TYLER, Texas — After the two-car caravan carrying Rep. Jasmine Crockett parked outside an east Texas voting site, the crowd of more than 200 people who had gathered to see her couldn’t stop cheering.
Her supporters erupted as she walked to a lectern, then abandoned it, pacing back and forth in a black leather jacket and black jeans. Only a “bold and unapologetic” Democrat like her could win in November, she told the group of mostly Black women — not a Democrat who talked “like a Republican.”
Trump “tried to tell you that the immigrants were going to take y’all’s Black jobs,” she said. “Immigrants don’t take your Black jobs. Let me tell you something: 330,000 Black women have lost their jobs.”
In Crockett’s telling, Kamala Harris — who has endorsed her in Tuesday’s hard-fought primary — told the truth about the “criminal” President Donald Trump, but Democrats still lost because their leaders didn’t excite them, and their party didn’t have their backs. Crockett’s primary rival, state Rep. James Talarico, tells more or less the same story, in a far milder tone.
“I will say what not enough Democrats have been willing to say: Joe Biden failed us,” Talarico said in a Jubilee debate this year, referring to the administration’s border policies.
The Crockett-Talarico race has aggravated the national party from the moment she entered it, for reasons that are somewhat personality-based. There’s a palpable fear that her smashmouth attack style won’t work, and his collaborative politics might, in a red state where a Republican primary pileup has given Democrats a rare opening.
For Texas’ Democratic voters and the online influencers who have engaged on both sides, it’s been thrilling: Two youthful political celebrities, natives in the attention economy, battling with the kind of nimble videos and one-liners that they can share with mom on Facebook and a classmate on TikTok.
Not that Talarico, a progressive seminarian, likes to see the social-media drama that’s arisen as primary day gets closer.
“Twitter is not real life. Threads is not real life,” Talarico told Semafor. “When I’m out in the state, there is not nearly the vitriol in this primary that we’re seeing online from a lot of people who don’t even live in Texas. It feels like, maybe, this primary has become a proxy war for online people to fight about politics and fight about something other than Texas.”
