The unlikely path of Jasmine Crockett, Ken Paxton to Senate primaries | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Crockett and Paxton are frontrunners; Paxton often wins, Crockett had losses.
- Primary voters favor risk-tolerant candidates over conventional, 'safe' nominees.
- Paxton shows decades of electoral wins; Crockett rose fast and faced image issues.
Go ahead and gawk at the 10-car pileup in the March party primaries.
But when you’re done jeering and making fun of the other side’s candidates, remember the bottom line:
Whatever else you may think, Jasmine Crockett and Ken Paxton win elections.
Both current party frontrunners for U.S. Senate have some image repair ahead. Neither is considered his or her party’s safest bet.
But primary voters aren’t interested in safe.
Paxton has been on the ballot nine times in his 24-year political career, starting with a Texas House seat from McKinney. He won every time.
Current U.S. Sen. John Cornyn has won more elections in a 42-year career, sometimes by leveling ethics charges. But Paxton is the better infighter.
When Cornyn won his first Bexar County election, Crockett was a 3-year-old girl in St. Louis.
Crockett lost her first election, But that was back in 2010, when she was a Texarkana defense attorney and got 41 percent of the vote in a primary campaign for district attorney.
Since she moved to Dallas in 2015, she has won twice in runoffs.
In 2020, she upset a Texas House incumbent by less than 1% of the vote. Then in 2022, she won a seat in Congress in a runoff over President Joe Biden’s state campaign director. Jane Hamilton.
By then, Crockett was already well-known as a Dallas civil-rights lawyer representing defendants shot or beaten by police.
In 2016, she represented a mother and two daughters in one of the ugliest incidents in the history of the Fort Worth police.
When Jacqueline Craig, a southwest Fort Worth mother, called police for help after a male neighbor grabbed her 8-year-old son, she and her daughters were handcuffed and jailed.
The video went viral on national news. Instead of warning the neighbor, officer William Martin told Craig, “Why don’t you teach your son not to litter?”
When Craig said the neighbor still shouldn’t grab her son, Martin replied, “Why not?”
Then, when Craig and her daughters started to yell, Martin strong-armed, handcuffed and jailed them and ignored the offending neighbor.
Mayor Betsy Price called the incident “deeply troubling,” noting that the Craigs “called Fort Worth PD for assistance and it ended badly.”
“It was disturbing that the officer chose to ignore the assaultive act,” Crockett said alongside law partner Lee Merritt.
“The officer instead wanted to ask her about her mothering skills.”
The video drew attention for the difference in how a white officer handled a white offender and a Black complainant. It also showed how another man was treated respectfully but a protective mother was demeaned and handled like a criminal.
Police Chief Joel Fitzgerald said Martin was simply “rude.”
National police experts called the handling “asinine” and “the worst piece of police work I have ever seen in my life.”
It took more than a month of embarrassing national attention, but police eventually ticketed the neighbor and dropped charges against Craig and her daughters. District Attorney Sharen Wilson had already declined to prosecute.
“You would get more justice if someone kicked a dog,” Crockett said.
The officer was suspended for 10 days. The city eventually reached a $150,000 settlement with the Craigs in 2021. Jacqueline Craig died in 2023.
Crockett was already on her way to Washington.
This story was originally published December 11, 2025 at 9:25 AM.
