State lawmaker beats Jasmine Crockett in fiercely contested election marked by record turnout and confusion at polls

James Talarico won the Democratic nomination for a US Senate seat in Texas on Tuesday, capping a remarkable rise from state lawmaker and seminary student to the party’s standard-bearer in one of the key races of the 2026 midterm cycle.

With his blend of faith-based populism, bipartisan appeal and generational energy, Talarico defeated Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a firebrand beloved by the party’s base but who struggled to dispel concerns that she could defeat a Republican in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide in more than 30 years.

A jubilant Talarico told supporters in Austin before the race was called: “We are not just trying to win an election. We are trying to fundamentally change our politics. And it’s working.”

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      143·
      2 months ago

      You’re literally falling for Republican propaganda…

      The National Republican Senatorial Committee put out a poll in July with Crockett’s name included, which showed her as the leading Democrat in a hypothetical matchup.

      “When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” a source familiar with the process told NOTUS.

      The fact that Crockett was included in the poll was no accident.

      In June news broke that Texas Democrats Colin Allred, James Talarico, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro met to discuss the 2026 election. Operatives at the NRSC realized that Crockett — whose political stock had been rising — wasn’t included in that meeting and also hadn’t been included in any credible poll. So they decided to change that.

      https://www.notus.org/senate/jasmine-crockett-nrsc-texas-senate

      That propaganda is literally the only reason she ran:

      Crockett herself even admitted she was encouraged to jump into the race by all the positive polling she was seeing ahead of her announcement.

      "The more I saw the poll results, I couldn’t ignore the trends that were clear,” Crockett said during her announcement speech.

      Crockett did not return a request for comment.

      We can’t afford to just ignore that people are being manipulated…

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        They also had the earned media from the Trump/ Colbert thing.

        I genuinely think Crockett wins without that. That was hundreds of millions in earned media, and just an unforced error on the part of Trump.

        If Trump had just “done nothing”, that Talarico interview maybe gets 80k views coming from people who just “Like Colbert”. Instead it got millions of views because it was the thing everyone was interested in for 48 hours. And it got a lot of people who would have not known who Talarico was to learn the name.