Stop the Sabotage, Democrats! You Need Talarico and El-Sayed to Win.

Let’s start with Texas and Crockett. Talarico defeated Crockett 52-46 percent in a tense March primary. The congresswoman has a legitimate beef that she and other Black female Democratic candidates are treated unfairly by a party that is obsessed with “electability” and often views the most viable candidates as those who are white and male like Talarico. A party both committed to racial and gender inclusion and heavily reliant on getting more than 90 percent of Black women’s votes to win elections should be trying to get more Black women into office, not essentially practicing pre-discrimination. “We will oppose you based on your race and/or gender in the primary because we fear voters in the general election will reject you based on your race and/or gender,” is the position of many Democratic voters and elites towards Black and female candidates. They need to abandon that. Talarico’s race and gender alone may have been what put him over the top in the primary, which I suspect grinds at Crockett. (It’s worth noting that some voters may have felt that even a white male candidate couldn’t win in Texas if they are as partisan as Crockett.) 

That said, Talarico would be a much better senator than Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate. So Crockett should be trying hard to ensure that Talarico wins. She’s not. “I personally don’t feel like the excitement necessarily exists within the Black community. Right now, I don’t feel like they’re excited,” Crockett said on the “Front Page” podcast recently of Talarico’s candidacy. That might sound like Crockett just giving a political analysis. And it’s likely that Talarico (like most candidates) has work to do to improve his standing among Black voters. 

But Crockett has suggested several times over the last few months that Talarico is running a lackluster campaign, particularly with regard to appealing to Black voters. She could air those critiques in private. Or she could campaign aggressively for Talarico to Black voters, to address this shortage of excitement that she is asserting. She’s doing neither. She refused to speak at the Texas Democrats’ convention in June, even after Talarico reportedly personally called and asked the congresswoman to give the keynote address. She has suggested that she will campaign for other Democratic candidates in Texas but not Talarico.