Rep. Jasmine Crockett's Texas Senate campaign has been running for over two months without a campaign manager, has been outspent on political ads by her primary rival 19-to-1, and until recently featured a website that included placeholder text reading, "Write out your bullet points here."
This is not a parody. This is the Democratic frontrunner's operation.
According to the Washington Examiner, Crockett, the progressive Democrat from Texas who built a national profile through viral congressional clips, launched her Senate bid in December. By every traditional measure of campaign competence — staffing, fundraising, advertising, even basic web design — the effort has left her own party scratching its head. State Rep. James Talarico, her primary opponent, has buried her in ad spending at a 19-to-1 ratio. Fellow Democrats, speaking anonymously, have been remarkably blunt about the dysfunction.
One unnamed Democratic strategist offered an assessment that landed somewhere between diagnosis and eulogy:
"I don't think she's a particularly strong candidate. I don't think she's putting together a particularly strong effort. And I don't think they're particularly interested in taking any advice on how to make things better."
That same strategist described the whole operation as a "political science experiment" — the kind of phrase you use when you want to say "disaster" but still have to work with these people after the primary.
Another Democrat who had been in direct talks with the campaign was equally baffled:
"There wasn't that work done ahead of time, but there should have been. I just don't get it. She could have been better organized, but she wasn't."
No campaign manager. No commanding fundraising plan. No 24-hour fundraising goal at launch — the kind of basic organizational step that even long-shot candidates treat as table stakes. The campaign does have a deputy campaign manager, Karrol Rimal, which raises the obvious question: deputy to whom?
Then there's the website. Crockett's campaign page featured a section on mental healthcare policy that trailed off into literal placeholder instructions:
"Requiring all major insurance providers to include full mental healthcare coverage, including prescription medications and therapies. Write out your bullet points here. Anything from a sentence to a paragraph works."
Under the Social Security section, visitors found copy-paste wreckage — a header about Social Security followed by policy language about gun reform:
"In Congress, I've pushed for common sense gun reform, including:"
The errors were eventually fixed. But the fact that they were published at all — on a statewide Senate campaign site, weeks into the race — tells you something about the level of attention being paid to the basics.
Rimal, the deputy campaign manager, framed all of this as strategy rather than incompetence:
"We reject the D.C. playbook of politics as usual, because this moment — and winning — demands something different."
What does "something different" look like? According to Rimal, grassroots enthusiasm:
"Whether it's the clubs in Houston, the bars of McAllen, or church services in San Antonio — people immediately recognize the congresswoman and are eager for a picture, to share words of encouragement, a quick prayer, or even FaceTime their loved ones who follow the congresswoman's work."
No data accompanied this claim. No fundraising totals to back it up. No volunteer numbers, no event attendance figures. Just the assertion that vibes and FaceTime calls are closing a 19-to-1 ad spending gap.
This is a familiar pattern on the left — the belief that celebrity, cultural cachet, and social media moments are a substitute for the unglamorous mechanics of winning elections. It's the Beto O'Rourke theory of Texas politics: generate enough national buzz and the infrastructure will somehow materialize. Texas Democrats have been running that experiment for a decade. The results speak for themselves.
Crockett did receive one significant boost: a video endorsement from former Rep. Colin Allred, the last Democrat to challenge for a Texas Senate seat. But even the endorsement arrived wrapped in intraparty drama.
A liberal content creator alleged that Talarico had referred to Allred as a "mediocre black man." Talarico pushed back, claiming the conversation had been mischaracterized — that he'd described Allred's campaigning as mediocre, not Allred himself. No direct quotes from either the content creator or Talarico were provided, so the actual exchange remains murky.
What isn't murky is how Allred responded. His endorsement video doubled as a warning shot at Talarico:
"If you want to compliment black women, just do it. Just do it. Don't do it while also tearing down a black man. OK? We've seen that play before. We're sick and tired of it. We're tired of folks using praise for black women to mask criticism for black men."
He then went further:
"Go vote for Jasmine Crockett. This man should not be our nominee for the United States Senate. I wasn't going to get involved in this race, but listen, don't come for me unless I send for you, OK, James? And keep my name out of your mouth while you're at it."
This is a Democratic primary in Texas — a state where Democrats haven't won a statewide race in over two decades — and the energy is being spent on identity-driven infighting over an unverified secondhand allegation. Not on messaging. Not on voter outreach. Not on closing a massive spending gap. On settling personal scores.
Conservatives watching this unfold should note what it reveals about the state of the Texas Democratic Party. After Colin Allred's well-funded, high-profile loss in the last Senate cycle, the party's bench answer is a congresswoman running a campaign so disorganized that her own allies can't defend it on the record — and a state legislator whose primary credential is that he bought more ads.
The "reject the D.C. playbook" framing from Crockett's camp is worth examining honestly. There's nothing wrong with unconventional campaigns — when the unconventional approach is a deliberate strategic choice backed by execution. What Democrats are describing here isn't a maverick operation. It's a campaign that skipped the fundamentals and is now calling the absence of preparation a philosophy.
The placeholder text on the website is almost too perfect a metaphor. Write out your bullet points here. Anything from a sentence to a paragraph works. That's not just a web design error. It's the campaign's entire theory of the case, captured in a forgotten template instruction.
Texas Democrats needed a serious Senate candidate. They got a political science experiment — and even the lab partners aren't sure what hypothesis is being tested.