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All the comforts of a Waldorf Astoria city-view suite did not, at that moment, seem to cheer Jasmine Crockett. The 44-year-old Texas Democrat known for her viral comebacks was frowning as she walked into her hotel room in Atlanta last month. She glanced around before pulling an aide into the bathroom, where I could hear them whispering. Minutes later, she reemerged, ready to unload.

She was losing her race to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she told me, a job she felt well suited for. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were planning to vote for the senior-most person in the race, even though that person wasn’t actually a Black Caucus member, Crockett complained. California members were siding with the California candidate. One member was supporting someone else in the race, she said, even though “that person did the worst” in their pitch to the caucus. Crockett was starting to feel a little used. Some of her colleagues were “reaching out and asking for donations,” she said, but those same colleagues “won’t even send me a text back” about the Oversight job.

To Crockett, the race had become a small-scale version of the Democratic Party’s bigger predicament. Her colleagues still haven’t learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper, fiercer communicators. “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” Crockett told me.

In poll after poll since Donald Trump’s reelection, Democratic voters have said they want a fighter, and Crockett, a former attorney who represents the Dallas area, has spent two and a half years in Congress trying to be one. Through her hearing-room quips and social-media insults, she’s become known, at least in MSNBC-watching households, as a leading general in the battle against Trump. The president is aware of this. He has repeatedly called Crockett a “low-IQ” individual; she has dubbed him a “buffoon” and “Putin’s hoe.” Perhaps the best-known Crockett clapback came last year during a hearing, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made fun of Crockett’s fake eyelashes. Crockett, seeming to relish the moment, leaned into the mic and blasted Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.” Crockett trademarked the phrase—which she now refers to as “B6”—and started selling T-shirts.