Campaign Jasmine Crockett, James Talarico and the power of compact electoral minorities by Chris Stirewalt - 03/03/26 6:00 AM ET by Chris Stirewalt - 03/03/26 6:00 AM ET Share ✕ LinkedIn LinkedIn Email Email NOW PLAYING MAGA Republicans in Texas backing state Attorney General Ken Paxton in Tuesday’s Senate primary share a lot in common with Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s supporters on the Democratic side. There is the reckless thrill of telling party elites and opinion mongers that you don’t give a damn what the prudent choice would be. There’s also the preference for combat over conciliation. Like Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), state Rep. James Talarico (D) is an obvious potential compromiser, while Paxton and Crockett can present plenty of evidence in their own careers that they’re willing to walk away empty-handed rather than make any concessions. In lots of ways, Crockett is the prime example of blue MAGA. Her opponents and the political press say she’s crude, cruel and dishonest, but her supporters say the other side has it coming. She smears and sneers, but when her targets respond in kind, she plays the victim until she can get back on offense. These are all the kinds of tactics that President Trump used to such great effect.  But where MAGA should most see itself in Crockett is in the power of compact electoral minorities. In American politics today, it’s often better to be an inch wide and a mile deep than it is to try to maintain a broad coalition. That was how the MAGA movement took shape around Trump and then bowled over a mainstream Republican establishment that had won every presidential nominating contest since 1980. By sticking together, no matter what, the members of MAGA changed the course of history. But they hardly invented the technique. The conventional wisdom around Joe Biden’s victory in the Democrats’ 2020 nominating process held that Black Democrats, who made up almost 60 percent of the electorate in the crucial South Carolina primary, were more moderate than the very white, very online electorates in other states and preferred Biden to progressive favorites like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass).  There’s truth in that, to be sure. Black primary voters, particularly older, churchgoing, high-propensity types, are not likely to be swept up in the revolutionary utopianism of candidates such as Maine Senate contender Graham Platner. But there’s something else, too. Black voters, especially in the South, know how to vote strategically. Biden was the best choice to a) actually win the general election and b) feel politically beholden to the Black voters who saved his candidacy. One of the refrains of the Democratic Party in the 2020 general election would be “Vote like your life depends on it.” It was, among other things, an allusion to the still-raging coronavirus pandemic. But for a lot of Black voters in the South — in places like South Carolina where school districts fought desegregation into the 1970s, and where the law against interracial marriage technically remained on the books until 1998 — the slogan was not an abstraction. From Reconstruction to disenfranchisement to the Voting Rights Act and beyond, Black South Carolinians understood that as only about a quarter of the electorate, they would have to stick together to maximize their influence in a state where many in the majority meant them harm. One of the ways Democrats have gotten Hispanic voters wrong this century is by applying the lessons of the 1960s and Black voters to what, for at least two decades now, has been the second-largest ethnic group in the country. The capacity of Black voters to turn on a dime and switch their support from Republican to Democratic and remain overwhelmingly so for six decades reflects an understanding that unity is powerful. It was always foolish to imagine that the child of Cuban emigres in Cuba, a fifth-generation Texan and a newly naturalized Chicano in Southern California would engage in the same kind of strategic voting as the survivors of slavery and Jim Crow and their immediate descendants.   In Texas, Black voters are an even smaller share of the electorate than in South Carolina and other Deep South states: just about 11 percent or 12 percent in recent cycles. But in Houston and Dallas, Crockett’s hometown, there are enough Black voters that, if they stick together, they can continue to dominate Democratic primary politics in four House districts. Statewide, it’s more complicated. An Emerson College poll out on the eve of today’s election shows Black voters making up about a quarter of the total Democratic electorate in the Crockett/Talarico showdown — less than Hispanic voters (29 percent) and white voters (40 percent). But by getting 80 percent of Black voters, Crockett is only trailing by 5 points, certainly within the poll&