Texas Democratic Senate hopeful Representative James Talarico is fighting a two-front war. While he is engaged in a toe-to-toe race against Republican candidate Ken Paxton, the state's attorney general, the congresswoman he defeated in the Democratic primary has said she will not campaign alongside him. Dallas representative Jasmine Crockett told CNN she has no plans to join Talarico on the campaign trail.
"I will be campaigning downballot," she said when asked whether she would be with him. It was not the first time Crockett had declined to fully endorse Talarico, who polling averages and political pundits have identified as Democrats' best chance to break the Republican stronghold in Texas. Newsweek reached out to Talarico's campaign for comment Friday morning.
After losing the primary in March, Crockett called Talarico to congratulate him and endorsed his candidacy. But her concession statement focused on party unity rather than expressing personal enthusiasm, a theme she has returned to repeatedly and that was central to her CNN appearance on Thursday. Crockett pointed to Beto O'Rourke's 2018 Senate run, when Senator Ted Cruz beat the Democrat by a 2.6 percent margin, as a cautionary example of a strategy she doesn't want to repeat.
"We've tried this where we've got one amazing candidate that's running at the top of the ticket," she said. "Raising all the money, doing all the things, running around the entire state, but it's not enough." Her alternative, she said, is more about spreading attention to candidates further down the ballot who she said are being overshadowed by the Senate race. "That'll give something more to voters to make them say, you know what, it may be raining outside, but I gotta go get there because I gotta get there for this person and this person, plus I don't like Trump," she said.
Asked what she is hearing from Black voters about Talarico, Crockett said she does not believe they are particularly excited about his candidacy. So at the end of the day, I don't know that they're gonna have to be the most excited.” Crockett's endorsement carries extra weight for Talarico because of how the primary played out. She lost to Talarico by about 6 points, 52.5 percent to 46.2 percent, a difference of roughly 144,500 votes out of more than 2 million cast.
But Crockett won Black voters by a wide margin. Yet, Crockett said she expects Black voters to turn out and vote Democrat regardless of how they feel about Talarico. "They are looking at our Black lives," she said.
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