Rep. Emilia Sykes, a vulnerable Ohio Democrat, is seeking a fundraising boost from Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D., Texas), the left-wing firebrand whose insults directed at Republicans consistently stir controversy.
Sykes and Crockett formed a joint fundraising committee, the Crockett Sykes Victory Fund, on April 2, roughly two weeks after Crockett called Texas’s wheelchair-bound Greg Abbott (R.) “Governor Hot Wheels,” a Federal Election Commission filing shows. The arrangement will allow Democrats to piggyback off each other’s shared fundraising efforts, potentially collecting larger checks as a result.
Sykes’s decision to pair with an increasingly controversial, left-wing figure may help bring in cash, but it could also scare off the moderate voters she needs to win what’s expected to be a close election in 2026. She won her race last year by fewer than 3 percentage points after the National Republican Congressional Committee labeled her seat a “prime pick-up opportunity.” Part of her strategy included distancing herself from the polarizing presidential candidates and prioritizing local media and small community events.
Crockett, meanwhile, has embraced polarizing politics, making several remarks that sparked criticism in the weeks leading up to her joint venture with Sykes and supporting far-left positions like diversity hires and defunding the police.
In a March 22 speech at the Los Angeles chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, for example, the Texas congresswoman called Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels.”
“We in these hot ass Texas streets, honey. Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there. Come on now! And the only thing hot about him is that he’s a hot-ass mess, honey! Yes, yes, yes, yes!” Crockett said to applause.
After clips of her remarks went viral, Crockett argued that she was referring to “the planes, trains, and automobiles [Abbott] used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors.” But she liked Facebook comments referring to the Republican governor as “hot wheels” in 2021—a year before Abbott started busing migrants to Democratic cities.
Days after her remarks on Abbott, Crockett told Lone Star Politics that Democrats need to be “O.K. with punching” if they want to win their elections and that Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) “has to be knocked over the head, like hard.”
“The reality is we’re dealing with an administration that is lawless and disrespectful and so the idea that we’re still going to be nice and friendly and kind and try to look for some sense of normalcy when we’re literally living in a time that is anything but normal,” she said. “I think that you punch, I think you punch, I think you [sic] O.K. with punching.”
“It’s Ted Cruz,” Crockett continued. “I mean, like this dude has to be knocked over the head, like hard, right? Like there is no niceties with him, like at all. Like you go clean off on him.”
She’s also called President Donald Trump a “white supremacist” and an “enemy of the United States.”
Those sorts of comments are nothing new for Crockett. In June, she accused Rep. Byron Donalds (R., Fla.) of being “whitewashed” for marrying a white woman—though it’s unclear if she holds the same thoughts on former Vice President Kamala Harris for having a white husband.
“The fact that you’re sitting around talking about ‘life was better under Jim Crow,’ like, is this because you don’t understand history? Or literally it’s because you married a white woman and so you think that whitewashed you?” Crockett said on The Breakfast Club.
“It took joy to call him out,” she continued. “I feel like they give him his talking points and he’s like ‘Yes, massa [sic]. I got it.’”
Crockett’s radical rhetoric extends to her policies as well. She recently seemed to embrace diversity hires, saying her race helped her land a job.
“When I first became a public defender, I had no criminal defense experience,” Crockett said during an April 3 House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. “I walked in, and I told my boss, Charlie, I said, ‘Listen, you should hire me.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I’m black.’”
She also expressed support for defunding the police in May 2021 and compared the police response during the George Floyd riots to the “dogs and water hoses” unleashed during civil rights protests in the 1960s.
“The defund movement seeks to actually bring about healing and finally invest in our communities to make them safer, addressing the root causes of crime,” Crockett said while serving as a state representative in Texas. “Defund is about finally being smart on crime.”
Crime in major cities nationwide skyrocketed following the “defund the police” movement. And destruction during the summer 2020 riots caused more than $2 billion in damages, according to Axios.
Sykes and Crockett did not return a request for comment.
