Dem Senate Disaster Intensifies. No, The Other One.

Had Graham Platner not imploded yesterday, the biggest midterm story of the day may have come from 2,000 miles to the south. Even before Politico dropped the next shoe on Herr Totenkopf in Maine, Jasmine Crockett dropped a bomb on her fellow Texas Democrats. Several bombs, actually.

It’s been clear for a few weeks that Crockett has no interest in helping Democrats with campaigning for the US Senate seat. Both she and Colin Allred refused to show up to the Democrats’ state convention last month after James Talarico had the nerve to run against Crockett and had allegedly insulted Allred as a “mediocre black man,” an allegation Talarico denies. Both Crockett and Allred fumed at the time that the party had insulted them in more ways than one too, but hadn’t explicitly made a claim of racism.

Well, wait no longer. At a forum yesterday afternoon, Crockett went even further in refusing to “hold his hand” in reference to suggestions she should help Talarico win against Ken Paxton, and hinted that black voters should perhaps not turn out for that race at all. Crockett also blamed her primary loss on the Democrat primary being a “racist race,” which is a much clearer signal to black voters for disengagement:

Jasmine Crockett does NOT want to campaign with Talarico:

“People keep trying to say, well, Jasmine has to go and hold his hand. Nah, I don’t.”

“And honestly, some people just not going to be sold on certain people that are running in the state of Texas.”

Welp. That one’s not… https://t.co/nV7Zgqt4LD pic.twitter.com/32PqzuIHFv

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) July 6, 2026

That, of course, is the nightmare scenario for Texas Democrats, and not just among black voters. In the 2024 election, black voters were 11% of the overall electorate, but Hispanic voters were 26% of the turnout. Having Crockett cast the party as racist in its execution in its US Senate primary sends a message of disengagement to both demos, although clearly more to black voters than Hispanics. Crockett has been one of the more notable figures in the party, and certainly its most visible black woman even up to today – and her claims that she got shafted over race will resonate, especially on the Left where activists are particularly sensitive to such allegations. 

Platner’s unsurprising implosion got more attention yesterday, but this episode may say more about Democrats’ existential crises as it pushes harder to the Left. Socialism and wokery have one thing in common: both require some form of “intersectionality” to operate. Like most everything else in authoritarian economies – and both socialism and wokery require top-down command economies in all things – goods such as political support and attention operate on a shortage basis and create zero-sum tensions. Any resources that went to Talarico are, in the intersectionalist mindset, resources that could not be duplicated elsewhere and therefore were denied to Crockett. The Party is the rationing authority in this system, and certainly in Crockett’s mind, and she thinks the Party should have directed those resources to her as a black woman rather than to the “white Leftist” in the race. 

Crockett made that argument more explicitly in an interview with The Root at the Essence Festival over the weekend:

“When you walk into a room full of Black people, you can almost guarantee that they believe in the Democratic ideals,” Crockett said. “When you walk into a room full of White people, you don’t know what you walking into.”

“If there’s any group of people that the party should be most loyal to and most vocal about, it’s Black people,” Crockett said. “Because Black people have historically held this down.” …

Crockett also criticized what she called “White leftists” who focus on one issue while people who rely on government services struggle to get attention.

“You talk about the left. The left has decided that they — and, granted, I mean, I’m a progressive, I started the progressive caucus, all the things — but I know what you’re saying when you’re talking about the left,” Crockett said. “You’re talking about the White leftists that are doing the most in this moment.”

Democrats in Maine have a massive headache, one that does speak to the split between liberals and full-blown communists in their party. This Texas split, though, shows why both factions will eventually run off the rails when it comes to grievance politics. Intersectionality may work on college campuses – and maybe only for a limited time even there – but it falls apart in the real world for the same reasons that command economies of any sort will fail over time. The Road to Serfdom applies to political economies as well as market economies, and when both produce adverse results for a significant faction, they produce increased authoritarian policies and figures to “correct” the outcomes. 

Democrats are about to reap what they have sown, and it may start in Texas rather than Maine. And just wait until Michigan Democrats have to deal with Palestinian privilege in the wake of their upcoming Senate primary. 

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