The tense Texas Democratic Senate primary has been roiled by yet another online firestorm after an influencer accused state Rep. James Talarico of calling a former opponent a “mediocre Black man” — a claim he said was a “mischaracterization of a private conversation.”

The influencer, Morgan Thompson, who posts under the username @morga_tt on TikTok, posted the accusation in a video Sunday in which she claimed that Talarico told her in a private conversation after a Jan. 12 town hall in Plano, Texas, that he had “signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable, intelligent Black