Rep. Jasmine Crockett. (D-Texas) officially launched her campaign for the U.S. Senate on Monday, and Republicans appear to have played a major role in that happening. 

According to a report from NOTUS, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) was “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.”

With Sen. John Cornyn facing a tough three-way primary and Democrats fielding two strong candidates, Republican strategists reportedly were concerned the race would be tougher than expected. They feared a draining fight could leave the nominee wounded before the real battle against the Democrats even began.

Back in July, the NRSC commissioned a private poll that “by design” included Crockett’s name among the Democratic contenders. Her numbers surprised everyone: she topped the field. Instead of treating it as an internal curiosity, GOP operatives moved fast. 

“When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” a source told NOTUS.

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.

And Crockett took the bait.

“The more I saw the poll results, I couldn’t ignore the trends that were clear,” she said later, tying her Senate bid directly to the polling wave Republicans had manufactured for her. It was the political equivalent of bait left in plain sight. And she took it.

Behind the curtain, the NRSC operatives had built an entire ecosystem to sustain their creation. The source called it an “AstroTurf recruitment process,” as the NRSC had allies who were “seeding these new polls pretty aggressively into progressive digital spaces.”

They even coordinated text messages and phone calls to Democratic activists, urging them to call Crockett’s office and push her to run. Each round of organized “encouragement” added to the illusion of an organic movement. A small feedback loop spun into a statewide phenomenon.

Meanwhile, internal GOP numbers showed Cornyn trailing Attorney General Ken Paxton badly in a three-way primary that also included Wesley Hunt. Paxton polled as a general-election liability; Hunt wasn’t ready for a statewide fight. The GOP couldn’t afford to risk a damaged nominee in a cycle where Democrats had real contenders in Allred and Talarico. So national Republicans recalibrated. If their incumbent had vulnerabilities, they could balance the math by softening up the other side.

That meant turning Jasmine Crockett—a loud, anti-Trump social-media darling with a taste for cable brawls—into the presumptive Democratic frontrunner. She was tailor-made for the part Republicans wanted cast: a polarizing progressive who would turn off swing voters in a Texas general election.

Then the miracle happened. Allred, once the strongest Democrat in the field, suddenly exited the Senate race to run for the House, effectively ceding the primary to Crockett. Crockett announced her campaign the same day, citing the same polling trends the NRSC had seeded months earlier. 

Crockett’s campaign has admittedly gotten off to a rocky start. Her campaign launch video became an unintentional punchline, and despite her high profile and large campaign war chest, Senate Democrats aren’t lining up to endorse her.

But Republicans aren’t done shoring her up.

They are actively exploring ways to sustain her momentum long enough to secure the Democratic nomination. That means quiet talks with outside conservative-aligned groups about launching “independent expenditure” efforts that appear progressive on paper, with the sole purpose of propping up her campaign.

Crockett frames her Senate run as destiny, powered by the people.

The irony is, those “people” were Republican operatives running call lists from D.C., testing whether they could turn raw data into a political force that worked in their favor. They could. And they did.