When U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett jumped into the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Texas, she was the immediate frontrunner.

Widely known and beloved by Democratic voters, Crockett had a record of strong fundraising in the U.S. House and a knack for going viral with her brassy quips aimed at Republican foes. Her lead opponent, state Rep. James Talarico of Austin, was on the rise but lesser known among voters outside of Central Texas. Former congressman and 2024 Senate Democratic nominee Colin Allred was a rerun, who dropped out of the race in the hours before she launched.

Early Wednesday, Crockett lost the nomination to Talarico by a decisive margin — the result of a fiercely competitive primary that overwhelmed the Dallas congresswoman’s starting assets and tested the power of political celebrity among Texas Democrats. Her loss reflected both the strength of Talarico’s campaign and her own team’s inability to scale in time for such an expensive and hotly contested statewide race.

From the start, four people familiar with her campaign said, Crockett’s team deprioritized the primary race, confident that her name recognition and reputation as a fighter in Congress would be impossible for Talarico to catch up with, and would carry her to the general election. So she embarked on a primary battle with a makeshift operation that lacked a campaign manager, a developed fundraising strategy and comprehensive infrastructure for a ground game.

“What happened with Jasmine was that name ID can only take you so far,” said Monique Alcala, the former executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. “You actually have to have a real campaign operation, and actually engage in measurable campaign tactics. I don’t think that we ever saw that come together throughout the entire time that she was running.”

Crockett still put up a strong showing at the ballot box, winning over a million votes — 46% of ballots cast — and ginning up enthusiasm among the Democratic base, particularly Black voters.

But she was unable to run up the score where she needed to in Texas’ biggest and most diverse cities. At the same time, Talarico trounced in his political home base in Central Texas, and with voters in heavily Latino counties — a crucial, swingy voting bloc in the general electorate.

Crockett’s relative lack of an apparatus made a difference, especially against a candidate who entered the race three months before she did and built up significant media, fundraising, volunteer and events operations, and whose political persona cultivated its own kind of gravitational pull.

“This was a close race, and so I don’t want to sound like she ran a bad campaign,” Democratic strategist Matt Angle said. “She just ran into a guy who ran a really good campaign. And it’s a really good sign for Democrats that James wasn’t just a personality that caught fire — he had a plan, and he carried it out.”

Crockett declined an interview request. Campaign spokesperson Karrol Rimal declined to comment, citing “party unity,” but he insisted that the number of votes Crockett earned per dollar spent was crucial to any post-election analysis of her campaign.

A member of Crockett’s inner campaign circle, who asked not to be named so they could speak candidly, acknowledged the campaign’s reliance on her popularity and relative lack of infrastructure, but pushed back on the idea that she did not run a strong campaign, noting that she invested in advertising and turnout operations at a greater level than past statewide Democratic campaigns, which were not nearly as competitive as this cycle’s.

Ultimately, Talarico and his super PAC massively outspent Crockett, dropping an unprecedented amount of money in a statewide Democratic primary that she could not counter.

“That was the thing that we saw happening the whole time,” Crockett’s team member said, “and you just can’t really overcome that.”

Campaign infrastructure

Crockett’s challenges started with timing. Her decision to jump into the race so last minute — on the last day candidates could file in December — shortened her runway to build out a campaign that could face off in such a heated, expensive contest.

Competitive candidates for statewide office typically start planting the seeds of their campaign months, if not years, in advance, wooing donors, building relationships with political allies around the state, developing their email list and putting together a potential team.

But while Crockett had considered higher office — as popular politicians do — she had not been actively setting up a campaign before she launched, the member of her team said, forcing her to build up an organization in a matter of months.

“I don’t fault her for her campaign,” Chuck Rocha, a senior adviser on Talarico’s campaign, said in an interview Tuesday before the election results rolled in. “She had the benefit of having the name ID, but … she’s building the plane while she’s flying it.”

Notably, Crockett did not have a campaign manager for the entirety of her run, and while she delegated components of her campaign to trusted advisers, she largely managed operations herself. Her team member described her leadership style as a hub and spokes, rather than the more traditional top-down pyramid structure of most campaigns. That stood in contrast with Talarico’s campaign, which built out teams with dozens of salaried staffers in Texas, according to his most recent federal spending report.

A Democratic strategist briefed directly by Crockett said she indicated shortly after her campaign launch that Jason Lee, a senior adviser to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and son of the late U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, was on deck to run the campaign, but he never came through. In January, the strategist learned that Crockett was expecting Lee to come for the general election. Lee did not respond to an interview request.

“I was told they would not hire some consultants until after the primary,” said Dallas Jones, a Democratic strategist. “It was my understanding that all these things would happen after the primary, and now it appears that it’s not going to happen at all.”

With less time and fundraising to power her run, the campaign focused its energy on TV and digital advertising — instead of staffing up or building out a massive field operation.

Though she barnstormed the state and met voters at the polls during the 11-day early voting period, her campaign up until that point had largely been made up of appearances at churches, local businesses and events hosted by other groups, like unions and Black sororities.

The Crockett team member said the congresswoman wanted to meet Texans where they were outside of political settings, instead of bringing them to her events.

Crockett planned to get around the state more after she secured the nomination and while Republicans were duking it out in a runoff election, said a Democratic strategist who spoke to her directly about the matter.

“To her own admittance, Congresswoman Crockett wanted to launch and run a campaign that was different,” said Jones, noting her emphasis on in-person politicking at smaller venues like bars and churches over standard campaign rallies and events. “It was a very untraditional campaign in how it was ran and in many ways experimental.”

“If that is the case,” he added, “then we would now say the experiment did not work.”

Crockett’s ground game also paled in comparison to Talarico’s, who has said he saw his bid as the “underdog” campaign.

Crockett largely relied on organizations that endorsed her, such as Jolt Action and Texas Organizing Project, for get-out-the-vote tactics like door-to-door canvassing, in place of a robust in-house operation to turn out her voters.

The Crockett team member said that her campaign invested in Black voter turnout through blockwalking, virtual town halls, robocalls, Black radio stations and efforts on digital platforms to target infrequent Black Democratic voters.

In contrast, Talarico brought tens of thousands of Texans out to rallies and events his campaign put on around the state after he launched his bid in September. His campaign recruited 28,000 volunteers, contacted voters in all 254 counties in Texas and hosted more than 560 voter mobilization events in 75 cities throughout the race, according to a Saturday news release. In the four days before election day, his campaign and its volunteers blitzed 40 cities with 130 events.

He also had a clear-cut plan to win Latino voters in particular, running ads and social media content in Spanish, campaigning with Tejano music star Bobby Pulido in South Texas and closing his campaign with an ad featuring Latino influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina.

“He won because he showed up in communities, he ran advertising in those communities, he had an amazing field team,” Rocha said on social media Wednesday. “It’s grassroots organizing combined with paid advertising in digital, TV, radio around sporting events, and a robust Latino advertising campaign.”

Fundraising

Further into the campaign, Crockett suffered from relatively lackluster fundraising. She raised $8.6 million over the course of her bid, more than half of which she transferred from her House committee — a total haul dwarfed by Talarico’s more than $20 million take.

That drove a major spending deficit on advertising. Crockett spent $4.8 million on advertising, which would have been an impressive spend for a Democratic primary candidate in Texas, if not for Talarico.

Starting in January, Talarico’s campaign and his super PAC collectively unleashed $25.9 million on ads through election day, outspending Crockett and her super PAC nearly five-to-one. Talarico and his super PAC together raised more than $27.2 million through the start of the year.

Crockett’s team member recalled wondering how long Talarico could maintain his spending momentum. But as he continued to flood the airwaves, Crockett’s internal polling began to show Talarico narrowing the name recognition gap and winning some of her supporters, particularly white women, to his side.

“The fact that he did stay up at that level every week — you see the buy come in at a million dollars a week — all of a sudden, you’re like, ‘Okay, this is gonna make a big difference,’” the team member said.

Meanwhile, Crockett’s only broadcast spot, the biggest avenue for campaigns to get their message out, came five days into early voting, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. The super PAC in her corner fizzled, dropping just under $600,000 on ads supporting her and opposing Talarico.

Over the course of his campaign, Talarico invested $5.7 million in digital fundraising, hiring Aisle 518, a firm whose clients have included California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, to build out the operation.

Alcala, the former state party director, added that donors she spoke to in Texas, most of whom had backed Allred, did not express “any strong sense of enthusiasm” for Crockett’s candidacy.

“People related to James a lot more,” she said. “The donor class is not hyper progressive, as Jasmine presents herself.”

Talarico’s campaign also appealed to some donors who were backing Allred to stay on the sidelines or support his bid after the former Dallas congressman dropped out of the race, according to two Democratic strategists familiar with the conversations.

Colbert bump

Beyond his campaign infrastructure, the race frequently broke Talarico’s way, such as when late night host Stephen Colbert accused CBS of nixing their interview together because of new guidance from the Trump administration, turning Talarico into a national headline and an instant foil to President Donald Trump — catnip in Democratic primary elections.

The interview, posted on the eve of the early voting period, garnered 9.1 million views on YouTube and raised Talarico $2.5 million in the 24 hours after.

Put up against Talarico’s populist message of a “politics of love” and his campaign operation, Crockett’s popularity and appeal as a partisan warrior ultimately came up short at the ballot box.

“Talarico’s apparent win shows that campaign fundamentals still matter and having the better ground game, especially in Hispanic areas, was crucial,” Jessica Taylor, an editor at The Cook Political Report, said on social media. “His $$ advantage on air mattered, and the Colbert bump in organic search didn’t hurt either clearly.”

Going into the general election, Talarico will have to win over Crockett’s base of mostly Black voters, while facing a barrage of attacks Republicans began unleashing even before the race was called.

Republican National Committee spokesperson Zach Kraft called Talarico a “woke nutjob” that Texans would reject. Incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton were headed to a May runoff election after neither won 50% of votes on Tuesday, though President Donald Trump shook up that possibility by dangling an endorsement and saying the candidate he does not pick should drop out of the race.

In a statement conceding the race Wednesday, Crockett offered a message of unity and said she would “continue working to elect Democrats up and down the ballot.”

“Texas is primed to turn blue and we must remain united because this is bigger than any one person,” she said. “With the primary behind us, Democrats must rally around our nominees and win.”

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