Jasmine Crockett Wants Old Guard Democrats to Make Way for Young “Freedom Fighters”

Jasmine Crockett has been in Congress for less than two years, but she’s already made quite an impression. She went viral last fall for her memorably frank assessment of Donald Trump’s alleged storage of classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom: “These are our national secrets—looks like in the shitter to me.” Her clashes with Marjorie Taylor Greene—someone with a “bleach-blond, bad-built butch body,” in her phrasing—and other Republicans have made her a favorite of Democrats eager for a more combative approach to the MAGA movement. And an emotional speech at the Democratic National Convention in August cemented her as a rising star in the party.

I was eager to get her thoughts on what went wrong for the Democrats, who are reckoning with their loss in last month’s election—and when I got her on the phone this week, the Texas Democrat didn’t hold back.

Over the course of nearly an hour, Crockett offered effusive praise for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. But she also spoke candidly about her frustrations with Democrats’ “branding” failures, party “institutionalists,” and Black and Hispanic Trump voters—the latter of whom she suggested have a “slave mentality” when it comes to immigration politics. “The immigration thing has always been something that has perplexed me about this community,” the Texas representative told me.

In a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length, Crockett opened up about the 2024 election, how she’ll fight Trump, and why she is planning to start a podcast. “Democrats got to get out of their heads, and they have to understand that we are a product,” she said. “I think that it’s important that people understand that we are the party of equity and the party of freedom.”

Vanity Fair: I was just rewatching your speech at the Democratic National Convention, and it reminded me of the momentum that the campaign seemed to have, especially over the summer. It was clear the election was always going to be close, as you pointed out in that speech, but there really did seem to be so much energy around Vice President Harris. How do you think of that time now—that 107-day campaign—knowing how it all ended up?

Jasmine Crockett: I knew it was going to be close. I thought that we could pull it out. But I also understood that it wasn’t really going to be that much about policy. There were definitely speeches that delved more into policy than I did. I knew that it would kind of be a “vibes” election. I knew that this would come down to who people felt like they liked and trusted.

I don’t think there was anything more that the vice president could have done. I think that she ran a flawless campaign—from the amount of money that she raised, to the platforms that she was willing to go to and communicate [on], to the rollout of her policies. I think that there was nothing more that she could have done in this 107-day sprint that had never been done before, in so many ways—from a Democratic nominee stepping aside, another one being put in, to also being the first woman of color to actually do it. I think that she did everything right. I think that she was the perfect candidate. And I think that the people that were looking for perfection got exactly what they were looking for.

The problem is that that’s not necessarily what it takes to win, because we know that the most flawed candidate in the history of this country won the election, right? And so I think that this came down to communication, and I think the vice president would have had a better chance had our communication been consistent. We Democrats are very good at running the candidates with the best résumé, and I don’t think that we should shy away from that. I think that we should always have the best-qualified candidates. I don’t think that we should start getting behind 34-count convicted felons and uplifting them and pretending as if they are the best thing.

You don’t?

No, I absolutely don’t think that we should do that. But at the same time, I think that we have to stop kind of holding ourselves to what sometimes can be an impossible standard. And that’s what we saw with President Biden, right? You know, I’m like—I kept fighting and saying, Why are y’all tearing President Biden down? Like, do you guys realize that [Republicans are] standing with their man? And y’all were like, Get rid of Biden because he had a bad debate. Well, when Trump had a bad debate, they never acknowledged it. He just said, I’m not doing it no more, because I ain’t getting my ass kicked again. I mean, there is something to be said for just requiring this level of perfection out of nonperfect people, and I think Democrats really need to take a good look at themselves on that issue.

You mentioned that Vice President Harris was running a historic candidacy. She would have been the first woman elected president. She would have been the first woman of color. This was an intensely racist and sexist election cycle, whether it’s the lies Trump told about Haitian migrants in Springfield or questioning Kamala Harris’s race and ethnicity. None of this was surprising, because we know who Trump is. But we did also see Trump do better, somehow, with Black voters and Hispanic voters than he has before. I wonder if you could just expand a little bit on what your sense is of how race and gender figured into this election, because it obviously was an animating factor, but maybe in a more complicated way.

It’s interesting because I stood solidly by President Biden as my caucus was standing apart, and I remember getting a text message from a donor who I would consider to be a friend. It was actually the day that he pulled out. It was that Sunday, and she’s like, Hey, you know, I’m talking to some other folk—presumably another group of donors—and we all believe that you are a strong voice within the [Congressional Black Caucus] and that you should talk to the CBC about: Can Biden get out? The only group that did not falter is probably the group that most anticipated would desert him first, especially if it meant that one of our own—and I say “one of our own” because Harris was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus as a senator—could potentially be poised as the next [candidate], right? But it was just the opposite. We stood strong by the president.

I will tell you that Black people historically have been fiercely loyal. That’s why you still see the [turnout] numbers that you see coming out for Black folks, even though there was a bit of flaking. And that bit of flaking came from Black men, which I’m going to chalk up to misogyny. But the two groups that are most loyal and stand most solidly are Black folk in general, and we saw this again out of Black women. And so I said to my friend, Let me tell you something. I said, President Biden has a record to run on, so therefore, number one, we need to run with that record, and we need to ride it out, because he deserves the second term. He will go down in history as one of the best presidents in this country. It is only fair. That’s what I said.

But the second point is this. I said, I don’t trust white women. I said, I’m just telling you, and I think you need to have conversations with your sisters, because they are the group that failed Hillary Clinton. I mean, when you go back and look at the numbers, white women were the ones that failed her. And so in my mind, if they failed Hillary, I don’t know that I can believe that they won’t fail Kamala. This is what I told her. And when all of the pollsters were coming out and they were making it clear that women overwhelmingly were supporting Harris, I sat back and was like, Well, maybe I got it wrong. Because I still had this, like, PTSD from Hillary, because, again, as a Black woman, I stood with Hillary, as did a bunch of other Black women, right? And so I was like, Dang. Like, Y’all can’t stand with y’all sis? Like, what is happening? And so when all the polls were saying that women were going for Harris, and then we were seeing a surge of early votes out of women, I was like, We gonna do this. It was consistent across the board that the pollsters were saying that women were going for Harris in bigger numbers than historically they had. But when it came down to it, I don’t know if it was that they was lying to the folks, because I guess they were, but [white women] retreated and they did not.

I was not shocked that there had been a bleeding of Black men, and I was not shocked that there had been a bleeding of Latinos. I remember the first time Latinos let me down, in Florida with Hillary. When I saw how many Hispanics as a whole had voted, like they were voting in these big numbers, I was like, Oh, we gonna get Florida, so we good—we got Florida. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. And in my later years, I’ve learned about all the complexities within the Latino community. You know, as somebody who’s in Texas, who has traveled Texas and campaigns in South Texas specifically, and have people calling me during this election from South Texas, I can say that the immigration thing has always been something that has perplexed me about this community. It’s basically like, I fought to get here, but I left y’all where I left y’all and I want no more y’all to come here. If I wanted to be with y’all, I would stay with y’all, but I don’t want ya’ll coming to my new home.

That is my distilled summary of what happens within the Latino community. I’ve not run into that with the Asian community. I’ve not run into that with the African community. I’ve not run into that with the Caribbean community. I’ve only run into it with Hispanics. When they think of “illegals,” they think of, you know, maybe people that came out of the cartels and that kind of, like, the criminal-type book or whatever. It’s insane. It almost reminds me of what people would talk about when they would talk about kind of like “slave mentality” and the hate that some slaves would have for themselves. It’s almost like a slave mentality that they have. It is wild to me when I hear how anti-immigrant they are as immigrants, many of them. I’m talking about people that literally just got here and can barely vote that are having this kind of attitude.

I will say that, for men overall, I consistently heard that they felt like the Democratic Party was emasculating them. I was hearing part of it like the emasculation was being reinforced because the top of the ticket was a woman. But obviously we spent a lot of time on the conversation around reproductive care and access, and frankly, some men just didn’t care. We tried to make them care. They just didn’t, right? And so, us constantly talking about repro, along with it being a woman [as the candidate], and then the conversation around trans folk—those three things in combination, I was consistently getting from some men, and specifically some Black men, that they felt like the Democratic Party was emasculating them.

A lot has been made of Democrats losing working-class voters to Trump. And obviously, from a policy perspective, that doesn’t quite make sense, given he’s stacking his Cabinet with billionaires, he’s going to impose tax cuts, try to take people’s health care, etc. But I wonder, is there something in policy that voters are not connecting with Democrats, or is this just a failure of messaging, or a challenge of breaking through the noise?

It’s all three. Because if you ask, Hey, what policy made you say, I’m gonna vote for Trump? They ain’t got no answers—not as it relates to actual policy. He made a big point of talking about how immigrants are taking people’s jobs. It’s just not fucking true. These people are working because the unemployment numbers are low. So it’s just not true, right? But it does work to make people fearful, especially if you’re talking about the working class. The people that we’re talking about, I do think that is a fear of theirs, right? Like, I don’t have a fear of an immigrant coming across and taking my job in Congress, or if I’m a CEO of a corporation or whatever. But if I am a line worker in manufacturing or something, I may be concerned about that.

I also will say that they—“they” being Republicans—take advantage of the fact that working-class folks do not live on CNN or MSNBC all day. People are like: I’m waking up. I’m going to work. I got to get my kids together. I got to figure out how to get food, how to keep this moving, how to get the gas in the car. They literally are trying to survive. And so there are people that made their decisions in a very simple way. The Trump team kept saying, Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

I personally believe that the way that our brains work is that we try to protect ourselves from trauma. And so, like, thinking about the totality of it—[four years ago], there were freaking dead bodies in freezer trucks, right? Like, we did not know if we were going to live. And frankly, everybody knows somebody that died of COVID. But it’s like we protect ourselves from that, and we’re just like, Well, you know what, everything was cheaper. And if I have not been given the education, then I don’t understand why things were cheaper. So I kept trying to tell anybody that would listen on our team. I’m like, Listen when people say that the economy sucks. It’s not helpful to turn around and tell them the truth. Because if they feel that way, they feel that way. And if you then say, No, that’s not true, then you automatically shut them down, and they’re not listening to you, because you haven’t heard them. And so I was like, We have to dig into why it is that they’re saying that. Because these are not people that are talking to you about their stock account. They’re not talking about a 401(k). What they’re talking about is the fact that wages have gone up, but they have not gone up to keep up with the cost of housing, whether it’s renting or buying. And there’s so many layers to why housing is so expensive, and it has nothing really to do with this administration being bad on anything, right?

I don’t think that we in the Congress use our ability to have field hearings in a way that we should. I think that we should be going around the country. We should be going to rural America. We should be explaining to them that your hospitals are closing because you keep putting these Republicans in and they fail to expand upon Medicaid. We wait until election time, and we give information overload to a bunch of people that cannot simply take it all in at once. And so, I mean, you know, the policy is on our side. The question is, how far will we go? And how often are we committed to engaging in the conversations and truly just the education? So there’s a lot of work that we just have to do. [Republicans are] able to pull the wool over people’s eyes and sell them a fairy tale. But he basically said everything was cheaper, and it was. And he said inflation was caused by [Democrats], and because we did not educate people as these changes were taking place, it was easy to believe. And so they’re like, Well, I’ll just take a shot with Trump. He may be an asshole, he may be racist, but I could afford my apartment. So now hopefully I’ll be able to afford it again.

How do you break through the noise, though? Because it makes sense, especially when you say that this can’t just be an election-year thing—this has to be a consistent process of education. But you also outlined all these different impediments to getting that message through, whether it’s people tuning things out, whether it’s just all the noise that Trump himself creates. How do you break through that? How do you reverse that over the next two years, between now and the midterms, and four years when we have another presidential election?

I think number one: consistency. I think that we have to take a page or two, or three or four, out of Donald Trump’s book. One of the things I talk about a lot is that Democrats are bad at branding in general, and so we have been branded as weak. Trump has branded himself as this very strong figure. I mean, think about how he wanted his mug shot out there, and how he’s standing up against the system, and everybody’s against him, and he’s surviving, right? The assassination attempts. Like, it’s all of this kind of, I’m a strong man and I’m a businessman. Which we know, he’s a terrible businessperson, and he’s actually a sorry, weak guy. So I think we struggled because we kept hearing people say, Well, we don’t know her. That translated into, she’s not been branded, right? So I think that we have to, number one, decide what our individual brands should look like, as well as the collective brand of the Democratic Party. And we basically need a brand overhaul.

While I want us to have the best résumés—and we do—the reality is that Democrats got to get out of their heads, and they have to understand that we are a product. As an individual member of Congress, people vote for me because they like me. I make sure my district gets information about the policies I’m pushing for, about the bills that have been signed into law. But I can tell you that I don’t win on substance alone. I win because people like me and they like the brand that I have, which is that I’m a firebrand. Fire has always been a part of my logo. Since my very first state House race, it’s always been there. I intentionally put a flame, and I intentionally carry that theme on for everything, because I really do bring the fire. I’m a fighter. That’s what I do. If you really sit down and ask people to tell you all my policies, they probably can’t tell you. They can guess at a lot of them, but they probably cannot tell you my policies. But they can tell you that I’m a fighter.

Number two, we’ve got to make sure that we’re not so caught up on, Well, I got on CNN, or I got on MSNBC. You know, I probably have done more media than anybody in the House. And when I say more media, I mean as far as kind of how wide-ranging the media has been: Keke Palmer’s podcast to I’m talking to you right now—you are not necessarily the political source, right?—to being on nationally syndicated radio shows at all different times. I’ve done stuff that you wouldn’t see on YouTube, TikTok, IG, Threads, stuff of just me either in districts or in the office. We’ve got to be just that aggressive and understand it’s kind of like—early on, they try to educate teachers into understanding that you have different types of learners, right?

And the final thing that I’m really trying to push for going forward is to be more technologically savvy, and that’s not just social media. I think it’s easy for us to kind of fall into this, We’re doing more than everybody. That’s not really my bar. I set my own bar. And doing more than the Congress that is old as shit is really not saying very much. I’m just being honest. So for me it’s about making sure that we understand AI and being able to be ready, number one, for the attacks that we potentially are going to experience via AI, but also being able to use AI and figuring out, you know, like, can this make communication easier or better for us? So whether we’re using geofencing or geotargeting to start to basically infiltrate people’s cell phones, or getting the data on how many people in my district are using apps—whether it’s sporting apps, gaming apps, things like that—and making sure that we’re getting into those spaces as well, because I’m all about meeting the people where they are, and the way that we do politics is historically—I feel like we just talk to politicos, and we believe that everybody else just won’t vote, and that’s not the case.

What is the Democrats’ brand? There are clear values the Democrats have, but there’s also really kind of a directionlessness in the wake of the election loss. If you’re the branding manager for the Democrats, what does the brand look like?

I don’t know. I really want to listen to the full breadth of our party, because we have a big tent, and I would want to take into account kind of what everybody feels is most important, and come up with a brand that does not offend any portions of our tent but is strong enough to attract the American people. I will tell you that what works is people believe that you are fighting for them, even if they disagree.

I think that it’s important that people understand that we are the party of equity and the party of freedom. So I’d say freedom, equity, and fighting. But if I had to pick two—because I’m all about alliterations—we’re freedom fighters. And I think the vice president was definitely hitting on a theme of freedom, because it is our rights that are being taken away. For me not to be able to decide health care decisions about my child, not being able to send my kid to a school that teaches history—that’s getting at my freedom. For me, not having control over my body—that’s getting at my freedom. For me, not being able to elect someone to represent me in whatever capacity, because you’re taking away my voting rights—that’s getting at my freedom. For me, not being able to go to a school of my choosing, because we are going to take into consideration the historical nature of the disadvantages that have plagued my community—that is getting at my freedom. I can tie every real fight that I have to actually seeking freedom, and right now the only thing that’s happening is, our freedoms are being rolled back.

On the subject of fighting, Trump takes office in less than two months. We can probably talk all night about the various threats and the dangers that he poses. But what are some of your biggest concerns looking ahead to when he takes office, and what can you and your fellow Democrats do to fight against them?

You are probably aware of the fact that we have all these ranking member elections that are contested, which is not the norm, and I think it is a sign of the times. And I think that there are people that maybe aren’t the most senior that feel like they are best equipped for this moment, because this is a different and historic moment. And I can tell you that when most people—I’m talking about House Democrats specifically—think of the people that they trust to hit back and fight back, it’s frankly the younger members. Not necessarily freshmen, but it’s the younger members. It’s not the institutionalists. And I think that what we’re struggling with right now is those that are fighting for the institutional norms that have been thrown out the window, because they are so set on the institutional norms. It continues to set us back, because they’re not realizing that the game has changed.

Can you give an example of the institutional norms you’re talking about? I mean, I know that one example is pardons, right?

When we think about the pardon of [Hunter Biden], right, like, there was like, Oh my god—like, dude, this is not the end of the world.They’re fighting over that. And I’m like, You guys are fighting the wrong fight. You do understand that the American people are looking at y’all like, Are you kidding me right now? Like, this is what y’all want to do? But ask me if they’re ready to, like, beat up on Trump—I don’t know, right? Because we have people that are like, Oh, well, we’re gonna see what he’s gonna do and act as if this is normal. So for me, I am gonna be more aggressive.

I’ve submitted to be on the more aggressive committees. I don’t have a say, so I have to go wherever they put me. But Judiciary and Oversight is where I think the biggest fights are going to be waged, and so I think that we need to stack those committees in a way that I feel like only Oversight was stacked. I don’t feel like Judiciary was necessarily a committee that was, you know, stacked in as aggressive of a way. It is a very difficult committee to get on to. We did not have any freshman spots, really. It’s very competitive to get on the committee because of how widespread the jurisdiction is. I would say the things that Democrats fight for the most are all there, right? All the civil rights stuff is gonna be there, immigration stuff is gonna be there, all the criminal justice stuff. It’s all there.

I personally believe that I will do a lot of the same that I did in the 118th [Congress]. I will try to swat down lies in real time. I will try to make sure that we are using every mechanism that we can to get that information out and educate the general public. I have talked about starting a podcast this term. I was supposed to do it my second year of my first term, but I kind of got busy with a little presidential race, so I didn’t. But that way, for those that really want to kind of tap in and get their information that way, they don’t have to wait for me to show up on somebody else’s podcast; they can always come to mine as a trusted voice and get information in a very digestible way.

So I think that my goal is to push members to be more okay with combating the lies, and that’s tough, as well as pushing members to really think outside the box.