Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, doesn’t get nervous. Not when she spars with her Republican colleagues in committee hearings. Not when she questions the point of what she sees as fruitless impeachment inquiries.
Not even when she had the audacity to take the stage at a music festival in the Washington, D.C., area before tens of thousands of people who had not gathered to hear a politician speak.
But before Ms. Crockett addressed the Democratic National Convention on Monday, she felt “a pit in my stomach” and the weight of the moment, she told a group of mostly female mayors gathered on Wednesday for brunch on a sunny patio. She did not want to disappoint Vice President Kamala Harris, a friend and mentor who also happened to be the party’s presidential nominee. Ms. Crockett worried whether she could deliver her most important argument yet in her short political career.
And, she added, no Black female, freshman member of Congress had been allotted a speaking slot, during prime time no less.
“I said, ‘I’ve got to be perfect,’” she told the crowd at brunch.
“You were great!” one of the women shouted in the back. The room was rapt. One audience member bit her lip. Others nodded along. They had been there.
This has been Ms. Crockett all week, quick-witted and unvarnished, introducing herself to her party and the nation. The St. Louis native has emerged as a forceful speaker and surrogate of Ms. Harris’s campaign. She has attended breakfasts with the delegations of Arizona, Arkansas, California and Kentucky, and has worked to shore up the Black Democratic vote, appearing at events alongside other members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Harris campaign representatives.
Ms. Crockett, a 43-year-old former civil rights lawyer, public defender and state legislator, has seen her stardom rise since she was first elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 2020. According to The Texas Tribune, she filed 75 bills on her own during that legislative session and wrote another 110 with her colleagues. Only three became law, but few rookie state lawmakers are so persistent.
Her ascent picked up speed during the summer of 2021, when she joined about 50 Democrats who fled Texas for Washington, D.C., in an attempt to block Republicans from passing new voting restrictions. The measure passed, but her video dispatches from the nation’s Capitol went viral online, which irked some in state leadership — and fueled her run for Congress in 2022.
She won her seat in a district that encompasses Dallas with the backing of Our Revolution, a group inspired by Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont. She has since become one of her party’s most effective communicators — known for her wordplay and alliteration — alongside other left-wing Democrats like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
In September 2023, Ms. Crockett drew national attention when she accused Republicans of ignoring Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified documents, waving a picture of the evidence in the air and uttering a profanity. In May, she and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, drew criticism for their heated exchange over eyelashes, hair dye and body composition.
On Monday, Ms. Crockett said onstage that when she first arrived in Washington and met Ms. Harris, the vice president soothed her apprehensions over joining Congress. At the time, Ms. Crockett said, chaos was wracking the House over the election of a new speaker, and the House Oversight Committee, of which she was a member, had become “unhinged.”
“The most powerful woman in the world wiped my tears,” Ms. Crockett said.
She told the group of mayors at brunch on Wednesday that it might have been her fault that the teleprompter had been accidentally sped up for the speaker before her, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland. In her nervous state, she said, she had asked organizers if they could skip over a line in her speech that sounded too similar to another that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just said.
In the end, Ms. Crockett ad-libbed — and she was fine, she said, as the audience cracked up.
Along her climb to Washington, she has picked up a lesson.
“Don’t let anybody tell you you’re not enough,” she said.
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