LAREDO, Texas — Tuesday is the final day voters can cast ballots in the Texas 28th Congressional District’s primary election, where immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros is again challenging Rep. Henry Cuellar for the Democratic nomination.
The race has attracted attention for obvious reasons. It is a clear-cut battle between the Democratic Party’s centrist and progressive wings, and an FBI raid on Cuellar’s home in January has increased the chance of a Cisneros upset.
But the intra-party contest also reflects a debate among Texas Democrats over the best way to improve the party’s performance in South Texas, where former President Donald Trump dramatically improved his performance from 2016 to 2020 in many predominantly Latino counties along the U.S.-Mexico border. The GOP is now hoping to translate those inroads into wins in congressional districts like Texas’ 28th, where the Republican National Committee has opened one of four nationwide community centers dedicated to engaging Latino voters.
Cisneros and her progressive allies present one vision for a path forward: Excite core Democrats and infrequent voters — many of them younger or low-income — with bold policy proposals.
A key part of Cisneros’ pitch is asking voters to consider why Cuellar’s seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee has gotten the district federal funding, but has made nary a dent in the city of Laredo’s 27% poverty rate ― or the region’s low voter turnout.
“We are offering an alternative vision for South Texas — one that’s fighting to recognize that health care is a human right and not a privilege, one that’s going to have Medicare for All, one that’s going to have a $15 minimum wage, one that’s going to fund education, one that’s not going to have a border wall, one that’s going to fund the people here,” Cisneros declared at a San Antonio rally in mid-February.
Cuellar’s backers, by contrast, see centrist candidates like Cuellar ― perhaps the last Democratic opponent of abortion rights in the House — as an antidote to the GOP’s appeals to the socially conservative views of local Latino voters.
Unlike Democrats in some other regions, the overwhelmingly Catholic Latino voters in South Texas tend to be more supportive of restrictions on abortion rights, stricter border enforcement, and fossil-fuel industry jobs, according to Anna Cavazos Ramirez, the former Webb County attorney and a friend of Cuellar’s.
“What you may hear about the Democratic Party nationally doesn’t apply to us here,” said Cavazos Ramirez, who is a precinct chair for the county Democratic Party.
Cavazos Ramirez and Eduardo Chapa, a former intern for Cuellar, co-founded a local chapter of Tejano Democrats, a statewide Latino Democratic group, as a centrist alternative to the Webb County Democratic Party, which they maintain has become a bastion of support for Cisneros. (Chapa ran unsuccessfully for the chair of the county party in 2020.)
HuffPost caught up with the pair and other centrist Cuellar-aligned activists on Monday night in a modest event space beneath the Cuellar campaign’s strip mall headquarters.
“Our concern was that the Democratic Party as an institution here was too progressive,” Cavazos Ramirez said. “It was not in conformity with what the local values are.”
The Tejano Democrats have endorsed a variety of Democratic candidates across the state, including gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, who is virtually uncontested, and Joe Jaworski, who is running against a more progressive contender for the Democratic attorney general nomination.
But it was clear that they see the Cuellar-Cisneros race as a key test of their thesis that doubling down on centrism is the best path forward for Democrats in South Texas. Cuellar, after all, won reelection in 2020 by 19 percentage points, while President Joe Biden won the district by just over 4 points. (After the recent redistricting, Biden would have won in Texas’ 28th new boundaries by 7 points.)
“If Henry Cuellar is not the nominee for the Democratic ticket, there’s a higher chance that Republicans can take it,” Chapa said.
National Republicans have insisted that they like their odds, regardless of the nominee, especially given the ethical cloud over Cuellar. “This has become Democrats’ worst nightmare in South Texas,” said Torunn Sinclair, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Cavazos Ramirez said she suspects that the FBI raid on Cuellar’s home — part of a federal probe into Cuellar’s ties to Azerbaijan — is a politically motivated plot to undermine Cuellar. Cuellar may have elicited the wrath of figures in the Biden administration for his outspokenness about the need for Biden to adopt tougher border enforcement, she noted.
“The progressives have too much influence in Washington, whether it’s DOJ or in the Biden administration — and I love Joe Biden,” Cavazos Ramirez said.
Of course, there is no evidence that the federal probe into Cuellar is politically motivated. And as a matter of policy, the Webb County Democratic Party remains neutral in any Democratic primary that is competitive, refusing even to endorse incumbents against challengers. None of the members of Tejano Democrats present on Monday night could explain exactly why they believe the county party is beholden to progressives.
Also on Monday evening, an all-female group of volunteers at county Democratic headquarters — a drafty former club venue where miniature vintage cars remain attached to the ceiling — were phone-banking to encourage local residents to vote in the primaries for a candidate of their choosing.
Webb County Democratic Chair Sylvia Bruni — the candidate who defeated Chapa for the role — refused to discuss her preference in the race. But several of the volunteers, speaking in a personal capacity, admitted that they were backing Cisneros.
Gloria Jackson, a retired social worker and party volunteer, voted for Cuellar in 2020 because she was more familiar with him and “he was bringing in a lot of money.” But Jackson got to know Cisneros after the 28-year-old lawyer became a party precinct chair ahead of the 2020 general election — and she liked what she saw.
“I believe that women need to be given a chance,” Jackson said. “I’m so upset at what happened with Hillary and the idiot Trump. We need to give her a chance and I feel like she has enough mentors that she will learn.”
Rosa Lambreton, a retired educator and party volunteer, is voting for Cisneros for the second consecutive time over the objections of many family members.
“Jessica is bringing new, young ideals to the Democratic Party,” Lambreton said. “I feel that Cuellar has lost his way. He is endorsing too many of the Republican ideals.”
Asked whether she agreed with centrists that Cisneros is likely to face massive attacks in a general election, Lambreton conceded that it was possible. “We need to rally the entire South Texas community and get them to know what she’s about,” Lambreton said.
Bruni, the party chair, said that in a general election, Cisneros would need to correct the record very forcefully about her views on policing, border enforcement, the phasing out of fossil-fuel jobs and other sensitive subjects.
Bruni also implied that Cuellar was already making that task harder by attacking Cisneros as a supporter of defunding the police and open borders, when in fact, Cisneros has not said she supports either of those things.
“I am puzzled by the emphasis on open borders and defunding beliefs, because I don’t believe I’ve ever heard her say anything like that,” Bruni said.
If Cisneros wins the primary, however, she will have to worry about wayward Democrats, as well as Republicans.
Several of the Cuellar supporters with whom HuffPost spoke on Monday night said that they did not plan to vote for Cisneros if she won the nomination.
Cavazos Ramirez said she would likely leave that part of the ballot blank. “An undervote is also a statement,” she said.
Minnie Villarreal, a state court administrator picking up material from Cuellar’s campaign headquarters, told HuffPost she would vote for the Republican nominee if Cisneros wins.
Without Cuellar, “we’re going to lose all the funding,” Villarreal said. “All this work he’s done for our community and for other communities — he’s our voice. There’s no other choice there.”