On Tuesday, March 3, Texas Democrats will choose between Jasmine Crockett, a U.S. representative from Dallas, and James Talarico, a state legislator from Austin, as their nominee for the U.S. Senate. Both are “rising stars” in Texas Democratic politics. Talarico is 36, Crockett is 44, and both have developed a national following, the former via his prominence during Trump’s 2025 gerrymandering of congressional seats and the latter by her skill in social-media amplified “clapbacks” against Trump and other Republicans. But while they are new faces to statewide and national politics, their competition raises some very old issues that have long bedeviled Democrats in Texas and in other “red states.”

The first is whether Democrats should go for broke trying to win elections, or focus on long-term coalition-building efforts that will pay off once demographic trends shift in their favor. This isn’t a theoretical question for Texas Democrats. They haven’t won a statewide race for any office since 1994. Every few years they get excited about some breakthrough candidate (most recently Beto O’Rourke, who came close to beating Ted Cruz in 2018) who then lets them down. So the question persists: is victory even possible in the foreseeable future, or is it better to undertake noisy and exciting campaigns that may not pay off for a while?

This is a particularly acute question in 2026, because national Democrats now view a huge Texas upset as the best and perhaps the only way to flip the U.S. Senate and make Trump a true lame duck. And a fractious Republican primary — in which incumbent Senator John Cornyn is in danger of being defenestrated by MAGA bad boy Ken Paxton (with a nasty runoff likely) — has increased Democratic hopes that this could be the big year.

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