SAN ANTONIO — In the final weeks of the Senate primary race here, Rep. Jasmine Crockett has accused her Democratic opponent, James Talarico, of supporting ads that are “straight up racist” against her.
She’s called the questions about her electability in the red state a “dog whistle,” aimed at demeaning her as a Black woman and picked up the endorsement of the 2024 Senate Democratic nominee, who blasted Talarico for allegedly privately referring to him as a “mediocre Black man.”
As the two face off in the March 3 primary for a crucial U.S. Senate race in Texas, these thorny questions of race and gender have consumed the heated battle between the two Democratic Party stars.
National Democrats may need Texas — which has remained outside their grasp for decades — to flip blue this year to have a shot at regaining control of the Senate.
But they are eager to avoid debates over identity that have consumed the party in recent elections. Some blamed those debates for their 2024 losses, as voters, particularly Latino voters who drifted rightward, saw the party giving short shrift to economic issues.
The race will test whether Crockett’s promise of exciting core Democrats — and embrace of identity politics — is enough to edge out Talarico, whose appeal to independent and even moderate Republicans has some voters and strategists saying he may be a stronger general-election candidate.
Crockett, who’s built her reputation as a fighter taking aim at President Donald Trump and other Republicans, said she is simply hitting back, even when the attacks come from within her own party. She’s leading Talarico in recent polls, after starting the race much better known among Democrats than him.
Crockett and Talarico are both leaning into their large social media followings and are largely aligned on policy. The distinctions are mostly stylistic.
“No one really believes that I’m the type of person that takes punches lying down,” Crockett, 44, said in an interview, acknowledging that people have told her the primary is getting nasty. “And I’ve been getting punched pretty hard since before I even got into this race.”
Crockett’s message is clearly resonating with the state’s Black voters, who are coming out in droves to support her. She’s vowed to transform the electorate in a state that Trump won by more than 13 percentage points — by exciting voters of color. But whether she can actually do so may come down to Latino voters, a larger group whose political diversity means they may not show as much support.
“The group that’s up for grabs is the Latino vote,” said state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democrat who represents a district in Bexar County. “The person who wins this race is the person who can bring that coalition together.”
Early voting data suggests sky-high Democratic enthusiasm, with tens of thousands more Democrats turning out to vote so far than Republicans, who are involved in an even more bruising primary featuring Sen. John Cornyn, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt, as of Feb. 25.
A recent University of Texas poll showed Crockett beating Talarico by roughly 75 percentage points among the state’s Black primary voters, who tend to turn out at high rates here. Talarico outperformed Crockett by 6 percentage points with White voters. Latinos, who early voter data suggest will be the second-largest voter group in the primary, were more evenly split between the two.
Whichever candidate wins will have to work to consolidate Democrats in the state, said Adrian Saenz, a Democratic political strategist and former White House aide in the Biden and Obama administrations. Saenz worries the focus on race and gender so far “doesn’t put us on the best footing.”
Talarico, a 36-year-old state representative and Presbyterian seminarian, has largely avoided directly criticizing Crockett as she sharpens her attacks against him. He denied criticizing Rep. Colin Allred (D) — who ran against GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in 2024 and endorsed Crockett — based on his race in a private conversation with a political influencer. His pitch of empathy and reaching out to even Trump’s most ardent supporters is in part aimed at those Latino voters.
“Tensions are rising in this primary, and, you know, accusations are getting thrown around,” Talarico said in an interview after a news conference outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on the outskirts of El Paso. “My job as a leader is to try to lower the temperature, try to get us to remember that we are all on the same team and to keep our eyes on the prize.”
Talarico has aggressively reached out to Latino voters: picking up the endorsement of Tejano singer and congressional candidate Bobby Pulido, quoting Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny, and speaking in Spanish at campaign stops and in videos with Spanish-language influencers. Crockett has been emphasizing Trump’s draconian immigration enforcement in her outreach, while backing away from a former comment criticizing some Latino Trump supporters for having a “slave mentality.”
“Right now, if we don’t understand we’re in a modern civil rights movement, then we’re not paying attention,” she told a crowd in El Paso.
Republicans have said they’d rather run against Crockett, who has lampooned Trump and other Republicans in scorching terms they believe could motivate their base in an off-year election. The national Democratic Party apparatus has stayed neutral, but privately many Democrats agree that she would fare worse than Talarico statewide.
Conversations with more than two dozen Latino voters at Crockett and Talarico events and early voting sites across the state suggest Crockett’s raw discussion of race — and how she feels it’s been used against her — has attracted Latinos who admire her fiery and unfiltered style, and who are moved by the idea of a woman of color representing them in Washington. But it’s also alienated others, who find less to relate to or fear the discussion will turn off White Anglo voters and more conservative Latinos.
“Just because you have the loudest megaphone doesn’t mean you’re the base,” said Ryan Trujillo, 48, a facilitator for special-needs students who stood in a snaking line to see Talarico outside an East El Paso banquet hall. “These social identity words are killing the Democratic Party.”
Trujillo said Talarico had the unique ability to hold a conversation in “a very far-right-wing Christian household” and, perhaps, win some new voters.
The last presidential election, in which Democrat Kamala Harris lost to Trump, revealed the country’s racism and misogyny, Trujillo said. “When it comes to voting, people are — I hate to say it — not educated,” he said. “To ignore that reality is insanity. It’s doing the same thing and expecting different results.”
But Asiah Mendoza, 26, who came to see Crockett at an event at a beer garden in San Antonio, saw herself in the candidate — and was excited by the idea of a Black woman representing Texas.
“She’s a double minority like myself. She’s a woman and a person of color,” said Mendoza, who is Mexican American. “When I look at who’s on TV and I don’t see anybody that looks like me, that’s a problem.”
Crockett’s boldness in the face of subtle and overt racism in Congress and along the campaign trail has made her a role model to Mendoza, a high school college counselor, and many of her students, she said, even if they hold different identities.
When Vice President JD Vance mocked Crockett’s “street girl persona” and nails last year, she responded by accusing him of ignoring Trump’s corruption and defiance of the Constitution. Last month, she accused a super PAC that supports Talarico of darkening her skin in an ad, which the PAC denied in a statement.
“People are labeling her as too aggressive or saying she’s too loud, but women of color are inclined to get labeled that way,” Mendoza said.
Other Latino voters called Crockett’s bluntness a sign of authenticity. “I just like the way she represents herself unapologetically and says who she is,” said Ruben Hernandez Valdez, 35, “regardless of what’s politically correct.”
Nine miles away, outside a polling site in San Antonio’s heavily Latino west side, Henry Rodriguez, 81, and Erika Aranguiz, 39, said they were supporting Talarico — in part because they worried about how Crockett might fare in a general election, especially with other Mexican Americans like them.
“We still have in our midst Latinos that would not vote for a Black person, and that’s sad to say, but I think it’s true,” Rodriguez said.
Over barbacoa tacos and Pepsi by the back of Aranguiz’s red pickup truck, he laid out the differences among the state’s Latino demographic, which historically has not turned out to vote in proportions as high as the state’s Black voters.
More progressive Mexican Americans might identify with Crockett, he said. Others see a sharp line between themselves and Black Texans — a divide exacerbated by Crockett’s comment that Hispanic Trump voters have a “slave mentality.”
Crockett might have a harder time winning those voters back, Aranguiz added.
“Latinos who have switched sides — there’s a point in our lives where everything seems hard,” she said. “We’re tired of paying the high prices. You don’t know where to go — left? right? It’s not just one thing that makes people switch.”
Goodwin reported from Washington.
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