Crockett makes Senate bid official
Meanwhile, Colin Allred suspended his Senate run and announced his candidacy for the redrawn TX-33, setting up a messy primary against his House successor.
Jasmine Crockett jumped into the Texas Senate race on Monday afternoon, using a Dallas event on deadline day to declare her candidacy and upend the Democratic primary. With Colin Allred exiting to pursue a newly drawn House seat, the contest now comes down to Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico in a pairing that pits two of Texas’s fastest-rising Democrats against each other in a bid to break the party’s 38-year drought in statewide Senate races.
The second-term congresswoman had been hinting at a Senate run for weeks before making it official, quietly commissioning private polling to test whether she could win a Democratic primary and mount a credible challenge against whichever Republican emerges from next spring’s GOP contest: four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The numbers, as she told me last week, suggested a real path to consolidating Democratic voters and energizing those usually unmotivated to turn out in non-presidential elections.
In recent weeks, the former lawyer and public defender has been maneuvering behind the scenes to align the chess pieces around her prospective candidacy and strengthen the party’s statewide prospects in a state President Donald Trump carried by fourteen points in 2024. Allred’s decision to bow out and run for a newly drawn House seat was the first visible shift. The larger question is whether others will follow, including potential entrants in lieutenant governor and attorney general races who could help form the kind of coordinated slate Democrats have long lacked in Texas.
“There are a lot of people that said, ‘You gotta stay in the House. We need our voice. We need you there.’ And I understand,” Crockett said at her launch event. “But what we need is for me to have a bigger voice. What we need is not only a voice, but we need to make sure that we are going to stop all the hell that is raining down on all of our people.”
Talarico used Crockett’s entrance as an opportunity to project strength, portraying his campaign as the race’s grassroots powerhouse and signaling that he doesn’t see her as a threat to his momentum.
“We’re building a movement in Texas—fueled by record-breaking grassroots fundraising and 10,000 volunteers who are putting the work to defeat the billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians who have taken over our state,” he said in a statement. “Our movement is rooted in unity over divison—so we welcome Congressman Crockett into the race.”
Crockett’s decision was also thought to have created a landing spot in Texas’s 30th congressional district for Rep. Marc Veasey, whose majority-Black and Hispanic district was carved up in an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymander engineered by Texas Republicans. (The new TX-30 was redrawn to absorb large portions of South Dallas and surrounding Democratic strongholds, creating a reliably blue seat that also served as a release valve for the GOP’s broader effort to dilute minority voting power elsewhere.) But Veasey will now run for a judgeship in Tarrant County, Texas’s third-largest county and a bellwether of the state’s suburban battleground, after Crockett’s pastor, Dr. Freddie Haynes, filed to run for the seat.
Allred explained his decision to step out of the 2026 Senate primary because he concluded that a long, bruising contest—especially with the field likely expanding to include Jasmine Crockett—would make it harder for Democrats to unify against Trump and whichever Republican ultimately emerges. Besides Cornyn and Paxton, the Republican primary also includes Rep. Wesley Hunt, whose candidacy is likely to force a runoff between the top two candidates—and a small fortune that would otherwise be spent on defeating the Democratic nominee.
The redrawn TX-33 now stretches from Oak Cliff and West Dallas through Grand Prairie and Irving and up toward the northwest suburbs, a reconfigured Metroplex seat that pulls in pieces of several diverse communities while shoring up Republican advantages elsewhere in the map. With the Supreme Court allowing Texas Republicans’ new maps to stand, Allred says the newly redrawn TX-33 is both his home turf and a community where he’s already delivered tangible results: a local VA hospital and more than $135 million in federal funding for housing, transportation and health care.
He also cast his pivot as a response to the stakes of the moment rather than a lack of support, noting that he’s been moved by the personal stories voters have shared with him on the trail, and as a return to his roots and a continuation of unfinished work, invoking his Jan. 6 experience and arguing that Trump’s second-term agenda poses even greater risks. He says he’s running again for Congress so kids in the district can have the same opportunities he had growing up.
But Rep. Julie Johnson, Allred’s successor in TX-32, who declared her candidacy in TX-33 last Friday, accused Allred of only shifting his ambitions once Crockett’s entrance undercut his Senate chances.
“This new district deserves representation that has been present in the tough moments, including throughout the redistricting fight, instead of parachuting back when another campaign doesn’t work out,” Johnson said in a statement. “Families here are dealing with rising costs, housing pressures, and real economic strain. They deserve someone with a strong record in Democratic collaboration and support.”
Equality PAC also blasted Allred’s move, arguing that with Trump and congressional Republicans escalating attacks on LGBTQ+ people, it’s “unconscionable” for a Democrat to mount a challenge against Johnson—the first openly LGBTQ+ member of Congress from Texas.
“Our [Victory Fund] is all-in for [Johnson],” Evan Low, president and CEO of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, said on Sunday night ahead of Allred’s announcement.