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Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett, best known for snappy clapbacks and one-liners that go viral on social media, is running for a long-shot Senate seat in Texas. She will face Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a populist pastor-in-training running on a campaign of unity, decency, and battling billionaires; Colin Allred, also a member of Congress who had been running for the Senate seat, just announced he’s stepping back from the race.
Crockett is one of the Democratic Party’s most vocally anti-Trump leaders, a woman known for taking the president on and often trouncing him on social media by saying what so many of us are thinking and wish we could put into words so concisely. Talarico, by contrast, is a devout Christian with politically progressive views and an affect that seems to have been calibrated by both Texan genteelness and the Ivy League—the human embodiment of what critics might call “respectability politics.” He’s social media–savvy, too, and his team loves to post a good trouncing, like the time he challenged a Republican legislator on her support of a bill to put the Ten Commandments in public schools by noting they were working on the weekend, including the Sabbath, and asking, “You’re saying that you’d rather tell people to follow the Ten Commandments than follow it yourself?” Talarico’s gotcha moments often feel like they could have been scripted by Aaron Sorkin, usually making him look intelligent in contrast to a foolish opponent. (Allegra Hobbs of Texas Monthly noted in a recent profile that he is particularly adept at using social media to show off “what is arguably one of his greatest skills: making his opponents look stupid.”) Crockett’s viral moments, on the other hand, are more off-the-cuff and akin to a perfect Twitter dunk or reality TV insult: brief, often personal, and just straight-up humiliation of her target. (Sometimes this goes very poorly, such as when she called Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, “Governor Hot Wheels”; after blowback, she said it was a reference to his policy of busing migrants to blue cities.)
This all makes this primary about competing visions of the Democratic Party’s future: Does the party need to learn from the media-savvy Trump and focus its efforts on competing for ears and eyeballs, even though this particular attention economy often means bulldozing over any nuance, lobbing creative insults, and firing up the base in the hopes of breaking through on social media? Or should the party counter Trump by behaving as his opposite, calling for unity and winning by being the smartest guy in the room? Is this the time for the party to go back to the kind of more polite politics last seen on The West Wing, only with more of a Bernie-populist flavor? Or do we need a fighter who will get down low in the muck and respond to MAGA ugliness in kind?
Crockett is a controversial figure, to put it mildly. Her first big viral moment was when she held up a photo of the box of classified documents notoriously found in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and said, “These are our national secrets—looks like in the shitter to me!” When Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene mocked Crockett’s false eyelashes, Crockett snapped back that Greene had a “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.” Her “B6” insult became a fan-favorite slogan (and her campaign later filed a trademark application for the phrase). She has a robust social media following, and I’ve certainly cheered over her viral videos. Donald Trump has repeatedly insulted her, including calling her “low-IQ,” and his abuses simply seem to bounce off of her. It’s satisfying to see a Democrat fight back and win.
But I’ve also been unnerved by Crockett’s style, similar as it is to that of the MAGA politicians who have badly degraded our politics and who seem addicted to both social media and the creation of spectacle: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance, and of course Trump himself. Elected officials cursing each other out in dueling viral videos is not exactly the post-Trump liberal dream, even if a coarsened society nursed on reality TV and now gorging on outrage-bait TikTok videos is one where Crockett’s theatrics read as increasingly “normal” rather than gauche.
Complicating matters are the gender and racial elements at play. Democrats spanning the political spectrum have increasingly embraced crudeness, so long as it’s leveraged as evidence of a white man’s working-class bona fides—and drawing the line at a Black woman’s affect seems blinkered at best, obviously racist at worst. Before his rightward turn, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was applauded by progressives for his working-class-coded vulgarities and his penchant for hoodies and basketball shorts. Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has stayed in the race and continues to enjoy progressive support despite the surfacing of bigoted Reddit posts and a tattoo with Nazi implications. The writer Branko Marcetic argued in the leftist magazine Jacobin that in fact Platner’s posts were in line with his progressive working-class persona, “a rough-around-the-edges military veteran and oyster farmer with a penchant for crude language and a passion for firearms and sustainable living who holds a variety of standard progressive views alongside some heterodox ones.” Gov. Gavin Newsom, to his credit, doesn’t try to fake being working class, but he has also embraced Trumpian tactics that even a few years ago would have read as unprofessional and embarrassing. And he’s seen overwhelming support for his shift toward the uncouth.
Whatever one’s opinion of Crockett, “inauthentic” she is not. It certainly grates to see so many white men being given the benefit of the doubt and applauded for adopting a “rough-around-the-edges” persona, while a Black woman who adopts a similar tactic, just in her own style, is dismissed by the self-serious political class. And many of the criticisms of Crockett have more than a whiff of racism, classism, and sexism to them as they deride her eyelashes, nails, hair, makeup, and speech patterns. Laura Loomer characteristically channeled the MAGA movement’s racist id when she called Crockett a “ghetto Black bitch who hates America.” Liberals are not tossing around these slurs—but some of the criticisms feel like they’re poking at the same conclusion.
Yet it’s also true that racism and sexism are not the only factors at play here. Crockett really does seem to lack substance in her approach. Her first video after announcing her campaign was simply of Trump insulting her—nothing about how she would govern, or her case for representing Texas. The message was, essentially, “Trump hates me and I hate him.” Her view that potential Democratic voters in Texas need to be given a reason to turn out to the polls is correct, but the idea that Texan moderates and conservatives don’t need to be persuaded, just outvoted, is concerning in equal measure. And neither Crockett nor Talarico offer much in the way of an agenda on their campaign websites. He emphasizes that we should be waging a war of bottom versus the top rather than fighting with each other; she notes that Texas is “heading in the wrong direction” and that she’s a fighter for the middle class who won’t be “a rubber stamp or party line vote for Donald Trump.”
However it shakes out, the Texas Democratic primary will tell us a lot about what Democratic voters want from their party as it sheds its gerontocratic baggage and emerges as younger, and, hopefully, more representative and more broadly appealing. This primary is pitting at least two millennial candidates against each other—Crockett is 44 and Talarico 36—but they are both stylistically, substantively, and strategically very different. When Elaine Godfrey of the Atlantic asked Crockett what Democrats should stand for beyond being the anti-Trump party, Crockett responded, “For me, I always just say ‘the people’ ”—not exactly an answer. And she also argues that the path to Democratic victory is primarily focusing on some of those people: a silent majority of could-be-Democrats who she believes she can get to turn out by making her anti-Trump case to them via social media. “When they tell you that Texas is red, they’re lying,” Crockett said as she announced her campaign. But one only has to Google the last time Texas voted to send a Democratic senator to Washington (1988) to wonder if this theory of Texas as a secret blue state is more wishful thinking than sound strategy.
If Crockett is encouraging inactive Democratic voters to turn out against Trump, Talarico is identifying a different villain: The uberwealthy, against whom he wants to rally Republicans and Democrats alike. He is fond of saying, in speeches and on his website, that “the biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom.” He’s still a Texas Democrat, which means his politics are miles away from the far-left sort that might stand a chance in San Francisco or New York City, but he has nevertheless staked out courageous ground in a conservative state. “His voting record placed him near the middle of the ideological spectrum of his caucus,” Texas Monthly’s Hobbs writes, “but by Texas House standards his politics were downright radical.” A devout Christian who encourages unity, love, and the separation of church and state (and the separation of billionaires from their money), Talarico is the kind of red-state religious liberal populist who tends to get the Democratic pundit class salivating. He has a master’s degree from Harvard, and it’s unclear whether that hurts or helps in today’s Democratic Party; Crockett has a law degree from the University of Houston. He did Teach for America after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, educating children in some of Texas’ poorest districts; she was a public defender standing up for the foundational American right to representation, and later took on pro bono cases for Black Lives Matter protesters. Both, in other words, are young and ambitious and have had careers in public service, but Talarico goes for a Pete Buttigieg–esque “nice Harvard boy smiles winningly as he buries you in a debate.” Crockett buries you with a one-liner (and then her army of online supporters drag your corpse across social media).
Talarico is running on the slogan “It’s time to start flipping tables,” a Biblical reference to Jesus knocking over the merchants’ stands as he drove them out of the Temple in Jerusalem, taking it from “robbers” and returning it to the religious. But it’s hard to imagine Talarico, a high school debater who Hobbs of Texas Monthly aptly described as a “strange, wise boy with the gentle cadence of a preacher,” ever going full Teresa Giudice. Crockett, on the other hand, could give our reality-TV president a run for his ratings.
The question is whether table-flipping, insult-lobbing, and attention-grabbing is what voters crave and what might actually beat MAGA at its own game—or if, after a decade of Trumpism, we just want the show to be over.
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