What Can the Texas Primary Tell Us About Democrats?

Our reporter Elaine Godfrey on getting kicked out of a Jasmine Crockett rally

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This week, the Atlantic staff writer Elaine Godfrey was covering a campaign rally in Texas when she was ushered out. Elaine has been covering national politics for years, and has been turned away before—but, she says that has usually happened to her at Trump rallies. This time, she was turned away by a Democrat running in a Senate primary.

Representative Jasmine Crockett is known for her confrontational style, and it serves her well with her constituents, voters, and Democrats who are tired of playing nice when Republicans don’t. Last year, Godfrey profiled Crockett for The Atlantic, a story that Crockett tried to “shut down” when she found out her House colleagues were being interviewed. “Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there,” Godfrey wrote at the time. Is that where the rest of the party might be heading? We talked to Godfrey about her experience at the rally and the upcoming primary election in Texas.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: The Texas Senate primaries are drawing national headlines. You may have heard of the Democratic candidates: Representative Jasmine Crockett, whose spat with Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2024 lit up social media

Representative Jasmine Crockett: If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?

Representative James Comer: A what now?

Harris: —or James Talarico, who was recently interviewed by Stephen Colbert—an interview Colbert said CBS tried to bar him from airing.

State Representative James Talarico: I think that Donald Trump is worried that we’re about to flip Texas. (Applause.)

Harris: And both candidates would have a big hill to climb. No Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994, and promising candidates, from Beto O’Rourke to Wendy Davis, have tried and failed to change that fact.

But people think Crockett or Talarico really could. And it’s making them wonder: Is this the year for a Democrat in Texas?

This is Radio Atlantic, and I’m Adam Harris, sitting in for Hanna Rosin. Atlantic staff writer Elaine Godfrey has been covering this Texas race and also following Representative Crockett. She profiled her last year.

And then, while Elaine was at a Crockett campaign event this week, this happened.

Elaine Godfrey: Why are you asking me to leave?

Woman: They just said, “Elaine from Atlantic, white girl with a hat and notepad. She’s interviewing people in the crowd. She’s a top-notch hater and will spin. She needs to leave.”

I told her to get her bag and—

Harris: We’ll get into that soon.

Elaine, welcome to the show.

Godfrey: Adam, thank you for having me.

Harris: So the Texas Senate primary, why has this race captured the national media attention? What’s going on in the Texas primary?

Godfrey: I think what’s made the Texas primary on the Democrat side so exciting is that both of the candidates are really popular. Voters are excited about them both, genuinely. And also, the dynamic here is you have two fighters, and Democrats have been saying they want fighters against Trump. And each of these candidates does so in a different way.

So you have Jasmine Crockett, one of the Democrats. She’s a two-term congresswoman who is much sharper in her criticism of Trump, much more willing to throw insults, much more bombastic. She’s on cable news all the time. She’s in hearings blasting Trump and aggressively sort of questioning witnesses. And Democrats love this. They love to see a capital-F fighter.

Harris: Yeah.

Godfrey: You also have James Talarico, who is running against her, who is a state lawmaker in Texas; they used to be colleagues in the state legislature. He’s also a preacher in training. And he’s a little quieter. His approach is a lot more peace and love: We need to heal as a country. He talks a lot more about Let’s join hands with our Republican friends. Trump is made in the image of God, and we should be fighting against the top and the billionaires rather than each other.

So they’re both fighters, and they’re both sort of channeling Democratic rage and the rage of voters at this moment, but they’re doing so in very interesting ways. It’s such a perfect encapsulation of this moment, so it’s very exciting to watch.

Harris: Yeah. And so you’ve been watching this for a while. You go to Texas to cover the race. And then what happens?

Godfrey: I go to Texas to cover the race. (Laughs.) And this is my first event. I show up on Monday morning to an event for Jasmine Crockett. There’s a line out the door. It’s in Lubbock, Texas. It’s in a rural area, an event center on a county road. I’m interviewing all of these people who have come to see Crockett. They’re so excited. The vibes are really good.

I come in. I show my badge. They put me in the press section. I watched the whole rally. I was taking notes the whole time. It was the kind of rally that I think, if you’re a candidate, you want a reporter to be at ’cause she looked great. She came off great. People loved it.

Afterwards, they had a press availability for her. And there were only a few press there, most local. And I went over to join, and after I identified myself, one of her press people said, It’s already full. You can’t go in there. I said, Okay. So I went back to keep interviewing people who were lingering in the building.

And then a different person came up to me and said, Her team wants you to leave. And I said, Why? She read from her phone, and she said, They’re looking for Elaine from The Atlantic, a white girl in a baseball cap with a notepad. She’s a top-notch hater, and she will spin. She needs to leave.

I don’t think they were supposed to have read that message to me. (Laughs.) But they did, and then, immediately, security guards surrounded me and escorted me out of the building, through the parking lot, to the edge of the county road, where I had to get an Uber.

Harris: And you recorded this whole interaction, and it’s a good thing that you did record it ’cause after you published the article, the campaign denied it. They said that they didn’t actually say that.

Godfrey: Yeah. First, a spokesperson for Crockett said that that didn’t happen. Then a CBS reporter was interviewing Crockett and asked about it, and Crockett said, There’s no evidence that a reporter was ejected from my event. She also said, The specific reporter in question has a reputation for not being truthful and has been sued for defamation successfully.

She didn’t say my name at any point, but it was pretty clear she was talking about me. (Laughs.) I have since reached out to her and to her campaign multiple times to say, Could you clarify what you meant?, and I haven’t heard anything back.

Harris: And for the record, have you been sued for defamation successfully?

Godfrey: (Laughs.) I have not. No, I haven’t.

Harris: (Laughs.) Yeah.

In thinking about being turned away from rallies, we’ve seen, over the last several years, instances of reporters being turned away at campaign events. Has something like this ever happened to you before?

Godfrey: Yeah, at Trump rallies.

Harris: Hmm.

Godfrey: But they’ve treated me better at Trump rallies when they do this, I would say. (Laughs.) This has only happened a couple times at Trump rallies, where they’ve sort of said, We don’t have room for you, which that’s never true, but it’s never You’re a top-notch hater kind of thing.

And so, yeah, it has happened. I would say the kicking reporters out of rallies, Trump’s fans love that. A lot of Jasmine Crockett’s fans seem to like that too. They like the way that she sort of manhandles people, the way that she says, You know what? I’m not putting up with that.

hat she didn’t like and that she had tried to shut down because it was something that she thought was gonna be unflattering.

Harris: How did she try to shut it down?

Godfrey: So she called me four days before that profile of her was gonna be published, and she said, I heard you’ve been talking to members of Congress, my colleagues—her colleagues—without asking me, without my permission, she said, and so I will be revoking all permissions and shutting down the profile.

That is, obviously, not how journalism works. (Laughs.) So we published it. You can read it at TheAtlantic.com. I think it’s pretty fair and good. She gave me tons of access for that story. She talked to me a lot for it. I think it’s pretty fair, and I think that was pretty surprising, that she tried to shut it down and even more surprising that now, she appears to be holding that against me to this day. (Laughs.)

Harris: Yeah. So you mentioned that she’s sort of no shrinking violet, right? This is a part of who she is as a politician. It’s a capital-F fighter. You put it in your piece—you said she doesn’t wilt before the president “like cut hydrangeas.” So is this indicative of maybe a broader trend in the party? That we had the classic Michelle Obama “When they go low, we go high”—is this a way of sort of signaling that there’s an end to that?

Godfrey: I think, for some candidates, yeah. Republicans have already blown past that benchmark, right? There is an appetite now for Democrats to do the same.

And I don’t know if it means we’ll see more reporters getting thrown out of rallies, but specifically, when it comes to swearing, insulting people, not being willing to correct the record if you make a mistake or if accuse someone of having been accused of defamation, I think there is just a real increase in tolerance on the left now for that because they’re saying, Well, look at the guy in the White House. He does that all the time. Why can’t we? More importantly, why shouldn’t we? If we wanna win, we might have to play dirty. I think the midterms are probably gonna have a lot more of that than we’ve seen before.

Harris: Yeah. So of course, you were in Lubbock, so you’re in West Texas. You don’t just stay in West Texas and then leave. You continue on, continue to cover this race, so you go out to Tyler, and there’s a part in your story where you say you were asking folks, Why James Talarico?, and at the Crockett rally, similarly, Why Jasmine Crockett? And they seem to have a interest in the other candidate, but it was just about that style.

Can you just talk to me a little bit about that? What is that actually saying, that they’re both interested in the policies and the people, but the style is really what’s different?

Godfrey: Yeah. I was surprised, given how controversial or ugly the primary has seemed online and from the outside, that when I got there, people who like Jasmine Crockett still told me, But I like that James Talarico too. He seems nice. I’m not gonna vote for him, but he seems nice. And if he was in a general, I’d vote for him.

People were not so much interested in their policies. They were interested in style. People who liked Crockett liked that she was gonna go out there and go after Trump, gonna prosecute people when Democrats were back in power.

People who like Talarico, they were kind of playing a little bit of 3-D chess, right? They were saying, Well, I like Talarico because I think he’ll appeal to more Republicans and independents and moderates when the general election comes. So maybe some of them would prefer Crockett, but they were thinking about electability. And I think Democrats in Texas are really balancing this urge for a fighter with a desire to win.

Harris: So we’ve been talking about the Democratic candidates. Obviously, the primaries are on Tuesday, and you’ve been watching the Republican side as well, so what should we be looking out for?

Godfrey: So I think the Republicans have their own real mess over there, I would say. There’s three Republicans in the race: John Cornyn, who’s already a senator, who’s running for reelection; Ken Paxton, attorney general, who is running against him; and Wesley Hunt, who is sort of the spoiler in the race. (Laughs.) People like him. He may be the force that sets the race to a runoff.

But I’m watching what happens if Paxton is the nominee. Right now polls show he’s probably gonna beat Cornyn; he’s probably gonna be the Republican nominee for the race. And here’s why Democrats love to hear this: because Paxton brings a ton of baggage. He was impeached and acquitted over allegations of bribery and corruption. He was accused by his wife of having an affair. He has this long laundry list of scandals that Republicans are worried is gonna make him just a toxic candidate and Democrats are really excited will make him so weak that a Democrat could finally win in Texas.

And I think part of what makes Talarico particularly exciting for a lot of Democrats is they think he has the best chance to beat Paxton if it comes down to a head-to-head. I think Crockett probably would have a good chance, too, although her unfavorables are very high compared Talarico’s.

So that is something I’ll be watching too—that’s something we’ll all be watching—is what happens on the Republican side, ’cause that’s really gonna determine what the chances are for a Democrat to win statewide in Texas for the first time in, like, 30 years.

Harris: Yeah. So they’re thinking it could be like a Doug Jones–Roy Moore situation.

Godfrey: Exactly. Yep.

Harris: Well, we’ll be watching, Elaine. Thank you so much.

Godfrey: Thank you for having me.

Harris: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered this episode and provided original music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Adam Harris. Thank you for listening.