The Art of Losing: Jasmine Crockett

Thoughts on the official end of the first complete character arc of Trump 2.0.

This Tuesday, the 2026 election cycle officially began. In a series of surprisingly early primaries across a series of Southern states, American voters of both parties went through with the first stages of their verdict on the latest Trump administration by selecting their congressional nominees for his final midterm election. Of all of these contests, the stakes were by far the highest in the Texas Democratic senate primary, where a historically large electorate of liberal voters was asked to choose their standard bearer in what stands to be one of the single most important contests of the entire year. Up for their consideration were two distinct visions for a new post-2024 liberalism: State Representative James Talarico’s shapeshifting liberal populism on one hand, and U.S. House Representative Jasmine Crockett’s firebrand partisanship on the other.

Just the fact that this was even a race at all was a story in and of itself. Despite beginning the new administration as a second-term House backbencher, Jasmine Crockett had made modern political history by posting, insulting, and demagoguing herself into becoming a national liberal icon over the course of less than one year. By the end of 2025, she decided to cash in on her fame entering a Senate contest that she was already leading before even launching a campaign. At that moment in late November, she looked like nothing less than the future of the Democratic Party: the spearhead of a new kind of nihilistic anti-politics centered around little more than anti-conservative hate.

Jasmine Crockett succeeded in tapping into something real. When the results were finally tallied in her first-ever statewide race, she had won more than one million votes and carried three of Texas’s four largest cities. Yet she did not succeed in assembling enough support to actually win the nomination. Despite an early advantage in everything from polling to name recognition to endorsements, Crockett choked. She bled support across all three months of her short campaign until what was once a runoff-proof lead turned into a solid six point loss. For as much as liberals might have liked or even loved her personally, they were ultimately unwilling to meaningfully trust her with an actually important job once they actually got to see her in action.

If the soon-to-be-former Representative can take comfort in anything, it’s that what just occurred won’t be remembered as an all-time collapse. Crockett was never a Cuomo; just the fact that she made it to the position she once was at all was a major accomplishment with far-reaching implications. But none of this changes the fact that she isn’t the nominee, will be out of office by the end of the year, and failed so thoroughly at even finding a message for her bid that it now casts a shadow on all other Democrats with similar profiles heading into 2028. Here’s what both her rise and her fall can teach us about the ever-evolving nature of post-2024 American liberalism.

#1: Woke 1.0 is Dead.