How GOP Secretly Helped Convince Jasmine Crockett to Run for Senate
Republicans are taking credit for Representative Jasmine Crockett’s last-minute decision to run for the United States Senate, as part of their efforts to recruit “very vulnerable Democrats” to run for office, NOTUS reported.
Crockett’s surprise announcement last week reportedly threw the Democrats’ political calculus into flux—but seems to have delighted the Republicans who’d been secretly working to get her in the race.
Crockett has made a name for herself being a particularly outspoken critic of Trump and his cronies, infuriating MAGA and marking her as a controversial figure in her own party.
A source familiar with the process told NOTUS that GOP machinations to prop up Crockett’s run first began in June, when Texas Democrats met to discuss 2026 midterm elections—and the firebrand Democrat wasn’t invited, or included in any initial polls.
In July, the National Republican Senatorial Committee published a poll that found that Crockett was the preferred candidate among Democratic voters. “When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” the source told NOTUS.
After the NRSC included Crockett’s name in their poll, other surveys started to include her too. The source told NOTUS that those polls were then aggressively seeded into progressive digital spaces by NRSC allies to “orchestrate the pile on” of promising polling numbers and drive the narrative that support for Crockett was “surging.”
The source dubbed the system of trying to pull in a weaker candidate who would lose to the Republican challenger as an “AstroTurf recruitment process.”
Incumbent Senator John Cornyn, who is running for reelection, dismissed Crockett as “radical, theatrical, and ineffective.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump who is currently leading the Republican primary polls, claimed that “everyone knows” Crockett will “be soundly defeated.” Previous polls had indicated that Paxton would fare far worse against state Representative James Talarico, the other Democratic primary candidate, or Collin Allred, who dropped his bid shortly before Crockett jumped into the race.