I’m always happy to see stories like this.
The main group working to elect Democrats to the U.S. House announced Wednesday it sees a path to victory in a district that Texas Republicans just redrew to be more GOP-friendly.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says it will invest in the party’s nominee for Congressional District 35, a seat that was redrawn from a Democratic stronghold into one that would have favored President Donald Trump by 10 points in 2024.
”Democrats will not let (Republicans’) cynical power play go down without a fight,” Susan DelBene, who chairs the national campaign arm, said in a statement Tuesday. “The DCCC will work to ensure the people of Texas’ 35th District have the representation they deserve.”
The open seat is one of two in Texas that the DCCC named to its “Districts in Play,” a roster of Republican-held or Republican-leaning seats the party considers competitive as it seeks to win the majority in the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm. In a news release, a spokesperson for the group argued that voters favor Democratic strategies for addressing rising costs, health care access and working-family issues.
The group’s GOP counterpart set CD-35 as a target in September, soon after Gov. Greg Abbott signed the new map into law. The National Republican Campaign Committee argued Democrats are mistaken in trying to win the redrawn district, which Trump would have won by 5 points in 2016.
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The three Democrats vying for the nomination are taking different approaches with voters. Johnny Garcia, a Bexar County Sheriff’s Deputy, has pitched himself as an “old school Democrat” ready to defend working families on both sides of the aisle.
“As a Sheriff’s deputy, you don’t take the call because a house is a Republican or Democratic house, you take it because it’s a family who needs you,” Garcia said in a statement after he filed on Monday. “True public safety means more than tough talk, it means ensuring kids feel safe in school, families can access healthcare, and communities can thrive with affordable housing and economic opportunity.”
Marine veteran John Lira has also sought to appeal to moderates. He has said that his first act in Congress would be to file legislation requiring that active-duty troops and National Guard soldiers be paid during government shutdowns. “I’m running to make sure every Texan has a fair shot, a strong voice, and a future they can count on,” he says on his campaign website.
Also in the running is gun club owner Whitney Masterson-Moyes, whose campaign website centers on pushing back against the Trump administration and “defending the Constitution.”
In a social media post Friday, she foregrounded affordability and health care access.
“I’m running to make Texas more affordable, expand opportunity, protect Social Security and Medicare, and finally fix our broken healthcare system,” she said in a social media post after filing for the Democratic primary.
Johnny Garcia seems like the most viable candidate to me, but we’ll see what the January finance reports say. I’m just glad we found some respectable contestants in a district that Beto almost won in 2018. Of the potentially winnable district for Dems this one is the toughest, but it absolutely deserves a real challenge, especially in a year like 2026.
As the story notes, the DCCC is also in on CD15, which would be a flip of a current Republican seat. The most realistic blue-sky outcome for Dems in Texas in 2026 is a net of zero seats gained or lost, by holding onto four of the five GOP redistricting targets (CDs 09, 28, 34, and 35) and flipping CD15. Just holding CDs 28 and 34 is the minimum for calling this a good year, and anything above that makes this a very good year.
How likely all that is depends largely on how much of the gains Republicans made with Latino voters in 2024 hold up – it’s clear how big a bet they’ve placed on that in the redraw of the Congressional map. That’s looking pretty shaky right now.
Like the races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia in November, exit polling in Miami shows Latino voters flipped heavily back to Democratic candidates after last year’s presidential election, when Donald Trump made major gains with them.
Chuck Rocha, a national Democratic political strategist originally from Tyler, said in New Jersey, Latino voters were feeling a combination of anxieties about the economy and the way Trump has handled immigration. Many may have wanted tougher border security, but that has brought “a certain amount of terror just because they have brown skin.”
The result, Rocha said, is that in some places in New Jersey, there was a 25% shift of Latinos from Trump to Democrats. He said Texas is a very different game because of how big of a presence Latinos have in South Texas. About 80% of the voters in South Texas are Latino, which means just shifting 5% to 8% of Trump supporters could sweep candidates like [CD15 candidate Bobby] Pulido into office.
A group called WelcomePAC, which supports more moderate Democrats, also sees a pathway to victory for both Pulido and U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-Brownsville. Even though Republicans redrew congressional lines to favor GOP candidates, the group thinks they made faulty assumptions that Latino voters will vote for Republicans next year just because they supported Trump in 2024.
“If we want to be competitive in more places, we must invest in candidates who offer a compelling centrist vision for Democratic leadership,” WelcomePac co-founder Lauren Harper Pope said.
Both Pulido and Gonzalez are pro-oil industry Democrats who generally support tougher border security.
Republicans say they’ve put in big work in South Texas and will be ready for the 2026 midterm elections. Gov. Greg Abbott specifically has put millions of dollars into helping flip seats in the Texas Legislature and Congress to Republicans.
While Pulido said he doesn’t have much interest in results in other states, he’s feeling a vibe on the ground in the 15th District, a 10-county area that runs from Hidalgo County north to Gonzales County along Interstate 10.
He said he’s been around politics enough to know there is an energy building.
“You’re damn right I feel good about our chances,” he said.
Pulido has to win a primary first, and you never know what might happen. His opponent, Ada Cuellar, may also turn out to be a formidable contender. It’s early, we’ll see how the fundraising goes, who knows where Trump’s approval rating and the national atmosphere will be, etc etc etc.
CNN is on the same beat.
Democrats beat Trump’s 2024 results in five US House districts with special elections this year by at least 13 points. Over-performance at that level next year would flip three of the five new Texas seats to the Democratic column, though it’s unlikely that performance will be replicated in every district around the country, and recent polling suggests that Democrats currently have a more modest national advantage.
“I can feel it on the ground,” said Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, whose South Texas district was one of the five targeted by Republicans. “I really anticipate us taking the majority back next cycle and winning back South Texas and places that had been traditional Democratic districts that have turned on us in the last few cycles, with so many disillusioned people.”
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Trump improved Republicans’ standing with Latino voters in 2024, winning about 46%, according to 2024 exit polls, up from 32% in 2020. Texas’ new maps sought to build on Trump’s strong performance in the state, which he won by 14 points. Notably, Trump won every county in the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley, which was long a Democratic stronghold.
Four of the five Democratic-held seats targeted by the state GOP are majority Latino under the new maps, with the 28th Congressional District, represented by longtime Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, topping out at over 90% Latino.
But Trump’s standing among Latinos has fallen dramatically nationwide since the start of his second term, outpacing his drop in approval overall. In three statewide races this November – a Democratic-backed ballot measure in California and gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia – Democrats gained the most in counties with higher shares of Latinos, even outpacing Joe Biden’s 2020 margins there.
And in Miami, a Democratic-backed candidate won the mayoral election earlier this month, breaking nearly 30 years of Republican-aligned control of the nonpartisan seat.
In Texas, Trump’s approval rating among Latinos dropped from 44% in February to 32% in October, according to the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll. The 2025 UH-TSU Texas Trends Survey found Latinos in Texas expressing regret for their 2024 vote at higher rates than Texan voters overall. When asked how they would have voted in the 2024 presidential election if they could vote again, Texan Latinos backed Democrat Kamala Harris by a margin of 11 points, a 19-point swing from the 8-point margin by which the same group said they supported Trump in 2024.
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist and founder of Solidarity Strategies, told CNN that he thought Latinos could swing back to Democrats next year by a five- to 20-point margin.
“I think they’re all going to snap back,” Rocha said. “It’s just, do they get back to the norms of where it was before Trump?”
Gonzalez told CNN that he’s been seeing that discontent among his own constituents in the past year. His new district is more than three-quarters Latino.
Gonzalez highlighted that affordability is the top issue in his district, along with a shortage of labor and an increased presence of immigration officers on the ground.
“I don’t think Democrats, and especially Latinos, who voted for Trump ever expected that this would happen,” Gonzalez later said. “And now it has, and it’s compounded – that is compounded with a lot of the other problems that we’re talking about, economic problems and inflation and people, the American people, are continuing to struggle.”
A big swing among Texas Latinos could put the GOP-held 15th Congressional District in play too. Currently held by Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, the 15th District voted comfortably for Trump in 2024 (he won by 18 points under 2026 lines), but his margin was considerably more modest in 2020 (2 points). Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke won the district by 11 points in his 2018 US Senate run. De La Cruz’s electoral margins barely change under the new map.
We’ve talked about the polls before, and there will be plenty more of them to watch as we go forward. I continue to believe that Trump’s position is more likely to degrade than to improve from here, but who knows what that will mean at the ballot box. I’m eager to see what happens in the SD09 runoff, as that may give some indicator of what’s to come. Or maybe it won’t – the Republican candidate there will surely have a massive financial advantage, and that can make up for a lot. This is where we are now. Daily Kos has more.
I was surprised *not* to see Sarah Eckhardt file for CD10 after declaring her intention to do so back in October. I assume she had some polling she didn’t like (though going statewide instead is certainly a choice). But after her announcement freezing any other serious candidates from entering the race, we are now left with a slate of unknowns.