Dallas Democrat Jasmine Crockett has made expanding the electorate and driving up turnout around the state core pieces of her newly launched campaign for the U.S. Senate.

​“This election is about adding voices to our electorate,” Crockett said at her campaign announcement in Dallas.

​But while many believe Crockett will be able to create new energy in Houston and Dallas to drive up historically low turnout among Democratic voters, some worry she could have a problem connecting with Latino voters based on comments she made last year to Vanity Fair. In talking about why Trump did so well with Latinos in 2024, particularly on the issue of border security, Crockett said “the immigration thing has always been something that has perplexed me about this community.”

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​“It’s basically like, I fought to get here, but I left y’all where I left y’all and I want no more y’all to come here,” she said.

​Later, she added: “It almost reminds me of what people would talk about when they would talk about kind of like ‘slave mentality’ and the hate that some slaves would have for themselves. It’s almost like a slave mentality that they have. It is wild to me when I hear how anti-immigrant they are as immigrants, many of them.”

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​CNN anchor Jake Tapper pressed her on the comments earlier this week and whether she thinks Latinos who voted for Trump really have a “slave mentality.”

​“No, and that’s not what that said at all, to be clear. It did not say that every Latino has that type of mentality,” she said.

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​She said she was talking about Republicans trying to win Latinos over by telling them Trump was going to stop criminals from crossing the border, but the White House really planned to widen the target legitimate asylum seekers and so many others.

“I don’t believe that the people that voted for Trump believe in what they’re actually getting. That is number one. What Trump said is that he was going to kick out the bad guys. And that‘s what I was talking about,” Crockett said.

​Last year, after the comments in Vanity Fair first drew criticism, her office release a lengthy statement explaining the remarks.

​“I used the term ‘slave mentality’ in the way it has commonly been used to refer to Black Americans who support anti-Black politicians and policies: voters who throw their support behind people who have openly ridiculed their communities and promoted policies that would directly harm them,” she said in the statement. “I did not use this language with the intention to divide Black and Brown communities — in fact, I use this language to point out our common struggle while highlighting the hurdles that stand between us.”

​There’s no doubt Tapper won’t be the last one to raise questions about the comments, given how important Hispanic voters are in a Democratic primary. Texas has the second-largest number of Hispanic eligible voters in the U.S., and more than a quarter of all Texas voters are Hispanic.

Exit polls in November 2024, showed 46% of Hispanics nationally voted for Trump. In Texas, that was 55% — up 14 percentage points from Trump’s support among Hispanic voters in Texas in 2020.