Jasmine Crockett scrambles Democrats as she weighs a last-minute Texas Senate run

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

(CNN) — Jasmine Crockett has two cashier’s checks made out to use on Monday: one to submit if she files for reelection for her US House seat, the other to jump into the already competitive Texas Democratic primary for US Senate.

Her down-to-the-wire indecision, she knows, is driving even her staff crazy. She’s invited hundreds of people to an announcement event Monday that’s scheduled 90 minutes before she needs to submit one of the checks.

Asked when she’ll decide, Crockett told CNN in an extensive interview on Friday between working the phones and meeting with supporters back home, “Hopefully, it will be early that day.”

“I just thank God to be in a privileged position to the extent that I have choices,” Crockett said.

For the last week, Crockett was making phone calls that left people on the other end thinking she sounds not just like a Senate candidate, but one very much trying to arrange the pieces around her, according to several people familiar with the conversations.

She asked Colin Allred, her former House colleague making a second Senate run after losing in 2024, to drop out and run for governor instead as part of a slate that would also have Rep. Joaquin Castro run for state attorney general. She’s frequently cited a poll, including to James Talarico, the state representative who entered the Senate race in September, that shows her in strong shape, though people familiar with that poll say its conclusions are drawn from a sample of just 600 people.

Crockett and Rep. Marc Veasey, a fellow Dallas Democrat dealing with the gerrymandered breakup of his current seat, have already discussed sequencing on Monday for him to file in her district shortly after she submits her Senate paperwork.

And she’s talked with Stacey Abrams, the two-time failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate, about expanding the electorate in a longtime red state that turned purple.

Crockett, a 44-year-old former state representative and civil rights lawyer, has become one of the most talked about Democrats in the country through her viral takedowns of Republicans, a Black woman who’s always ready to rip President Donald Trump and fire back when he questions her intelligence.

The fighter persona that’s appealed to so many disillusioned Democrats now has many of them, and Crockett herself, thinking that it’s exactly what the Senate race needs. But for all those who believe Crockett brings the fundraising ability and energy needed to seriously contend in a long-shot race, there are those who fear she is setting up the latest example of classic Texas Democratic self-immolation.

If she runs statewide, Crockett will almost certainly energize Republicans who will be reminded of her blunders, like calling Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, “Gov. Hot Wheels” or accusing several GOP figures of taking campaign contributions from what turned out to be a Jeffrey Epstein but not the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

A wave of Republican voters turning out against her could take down not just Democrats running for US House seats in newly redrawn districts but also state legislative candidates trying to stop a future gerrymander.

To some Democrats, this seems like a classic case of the party seeing a potential Republican disaster it could take advantage of, then laying the groundwork for the Democrats’ own disaster. Democrats haven’t won statewide in Texas since 1994, a three-decade streak including failures by Beto O’Rourke and Wendy Davis, who both became national causes and lost anyway.

This time, Republicans have a vicious primary featuring four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, state Attorney General Ken Paxton and US Rep. Wesley Hunt, who are spending millions ripping one another apart and are likely to emerge from the March 3 primary having to go to a top-two runoff election in May.

If Paxton eventually wins, as many observers expect, Democrats will have an opposition researcher’s dream of material against the controversial attorney general: now-closed federal and state investigations, a Republican-led impeachment attempt, and a messy public divorce.

“You’ve got two highly intelligent, very articulate, very prominent persons running in a race that we never thought we had a chance to win but now we do,” one senior Texas Democrat told CNN. “She jumps in, and the question is why?”

Crockett makes her case

Over a 45-minute conversation on Friday, Crockett expressed annoyance at accusations that she’s just barreling into the race.

“I’m not crazy. It’s weird that people believe that I could win the races that I won and I’m just like out here willy-nilly. But OK. I am very self-aware, right? Even when I go in to help candidates in other states, I ask them, have you polled for me?” she said.

Crockett knows about the opposition research already circulating on her, with past quotes labeled “divisive comments that call into question her electability in a statewide race in Texas.” She argues her profile and politics might be the way to actually put the seat, and with it the Republican Senate majority, in play by turning out voters particularly in Black and Latino communities who’d otherwise stay home.

“I agree that we don’t need a messy primary. … If it’s three people, I think that we probably all would agree with that sentiment,” she said. “It would be because different people in their minds have different ways about how and why they would be successful.”

Crockett points out she’s one of the best fundraisers in the US House and inspires more energy from the base than Allred or Talarico. Some Democrats want her to turn on that spigot to lift House candidates across the country rather than for a Senate run that would need everything to go right to have a chance of winning.

Crockett said she’s not putting too much stock into the polls she’s seen. She’s trying to figure out whether she would be starting from a workable position given how much she’s embraced being a partisan lightning rod, whether in committee fights with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene or in frequent cable appearances.

“We also had to test for the fact that I not only have high name ID, but the reason that my name ID is high, right? Calling Marjorie ‘Bleach Blonde’ may work nationally,” Crockett said. “Who knows how that plays in Texas, right?”

An October poll had Crockett leading a hypothetical four-way primary with her, Allred, Talarico and O’Rourke, who was considering a run but has since passed. Crockett led that field with 31%, followed by O’Rourke and Talarico each at 25% and Allred at 13%. The poll was taken by the University of Houston and Texas Southern University.

“There’s a real shot she wins the primary,” said another Texas Democratic official who asked not to be named to provide a candid assessment of the race. “But I think she’s our least competitive general election candidate.”

Others disagree.

“If she’s going to get in, that’s because Colin and Talarico haven’t sucked up all the oxygen, and her polling is showing that there’s a whole lot of people out there — not the insiders, but Democratic voters — who would be with her,” Carroll Robinson, a former Houston city councilman and chair of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats, told CNN. Robinson has not spoken to Crockett about running but says her personality has breakthrough potential.

“Jasmine’s going to make the Texas Senate race the hottest show on Broadway,” he said.

A private meeting failed to yield a ticket

This kind of pileup is exactly what prominent Democrats were trying to avoid when a group of them — Allred, Talarico, Castro and O’Rourke — quietly huddled earlier this year.

In 2018, when O’Rourke came up less than 3 points short of beating Sen. Ted Cruz, he was the only competitive statewide Democrat. That meant Abbott and other Republicans could use their campaign funds to boost Cruz.

According to two people familiar with the meeting, O’Rourke wanted to run for Senate again, and Talarico told people for years he wanted to run for governor. So O’Rourke wanted Allred to run for attorney general and Castro for lieutenant governor.

“What if we had a ticket of well-known, well-funded people?” a third person familiar with the meeting recalled to CNN.

But Abbott had more than $80 million raised already to seek his fourth term. Allred felt that his 2024 Senate run was an argument for a second chance. O’Rourke wasn’t interested in another gubernatorial run himself after losing to Abbott in 2022.

Allred and Talarico went on to enter the Senate race. O’Rourke thought about running for Senate anyway but has decided to focus on his group, which is trying to recruit Democratic candidates into races across the state and build up grassroots support. Castro, who’s been gaining seniority in the House and could get a committee chairmanship if Democrats win back a majority, opted to stay focused on Washington.

“Ideally, if you were gonna design the strongest possible chances of winning, you would design it so that you have strong candidates that are well-funded in each of those races,” Castro said at the Texas Tribune Festival last month. “That was my hope, that we would have a full slate, and we didn’t quite get there.”

After months of trying to get someone to run against Abbott, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, who had been looking at running for state comptroller, decided to jump in herself.

Crockett hadn’t been invited. “In a million years, I would have never imagined that this would have even been a thought. I think I would’ve been included had I expressed an interest,” she told CNN. While the group briefly talked about reaching out to her about running for attorney general, that was news to her.

But now that Crockett is imagining the thought of running, thoughts of a slate are on her mind too. While declining comment on any of her private calls, she told CNN that not having one “does make it a lot more difficult. We need the resources. The state is big. Getting around this state is difficult. And then I just don’t think that you can rely on one person to have enough cross-appeal to everybody.”

An Allred spokesman told CNN he “already endorsed Gina Hinojosa — he’s not running for governor.” A Talarico spokesman said he’s “100% in the race for Senate” and pointed to a surge in fundraising, volunteer recruitment and poll numbers.

Crockett has talked to leaders in her Dallas-area district and weighed what it would mean if she lost a Senate race and, as she told CNN, “the possibility of my voice being absent during the second half of a Trump presidency.” But she also believes running statewide could boost Texas Democrats both next year and in 2028.

The more she feels attacked by the left or the right, in the deluge of texts and social media posts, she says, the more it pushes her to run.

“That is how I work. It may not be the normal way that people work. Like maybe normal people are like, ‘Oh, I’m being attacked, so maybe I don’t do this, maybe I run away,’” Crockett said, “But I’m like, ‘I eat attacks for breakfast.’”

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