U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and Texas state Rep. James Talarico faced off in a debate on Saturday, giving Texas voters their first true glimpse at the U.S. Senate candidates’ policy proposals — and contrasting political styles — ahead of the March 3 primary election.
During Saturday’s debate, moderators Daniel Marin, a KXAN news anchor, and Gromer Jeffers, a political reporter for The Dallas Morning News, and a select group of citizens asked about the candidates’ positions on the economy, AI, the potential impeachment of President Donald Trump, the most recent shooting by ICE in Minneapolis, the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, the cost of insulin, military aid to Israel, and more.
In Saturday’s debate, Talarico, who represents Austin, repeatedly and emphatically referenced the Bible, economic populism, and his experiences as a Presbyterian seminarian and former middle school teacher in a not-ineffective-but-not-particularly-subtle appeal to relatability.
By contrast, Crockett, who is from Dallas, is “defined by her reputation as a political brawler,” as the Texas Tribune put it in a lookahead on Saturday. She’s viewed by some as the candidate best positioned to expand the electorate, since her quotability and frequent cable news appearances give her a leg up in name recognition and have inspired hopes of juicing Democratic turnout at the polls.
The two Democrats debated at 2 p.m. for an hour at the Texas AFL-CIO’s political convention in Georgetown, Texas. The candidates’ positions had an unsurprising overlap on the vast majority of the issues discussed Saturday. Talarico in particular argued that the “real fight in this country” isn’t “left versus right,” it’s “top vs bottom.” In the hours after another shooting by ICE agents in Minnesota on Saturday, neither candidate would directly answer whether or not they support abolishing ICE, but both made it clear that the agency requires reform and “a crackdown” — whatever that looks like.
“We should be hunting down human traffickers, not moms and babies,” Talarico said. “We need to remake this broken immigration system.”
Talarico posted on X Saturday shortly before the debate began, “They shot Renee Good in the face. They kidnapped Liam Ramos. They just executed a man on the street.”
He added, “Unmask them. Prosecute them. No more secret police.”
Crockett, for her part, called ICE a “rogue organization” violating American rights. “We need to clean house from top to bottom,” she said, noting that she has already signed on to legislation to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
“This is the fifth-highest funded military force in the entire world, and what are they doing?” asked Crockett. “They’re killing people in the middle of the street.”
“They are supposed to do immigration and customs enforcement,” she added. “Not going after U.S. Citizens. Not going after people who are documented.”
‘It’s a Way of Talking About Race Without Talking About Race’
Then Jeffers asked the candidates about the “electability” debate that has plagued Crockett in recent weeks.
For context, as Crockett and Talarico prepared for their first side-by-side battle, a discourse was still simmering online: The contention boiled down to one political term — “electability” — and what it means when applied to a Black woman.
Podcaster Matt Rogers of “Las Culturistas” stepped in it earlier this month, telling listeners: “Don’t waste your money sending to Jasmine Crockett.”
“She’s not gonna win a Senate seat in Texas, you guys,” he continued. “If Beto O’Rourke couldn’t do it, Jasmine Crockett is not gonna do it.”
Rogers’ intent was clear — that he believes Crockett won’t win against the Republican nominee, who will likely be either incumbent Sen. John Cornyn or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — and Crockett herself clocked the racial implications.
“I really do think that the host said the quiet part out loud, which basically was: If a white man couldn’t do it, then why would a Black woman even have the audacity to think that she could?” Crockett said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
Rogers apologized (“I just want us to win,” he said) but still seemed to miss the broader context to the backlash, and backlash to the backlash, over electability.
When asked about her electability on Saturday, Crockett said: “I’m not a likely story.”
“I hate politics,” she said. “We’re living in a time where systems are clearly rigged against us.”
“I am here to fight the system, the system that is holding so many of us down,” she added.
When Jeffers asked about detractors who may view her “style” as offensive — like when she called Gov. Greg Abbott “governor hot wheels” — Crockett replied: “We are not looking at politics as usual.”
“I’ll do the things the political consultants will never tell you to do,” she continued, arguing that effective messaging in 2026 isn’t about polish anymore.
“It’s about tapping into the rawness of this moment,” she said. “We have killings going on.”
Another electability discourse popping up around a political candidate of color certainly isn’t new, but it also hasn’t gone unnoticed by Texas voters, academics, political experts, and content creators.
“I’ll be honest, I think that is pretext for discrimination,” said Erika Harrison, a political content creator and attorney. “The electability part of the argument there, to me, it doesn’t fly… I think it’s people wanting to placate what they believe to be racism in Texas and think that the white man is more electable.”
That could be said, in fact has been said, for many a diverse candidate, according to Jeremi Suri, professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas.
“These sorts of judgements of who is electable or not, they are at some level assumptions of how people view race or religions. People said John F. Kennedy was unelectable because he was Catholic,” Suri said. “They’re always arguments used for people from a nontraditional group.”
“People don’t say Paxton is an unelectable philanderer, right?” he added.
Suri pushed back on the idea that the term has become a racist dog whistle, as some have opined. Rather, “I think it’s a way of talking about race without talking about race.”
And, of course, there’s much to talk about in terms of race in Texas. “You’d have to be really sticking your head in the sand to think there isn’t prejudice of Black women candidates in Texas,” said Suri.
But candidates face all sorts of challenges, Suri said. It doesn’t make them unelectable. Just look at Kennedy. Unfortunately, once a candidate’s electability has been questioned, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A number of studies have found that women, and Black women in particular, are negatively impacted by the idea of electability. In one study, Stanford scholars found that voters withhold support for female candidates in primaries if they believe it’s not possible for them to win the general election — and support male candidates instead.
Sound familiar? It gets even more interesting. The researchers, who used surveys from the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, found that simply sharing evidence that women are just as likely as men to win increased voters’ intentions to support female candidates by 3%.
Crockett is in her second term in Congress. She previously worked in the Texas House and as a public defender in East Texas.
‘A Winning Coalition’
As the debate loomed last week, polls told conflicting stories about the race.
Recent public polling by Emerson College showed Talarico leading Crockett by 9 percentage points in the primary. But soon after the Emerson poll was released, Crockett’s team published competing numbers via an internal survey, which put her up 13 points.
Yet, as Harrison has watched, a similar pattern found by the Stanford researchers has played out in real time in Crockett’s Senate campaign.
“All of a sudden, it’s, you know, we can’t elect a Black woman statewide,” Harrison said. “It’s this belief that like, ‘Oh, we need some Republicans to vote for her, and Republicans won’t vote for a Black woman.’”
Where Crockett has earned name recognition in Texas and beyond for pointed arguments against Republicans — like her testimony this week on former special counsel Jack Smith’s report recommending charges for President Trump — Talarico has, in some ways, gone the opposite direction. He has touted an appeal to swing and red-leaning voters, and he made his first major splash on the national scene on Joe Rogan’s podcast in July.
“You need to run for president,” Rogan, who endorsed Trump in the 2024 race, told Talarico at the end of the episode.
Kat Vargas, a content creator focusing on Texas politics who has amassed thousands of followers on Instagram and Threads under the handle @howdypolitics, said that the characterization of Crockett as less electable than Talarico against a Republican candidate doesn’t match the polling data. After Crockett entered the Senate race in December, a Texas Southern University survey of likely Democratic voters found her leading Talarico by 8 percentage points.
While Talarico led with white voters by 13 percentage points, Crockett had the support of nearly 9 in 10 Black voters. She also led women voters by 21 percentage points.
A January Emerson College poll showed Talarico leading by 9 percentage points, though Vargas pointed out that it found Crockett to have a slightly greater advantage over Paxton compared to Talarico. Eighty percent of Black voters surveyed by Emerson said they planned to support Crockett, and a separate December poll by Texas Southern University found 89% of Black voters supported her.
As Dallas S. Jones, a political strategist and founder of a Houston-based public affairs firm, pointed out in an opinion piece for The Hill titled “White liberals are Jasmine Crockett’s biggest obstacle to the Senate,” there are nearly 4 million African Americans in Texas.
“Mobilizing that base with others could create a winning coalition,” Jones wrote. “If the state had just a five percent increase in Black voter turnout, that would be 200,000 more votes. This surpasses margins in recent Senate races.”
There’s research to support the idea that Black female voters, historically one of the most loyal Democratic voting blocks, can sway elections. In 2020, they proved critical to former President Joe Biden’s election win.
“People forget that Beto’s near-upset of Ted Cruz in 2018 was not driven only from the top of the ticket. A huge share of that turnout and margin came from an EXTRAORDINARY number of strong Black women running in local races, especially in the major cities, who pulled voters to the polls and lifted the statewide ticket with them,” Jerry Ford, Jr., an attorney and graduate of University of Houston, wrote on Threads and shared with The Barbed Wire. Ford pointed out that 17 Democratic Black women made history that year by winning judicial seats in Harris County with a campaign they called “Black Girl Magic Texas.”
“That matters because in the state with the largest Black population in the country, ignoring the real voting engine in a statewide race is a strategic mistake.”
Crockett is well-known for her clapbacks — which are praised by supporters, who value them as the kind of authentic sharpness missing in Democratic leadership, but derided as offensive by advocates aplenty.
In recent weeks on the campaign trail, Crockett has had to defend herself from year-old comments she made to Vanity Fair, when she called Latino Texans’ anti-immigrant attitudes “almost like a slave mentality,” and separately when she remarked last year that the country needed migrants because “we’re done picking cotton.”
This month, she told the Texas Tribune that “there was never an intent to actually offend somebody.”
“Before I was elected, and through all of my elections, I have always stood with all people,” she added.
“She leans into a cultural way of speaking that is very common for Black women,” Harrison said.
Harrison said that Crockett’s firebrand method of pushing back at political opponents like Trump is rooted in her identity as a Black woman.
“I think that can throw people off a bit. And so I was prepared to see that show up a little bit more in the polling, but… people are not saying that it’s super unfavorable there.”
Harrison noted similarities in Talarico’s comments about Gov. Greg Abbott over hot issues during debates on school voucher legislation.
“You go look at his social media during the voucher time, every post he has is about Abbott. He went after Abbott the same way that she goes after Trump,” Harrison said.
Why followers have different responses to Talarico’s pushback on political opponents versus Crockett’s goes back to some of the underpinnings of the electability debate, Harrison said, and our understanding of what’s professional.
“We are implying there’s one way to do things, and that oftentimes leans into this idea that the way that white people do it is the more appropriate way,” she said.
In his book “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities,” Brookings fellow Andre M. Perry wrote that in places where Black people are the racial minority, “Black women politicians differ from their male predecessors by embracing their cultural heritage to attract non-Black voters.”
Perry pointed to Ayanna Pressley, the first woman of color elected to Congress from Massachusetts, who in her election night speech in 2018 said: “Can a Congresswoman wear her hair in braids?”
“Also in the 2018 midterms, Jahana Hayes won Connecticut’s 5th District; Lucy McBath claimed Georgia’s 6th, and Lauren Underwood won Illinois’ 14th,” Perry wrote. “These are all Black women who saw victory by not shying away from their Blackness in white-majority places.”
Texas is no longer a white majority. And the Black voter population isn’t the same as it is in Massachusetts.
Black Texans account for 13.7% of the population, while white Texans represent 38.7%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Importantly, Hispanic and Latino Texans make up 40.3% of the population — “a crucial constituency that’ll determine not just the primary but the general election,” said Suri.
Crockett has faced criticism for previous comments about Latinos, although she has recently spoken on uniting Black and Latino voters. Vargas said that she would like to see a Democratic ticket reflecting that push for unity, with Crockett as the nominee for the Senate and State Rep. Gina Hinojosa as the nominee for governor.
“I’m Latina, and I think there are obvious rifts between our communities,” Vargas said. “With Crockett and Gina Hinojosa at the top of the ticket, there’s a really unique opportunity to bring Black voters and Latino voters together.”
Vargas said she’s looking at how both candidates hone their message to Latino voters.
“How are they speaking to Latino voters in a wider frame? It’s not just immigration,” Vargas said. “We also have families, we have to pay childcare, we want to talk about jobs.”
As Texas Tribune reported, Talarico has made a considerable effort to grow his support among Latino voters, buying air time for a Spanish-language TV ad he recorded, which played in almost a dozen of Texas’ largest media markets. Last month, Talarico also reportedly rallied with congressional candidate Bobby Pulido, who also happens to be a Tejano music star, during a stop in the Rio Grande Valley. (The two candidates endorsed each other.)
Similarly, Harrison said she is interested in Talarico’s message to Black voters, and his response to some of the backlash Crockett has faced.
“I think he has a lot of room to grow with Black voters,” Harrison said. “I also want to see him distance himself from some of the really negative rhetoric about her online.”
Earlier this week, Suri speculated that much of the race, like Saturday’s debate, will be more about style than substance — a prophecy that came to fruition. Not that both candidates aren’t impressively qualified. In fact, it’s the opposite. Both candidates have significant experience, and similar policy priorities, like on education and healthcare.
Crockett “has a real talent for zingers, which a lot of people like. Talarico is more ministerial, a preacher, a storyteller, so I think we’ll see different styles,” Suri said.
“We have two very good candidates,” Suri said, “for two reasons: they’re Impressive in their intelligence and policy depth, and in charisma.”
“This is a good problem to have.”
And this cycle of electability talk just may buck the trend.
“I was tracking the online impressions in real time of what was happening,” said Vargas about the “Las Culturistas” debate. “Crockett was trending for days. I think it was about four or five days that she was trending across platforms over this. And overwhelmingly, the impressions were positive.”
“And it was kind of this confirmation of this theory of, even when they attack her, it ends up being positive for her, just because it gets her everywhere.”
Early voting opens for Texans on Tuesday, Feb. 17 and closes Friday, Feb. 27. Election day is Tuesday, March 3.