beach-blonde, bad-built, butch body" after Greene made offensive attacks on Crockett's appearance).  Crockett was even afforded a speaking slot at the 2024 DNC, unusual for a freshman member of Congress unless they're on the rise.  Given she's only 44, it would make sense to look to her to run in a Senate campaign.

But there's a reason that Crockett is not a good Senate candidate-she is a guaranteed loser in the general election.  Crockett has a history of making controversial comments, using the phrase "shitter" in a committee hearing, and making offensive comments about Gov. Greg Abbott's use of a wheelchair in March of 2025 (which she said was a reference to a movie...but come on now).  Crockett's voting record would make her the most liberal senator in Texas since...ever (she'd be one of the most liberal senators in the country if she won)?  This is a state that Democrats have struggled to get past 45% of the vote even in the best of circumstances in repeatedly over the past 30 years.  Crockett is more often associated with figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than the moderate wing of the party, and would be far too liberal to win in a state as red as Texas.  Crockett has acknowledged this, to her credit, but has also implied she'd have to get new voters, which, I'm sorry-never works (there is pretty much no real world example of taking a state as red as Texas, running a candidate considerably more left-leaning than they normally see, and winning the Senate).  Texas, if/when they elect a Democrat to the Senate, will almost certainly look more like recent moderate figures like Jim Webb, Ken Salazar, & Kyrsten Sinema when they broke the mold to end a long dry spell for the Democrats in winning Senate contests, not someone like Crockett.  The Democrats have those candidates (particularly James Talarico, but also Colin Allred)...Crockett ain't it.

What confuses me here is that Crockett is willing to do this.  In her heart, she has to know that she won't win this race-she's not a dumb woman.  It's possible the fame & power that comes with being a viral sensation has gone to her head (it wouldn't be the first time a smart person did something stupid because the internet thought they should...just look at Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign), but Crockett has a path forward here.  Being in the House is not a dead-end career-it still gives you power and scope that most politicians never achieve in their lifetimes.  Crockett is on the House Judiciary Committee, and is the ranking member on the Oversight Committee.  There's a near-certain possibility that she'll get a subcommittee gavel the next time the Democrats gain the majority, which looks increasingly likely to be next year.  Crockett would have power to put significant pressure on a suddenly accountable Trump administration, and given (even with the Texas redraw) her seat is safe-as-can-be, there's no worry about her losing.  The only path where she stays in politics is clear: run for reelection, and build up power in the House, maybe waiting a decade if she really has designs on the Senate to see if Texas will eventually become purple enough she could run as a liberal (hey, it happened in Colorado, where Ken Salazar at this point would be too moderate to win a Senate primary there).  In the meantime, she can build up a backing & leadership in the House.  If she runs for the Senate, she'll never hold political office again, so the only real answer to why she'd run is to head into lobbying or the cable news game...and she can do that without giving up the Democrats' best chance at a Senate seat in Texas since 2018.  No reason for her to set the entire contest ablaze just for her ego.

It's hard, honestly, to remember the last time a sitting member of the House was so adamant to lose their safe seat that they were willing to enter a Senate contest they had no chance of winning even when the House seat was not at risk at all.  I can think of some recent examples like Heather Wilson in 2008, though that year her House seat was probably also at serious risk even if she'd sought reelection, and (though she's not a member of Congress) Crisanta Duran in 2020, though in that case she was a promising member of the State House that (in a move I'll never understand) decided to seek an uphill battle against an incumbent House representative (Diana DeGette) when there was a wide open path for her to run for the higher office of US Senate that she likely would've won.  But the best corollary for Crockett has to be Denise Majette, which matches this almost exactly (and gives Crockett a look at her likely future).

Majette's similarities to Crockett are noted for where they match and where they don't.  Majette, like Crockett, was a young woman (by political standards) who won her seat by ousting an incumbent (Crockett in the State House, Majette in the US House), defeating incendiary incumbent Cynthia McKinney after the Democrats had attempted to do multiple times before.  McKinney (who deserves her own article on this blog at some point as she's a truly bizarre chapter in US House history that I've only mentioned in passing on TMROJ a couple of times) was to Majette's left, though, and Majette was seen as a more moderate option in the US House.  In 2004, though, Majette inexplicably gave up a safe House seat to run to succeed retiring Sen. Zell Miller.  Unlike Crockett, who has decades of Democratic losses to look to as to why she shouldn't run for the Senate, Majette had evidence that Democrats could win in Georgia (Miller, a Democrat, had won just a few years before), but she was significantly to the left of most of the Democrats who had won Senate seats in Georgia in the previous decades, and she'd just seen Sen. Max Cleland lose in 2002 in the wake of George W. Bush's unpopularity.  She stunned everyone in the political sphere (I remember being SHOCKED when she announced as it came completely out of nowhere), and became the first Black woman to ever be nominated for the US Senate in a southern state by a major party.

And then she lost.  In a landslide.  A foreseeable one, as Georgia had gone deep red in the wake of the second Bush administration, and even Miller would've struggled to win that year.  She would go on to lose a second election two years later in a much bluer year in the state (again, in a landslide), and after that, it was over.  The only headlines she'd make would be a disbarment scandal that would end her legal career a decade later.  Majette was once a clear star in the party, someone who could've kept that seat to this present day (Majette turns 70 this year...there's no reason to assume she wouldn't still be a congresswoman given no Republican has come close to winning her old seat since), and gone on to a gavel or maybe even a House leadership position.  Hell, if she'd played her cards right the eventual blue-shifting lean of Georgia in the late 2010's might've gotten her a spot as the first Black woman to win a Senate seat in the South (a title that is still unfulfilled).  Will Jasmine Crockett suffer the same fate (from the same impatience)?  We're about to find out.