Jasmine Crockett’s Last Stand

Welcome to Radio Free America, Aaron Kleinman’s take on stories that matter in state politics but aren't getting enough attention. 

In the aftermath of the 2024 election, Democrats realized that they had a problem: They were losing the attention war.

Attention is one of the most valuable commodities there is; there’s a finite amount of it, especially among the tiny group of voters that can swing elections. Democratic communication strategies and resources are largely geared toward trying to get favorable coverage in mainstream media sources in the belief that matters most to getting swing voters’ attention. Conversely, Republicans spent decades building up their own sources of media so they could try to get people’s attention directly instead of relying on an intermediary. 

Republicans were right. In 2024, if your political attention was attuned to mainstream media, then you likely voted for Harris. But that wasn’t enough for her. Swing voters increasingly got political news from alternate sources, and Republicans had mastered standing those sources up and getting them to pop up to the top of their news feeds. Up against that, traditional Democratic comms strategy was a failure.

If you’re a Democratic candidate, how do you fix this? Jasmine Crockett had a solution: She’d grab voters’ attention by creating buzzy content that didn’t have to be mediated by the mainstream media but would be picked up by alternate sources. In the aftermath of 2024, she seemed to be the anti-Harris — talking off the cuff, unafraid to be brash in order to get attention and willing to fight Republicans on their own turf (TikTok and other short form video). And when she announced that she was running for the U.S. Senate last December, this was a huge advantage for her, as she had near-universal name recognition among primary voters.

But now we know that it wasn’t enough on its own. She seemingly never landed on a campaign manager, there were rumors that her voter turnout efforts were lacking and she was vastly outspent in TV advertising. But her theory of victory was that these block-and-tackle elements of campaigning were irrelevant in 2026. Surely, her ability to create viral moments and inspire voters in person would carry the day while she sunk fewer resources into Democratic operative salaries.

And she might have been right except for one thing: Her opponent, James Talarico, knew how to command the attention economy, too. Unlike Kamala Harris, he could win over Joe Rogan. And when the FCC jawboned CBS into pulling his interview with Stephen Colbert, a YouTube clip of the exchange gathered 85 million views. All the while, he was able to get these attention economy wins while also running a more typical campaign. That’s why he’s going to be the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas.

I don’t want the lesson from this primary to be that you shouldn’t try to reach voters by being unscripted or willing to piss some people off in the name of getting attention. Just because Jasmine Crockett lost it doesn’t mean that Democrats should go back to focusing their comms strategy on only getting a soundbyte onto CNN. But getting voter attention in an atomized media landscape isn’t enough to win on its own; you still have to do the less exciting parts of campaigning like blockwalking, raising money and spending that money on TV ads. Because there’s nothing’s stopping you from doing that AND going viral. Just ask James Talarico.

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