Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has actively worked behind the scenes to encourage Rep. Jasmine Crockett to jump into the Senate Democratic primary in Texas, believing she will be the easiest opponent to beat.
Just a month ago, there was grave concern among Republicans about the Senate race, where incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is running for reelection. Democrats were running two formidable candidates, and Cornyn was caught in the middle of a bruising three-way primary that Republicans were concerned would weaken the eventual nominee.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee put out a poll in July with Crockett’s name included, which showed her as the leading Democrat in a hypothetical matchup.
“When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” a source familiar with the process told NOTUS.
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The fact that Crockett was included in the poll was no accident.
In June news broke that Texas Democrats Colin Allred, James Talarico, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro met to discuss the 2026 election. Operatives at the NRSC realized that Crockett — whose political stock had been rising — wasn’t included in that meeting and also hadn’t been included in any credible poll. So they decided to change that.
Following the NRSC’s polls, other surveys began to include Crockett and showed similar results: She was surging in the primary.
The NRSC then worked to amplify those polls and is taking credit for helping “orchestrate the pile on of these polling numbers to really drive that news cycle and that narrative that Jasmine Crockett was surging in Texas,” the source said.
Crockett herself even admitted she was encouraged to jump into the race by all the positive polling she was seeing ahead of her announcement.
“The more I saw the poll results, I couldn’t ignore the trends that were clear,” Crockett said during her announcement speech.
Crockett did not return a request for comment.
But the Republican efforts didn’t stop there. In what the source dubbed an “AstroTurf recruitment process,” the NRSC had “allies that were seeding these new polls pretty aggressively into progressive digital spaces.”
There were several recruitment phone calls and text messages that went out to Democrats and high-propensity voters across the state that would urge voters to contact and advocate for Crockett to join the race, the source said.
“That was really a sustained effort that we orchestrated across the ecosystem for several months,” the source said. “Not only was it getting positive news coverage, but her office was directly having traffic driven to it in terms of phone calls urging her to run.”
Cornyn was trailing significantly in the polls to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Rep. Wesley Hunt was creeping up on him. Polls also showed Paxton faring worse against Allred and Talarico, the Democrats who had announced they were running, in the general election.
Then, this past week, Allred dropped out of the Senate race, opting instead to run for the House, and Crockett, whose brand of anti-Trump, anti-Republican virality has made her popular with the progressive base, announced she would run for Senate in Texas.
The NRSC also worked to ensure they were “communicating” to donors and others in the Republican campaign ecosystem what they were seeing in the polling, the source said.
Now that Crockett is in the race, the work is not done. There have been conversations with outside groups and conservative figures about the possibility of working to “stand up independent expenditure arms and offshoot brands that aren’t necessarily overtly Republican entities, but that would prop her candidacy up to try and give us a better shot at facing her.”
“It’s not all too different than what we’re kind of already doing on a daily basis as the party committee, which is helping quarterback support for Republicans. And in this case, you know, the recruitment process is as much a recruiting of strong Republicans as it is trying to find ways to prop up, you know, very vulnerable Democrats,” the source said.
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