Dear readers,
I got myself into a bit of a monkey’s paw situation when I wrote a few months ago that Texas Democrats shouldn’t nominate State Rep. James Talarico for U.S. Senate. Talarico, I wrote, is too far to the left — he holds all the usual orthodox liberal positions, and what makes him stand out in the crowd is his choir boy/seminarian persona. In theory, that’s supposed to help win over Texas swing voters, but as we saw with Tim Walz’s supposed advantage of being able to “code talk” to rural whites, these theories of crossover-appeal-through-persona don’t work. To win voters in the center, you need a candidate who is actually closer to the center himself or herself, not one who knows how to argue that gendered grammar in ancient Hebrew counsels in favor of trans participation in girls’ sports.
So naturally, after my warning, we’ve ended up with a primary between Talarico and a candidate who would be even more ill-suited than Talarico: Rep. Jasmine Crockett.
Crockett is a partisan bomb thrower who delights the kind of Democrats who watch a lot of MSNBC and share a lot of memes on Facebook. You may have seen her refer to Marjorie Taylor Greene at a House committee hearing as a “bleach-blond bad-built butch-body” — whatever that means — and if you want, you can buy a t-shirt declaring that phrase a “Crockett Clapback.” There are more clapbacks where that came from: she stood up at the Human Rights Campaign gala and called wheelchair-using Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “Hot Wheels”;1 she said Hispanics who voted for Trump have a “slave mentality”; she called detractors of DEI programs “mediocre white boys”.
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