Here’s a bit of good news for Republicans: It appears appealing to Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s basest instincts not only worked to get her into the Senate race in Texas, but also managed to fool most of the state’s Democrats for now.
According to a new poll released Friday, Crockett — the Dallas-area representative famous for her bizarre outbursts and “clapbacks” — is leading her main competitor, state lawmaker and “progressive Christian” James Talarico, by a relatively wide margin.
The poll, conducted by Texas Southern University, shows Crockett with an eight-point lead over Talarico, 51 percent to 43 percent, with 6 percent of likely Democrat voters describing themselves as undecided, according to KDFW-TV.
This is up 6 points from when Crockett declared earlier this week. In the poll, a whopping 89 percent of black voters and 57 percent of women preferred her to Talarico.
The poll comes after it was reported that the National Republican Senatorial Committee had privately arranged to bait Crockett into the race — and succeeded.
“That was really a sustained effort that we orchestrated across the ecosystem for several months,” a source told NOTUS. “Not only was it getting positive news coverage, but her office was directly having traffic driven to it in terms of phone calls urging her to run.”
The move came after a Democratic primary poll in July that included the representative’s name and resulted with Crockett near the top.
“When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” the source said.
There are, of course, conservatives who are urging others to be careful what they wish for. We loved having AOC and Zohran Mamdani to kick around, they warn us, until those fools became credible.
There are several arguments why this falls flat. For starters, Crockett likely doesn’t have a seat to go back to in Texas after redistricting forced her out.
She also doesn’t have the kind of profile that would win statewide; she doesn’t do well among swing voters, for one, nor is she distinguished enough on the policies that she’ll become a cause célèbre on the left.
What she’s best at, instead, are clips like these:
Jasmine Crockett: We need illegals in the US because “we done pickin cotton” pic.twitter.com/DinxreioTt
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 13, 2025
And this is one of the cleaner, more eloquent rants from Rep. Crockett. The other ones usually require more asterisks than a Rockies snowstorm.
Secondly, Crockett is by far the weakest candidate in what’s likely to be a swing state. One normally does not buy the usual hype that Texas can swing to the Democrats, despite the Democrats trying insanely hard to make it happen, but this cycle may be difficult. GOP incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is locked in a tough primary battle with state Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt. Both are more MAGA-friendly than Cornyn is.
Paxton leads that race, mind you — but, like Crockett, his electability is in question in the general due to character concerns. Those concerns become moot if Crockett is the nominee, particularly if her propensity to engage in clapback-friendly sound bites persists.
And now that she’s declared, her lead has only opened up. Not only that, but she chased the only credible moderate-ish candidate — Colin Allred — out of the race. (Talarico may be more electable than Crockett, but he still isn’t terribly electable; it’s difficult to see someone who says God is nonbinary getting traction in the Lone Star State.)
In other words: It worked. Nice job, GOP!
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