A TikTok influencer's unverified claim about a white Democratic state legislator has detonated the Texas Democratic Senate primary into a full-blown identity politics meltdown — and even the left's own commentators are calling it out.
Atlantic writer Jonathan Chait torched his own side in a Friday column, labeling the escalating feud between state Rep. James Talarico and Rep. Jasmine Crockett the party's "latest and most egregious circular-firing-squad behavior." The dispute centers on an allegation from political influencer Morgan Thompson, who posts on TikTok under the handle @morga_tt, that Talarico once said he "signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable, intelligent Black woman" — a reference to former Rep. Colin Allred, who dropped out of the race in December.
Allred didn't let the claim pass quietly. He posted a video to social media on Monday endorsing Crockett and firing back at Talarico:
"We're tired of folks using praise for Black women to mask criticism for Black men."
Chait wasn't having it:
"Allred did not have to record and share his response to Talarico, nor was he required to take the allegation at face value. He chose the most inflammatory response."
What's remarkable isn't that Democrats are fighting. It's the weapon they chose.
The Texas Democratic Senate primary has become a case study in what happens when a party builds its entire moral framework around racial and gender identity — and then has to run candidates against each other.
Crockett, the progressive firebrand in the race, has leaned hard into identity-driven messaging, according to Fox News. She's said openly that she doesn't need to win over voters who supported President Donald Trump. Her theory of the case is mobilization, not persuasion — turning out voters who've never shown up rather than convincing anyone in the middle.
"Our goal is to make sure that we can engage people that historically have not been talked to."
Chait demolished this strategy with a single sentence:
"The belief that there is a hidden reservoir of left-wing voters who will bother to show up at the polls only if a sufficiently progressive candidate activates their interest is a decades-old myth."
It's a myth that has cost Democrats races across the country — but it persists because it flatters progressives into believing they don't have to moderate. They don't have to listen to voters who disagree with them. They just have to find the right avatar to "activate" a phantom electorate.
In Texas, of all places, this isn't a strategy. It's a fantasy.
The deeper rot Chait identified goes beyond one Senate primary. Crockett responded to podcast hosts Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers — who told their listeners not to waste money on her campaign — by framing their skepticism as racial animus:
"I really do think that the host said the quiet part out loud, which basically was: If a White man couldn't do it, then why would a Black woman even have the audacity to think that she could?"
Yang and Rogers later walked back their comments. The pattern is familiar: raise the accusation, watch the retreat, declare validation.
Chait drove straight at the structural flaw in this approach:
"One fatal flaw of progressive identity norms, which treat women and people of color as experts on racism and sexism whose charges of bias cannot be refuted, is that they insulate bad arguments from scrutiny. The belief that swing voters in Texas are too racist and sexist to be compromised with implies that defeat is the only morally acceptable option."
Read that last line again. Crockett's framework doesn't just risk losing — it requires it. If compromise is racism, and persuasion is capitulation, then the only clean outcome is a noble defeat. Texas Democrats get to feel righteous. Texas Republicans get to keep winning.
The timeline tells the story. Allred lost, dropped out, and then chose — weeks later — to detonate a grenade inside his own party's primary based on an unverified claim from a TikTok influencer. Crockett seized the moment to turn electability questions into racism accusations. Talarico, the other remaining major candidate, now has to navigate a minefield built entirely by his own allies.
The two candidates debated at the 2026 Texas AFL-CIO COPE Convention in Georgetown on January 24. But the real contest isn't happening on debate stages. It's happening in the progressive feedback loop where the loudest accusation wins, and the accused scrambles to apologize.
Chait's assessment was blunt:
"Everything about this episode reveals levels of pathological incompetence. Crockett and her supporters are prying open fissures that will scar whichever candidate emerges. They are expressing themselves in social-justice jargon that might be effective in a student-council race at Wesleyan but sounds completely alien to most Texans."
"Completely alien to most Texans." That's the line that should haunt every Democratic strategist in Austin. This is a state where Republicans dominate statewide office, where the median voter cares about the border, energy costs, and property taxes — and where the Democratic Party's Senate candidates are locked in a public fight over whether questioning a progressive Black woman's electability constitutes white supremacy.
Conservatives watching this unfold in Texas should appreciate what they're seeing. This isn't an aberration. This is the inevitable result of a party that elevated identity over ideas, grievance over governance, and purity over persuasion.
Every dollar Crockett and Talarico spend attacking each other is a dollar that won't touch the eventual Republican nominee. Every news cycle consumed by who said what about whom on TikTok is a cycle where Democrats aren't making a case to Texas voters on anything that matters to their lives. Every accusation of racism within the primary guarantees that whoever emerges will limp into the general election scarred, broke, and defined by a fight that had nothing to do with the concerns of actual Texans.
The party that lectures America about unity and inclusion can't hold a primary without cannibalizing itself over an unverified claim on social media. The party that insists it speaks for the working class is running a Senate race through the language of faculty lounges and podcast studios.
Texas Democrats don't need a better candidate. They need a mirror.
