Cassy Garcia Wants to Turn South Texas Red

Laredo, Texas — The Laredo stop on the Take Back America Bus Tour takes place in the parking lot of the local Border Patrol union headquarters, on a stage set in front of a campaign bus — emblazoned with Take Back Our Country in bold white font — and two large American-flag placards. It’s a bilingual affair — Pastor Rafael Cruz, father of Senator Ted Cruz, moves seamlessly between English and Spanish in the warm-up act for the main event — and an almost exclusively Latino crowd. Despite the friendly atmosphere, I’m clearly out of place here, not just because I don’t have a clue what’s being said in the Spanish sections of the stump speeches, but also because — dressed in a button-down, khakis, and beaten-up white sneakers — it’s obvious I’m not from here. As I walk into the National Border Patrol Council lot, just in time to catch the back end of an amateur rendition of the national anthem, more than a few cowboy-hatted Texans in the crowd turn to direct inquisitive glances in my direction. Later in the night, I’m told that I was initially flagged by aides as a left-wing agitator. (They’re relieved to hear that I’m just an Oregonian.)

Cassy Garcia, the rally’s main act — and the Republican hopeful in Texas’ 28th congressional district — takes the stage after warm-up acts from Pastor Cruz, Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas), and Hector Garza, the vice president of the National Border Patrol Council. Garcia is followed by Senator Cruz himself (clearly a crowd favorite — the line to take pictures with Cruz after his speech includes almost every attendee at the rally). Speakers deliver relatively standard Republican stump speeches: open borders and inflation are destroying our country; Joe Biden is an incompetent disaster; the Democrats are in thrall to left-wing radicalism, with one notable difference: Almost everything that’s said here is framed in terms of the perspective and interests of Latinos. That’s only logical, given that Laredo — a city of 260,000, perched at the southernmost edge of Texas — is more than 95 percent Hispanic, as is the surrounding Webb County where Laredo is located. Its neighboring counties along the Rio Grande Valley all have similarly monolithic Hispanic populations. A report last month rated Laredo the fourth-least ethnically diverse city in America.

Like most heavily Latino voting blocs, the 28th congressional district has traditionally served as a reliable Democratic stronghold. The district’s Democratic incumbent, Representative Henry Cuellar, has represented the area since 2005, after defeating its more left-wing Democratic incumbent in the 2004 primary. (Notably, that same year, George W. Bush was the one Republican presidential candidate in recent memory to win the district, carrying the vote by 54 to 46 points.) But like much of South Texas, the area’s voter base tends to be far more conservative than the national Democratic Party. Cuellar is rated as the most conservative Democrat in the House of Representatives, and he was the only member of his caucus to vote against the radical Women’s Health Protection Act.

The district was part of a marked move toward the GOP in 2020. While most of the Rio Grande Valley remains decisively Democratic, South Texas was the site of five of the six largest county-level Democrat-to-Republican shifts from 2016 to 2020. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy Republican pickup just yet: Joe Biden won Webb County by a decisive 23.2 points in 2020. (Although the 28th congressional district covers redder counties, too — it’s currently rated as D+3 by the Cook Political Report). But even that wide margin represents a major shift away from Democrats since 2016, when Hillary Clinton carried Webb by a whopping 51.6 points.

The 28th district’s three-point Democratic advantage is far from insurmountable in a red-wave year, particularly if the momentum is on the GOP’s side. Garcia was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley: “I went to high school down in the district, went to college and got my master’s degree down there,” she recently told me, and she got her start in politics working for Senator Cruz. “I think people are excited — people are ready for a better way forward for this district, and I feel like I’m prepared and ready to provide a new voice for them in D.C.,” she said.

That’s Garcia’s slogan: A Better Way Forward. Amid a flurry of elite ideological debates about why Hispanics in areas such as South Texas are moving right, the Garcia campaign is running a largely non-ideological campaign. The potency of abortion as an issue, for example, is mostly canceled out by the political dynamics in this district: The broadly conservative, heavily Catholic voter base won’t respond to Democratic attacks on the topic, but Cuellar’s muted, moderately pro-life stance in Congress means that Republicans can’t make hay out of his radicalism either. This race is about the essentials: the economy and the border.

In a district where 20.5 percent of residents live under the poverty line, the Democratic Party’s message on issues such as welfare could still resonate. But on the border — a deeply visceral issue here, where Mexican cartels leave a heavy footprint and Border Patrol agents make up a significant part of the area’s economy — the Republican message could be getting through. Cuellar was backed by the National Border Patrol Council in 2020 — an endorsement he touted in a TV ad last cycle. This year, though, he was snubbed by the union in favor of Garcia. In the past, the union had “always endorsed Cuellar,” Garcia, who is herself married to a Border Patrol agent, told me, adding:

They endorse Republicans and Democrats — anybody that’s going to align with and work with them, they endorse. But since he has repeatedly, time after time, voted against things that they’ve asked for — and he’s voted in line with Nancy Pelosi — he lost the endorsement. They endorsed me in this race.

Cuellar has also been weakened by a difficult primary challenge from his left and as a result may struggle to turn out the more progressive factions of his base. In August, Politico rated the race a toss-up. That said, the incumbent Democrat is a survivor — he has fended off multiple difficult challenges during his 17-year stretch in Congress and is a skilled retail politician who may be able to tap into the district’s residual Democratic loyalties enough to carry the day. November will be an important case study in just how far Republicans can go in breaking into those residual loyalties in traditionally Democratic constituencies, both in Texas’s 28th congressional district and in the nation writ large.