An 'AstroTurf Recruitment Process': National Republicans Propped Up Jasmine Crockett to Push Her Into a Senate Run [View all]

[Celerity]

The NRSC started including Crockett’s name in polling and conducted “a sustained effort” to get Crockett, the party’s preferred candidate to run against, into the race.

https://www.notus.org/senate/jasmine-crockett-nrsc-texas-senate

https://archive.ph/TmkAs



Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has actively worked behind the scenes to encourage Rep. Jasmine Crockett to jump into the Senate Democratic primary in Texas, believing she will be the easiest opponent to beat. Just a month ago, there was grave concern among Republicans about the Senate race, where incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is running for reelection. Democrats were running two formidable candidates, and Cornyn was caught in the middle of a bruising three-way primary that Republicans were concerned would weaken the eventual nominee.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee put out a poll in July with Crockett’s name included, which showed her as the leading Democrat in a hypothetical matchup. “When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” a source familiar with the process told NOTUS. The fact that Crockett was included in the poll was no accident. In June news broke that Texas Democrats Colin Allred, James Talarico, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro met to discuss the 2026 election.

Operatives at the NRSC realized that Crockett — whose political stock had been rising — wasn’t included in that meeting and also hadn’t been included in any credible poll. So they decided to change that. Following the NRSC’s polls, other surveys began to include Crockett and showed similar results: She was surging in the primary. The NRSC then worked to amplify those polls and is taking credit for helping “orchestrate the pile on of these polling numbers to really drive that news cycle and that narrative that Jasmine Crockett was surging in Texas,” the source said.

Crockett herself even admitted she was encouraged to jump into the race by all the positive polling she was seeing ahead of her announcement. “The more I saw the poll results, I couldn’t ignore the trends that were clear,” Crockett said during her announcement speech. Crockett did not return a request for comment. But the Republican efforts didn’t stop there. In what the source dubbed an “AstroTurf recruitment process,” the NRSC had “allies that were seeding these new polls pretty aggressively into progressive digital spaces.”

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