LAREDO, Texas—Just days away from the Texas primary elections, the streets of the southern border town of Laredo are filled with signs promoting nine-term Rep. Henry Cuellar (D) for reelection.
Cuellar’s ads blanket the airways, recent broadcasts claiming that a vote for his progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, would leave the U.S. with open borders and that she is “backed by the defund-the-police movement.” Another ad has a more positive message, featuring Cuellar digging his hand into a plot of Laredo soil and saying, “this land gave my family a chance.”
His brother is the sheriff. His sister is the former county tax collector. A trailhead and an elementary school in town bear his name.
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None of it is particularly hard to miss. But the congressman himself is a different story.
Cuellar has largely laid low since news broke in January of an FBI raid on his home and downtown office, related to business dealings in Azerbaijan. He’s voted remotely in the House for weeks. This month he even skipped the district’s annual parade for George Washington’s birthday, where Cuellar usually appeared alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer—a flex of his close ties with Democratic leadership.
But Cuellar’s supporters are still turning out ahead of Tuesday’s election. His campaign headquarters, tucked next to a sushi shop and a nail salon, had a steady flow of visitors throughout the weekend, often with campaign flyers in hand. The congressman’s campaign says it’s been focused on phone-banking and door-knocking efforts, while he had no public events scheduled for the weekend, nor did he have any scheduled events the weekend prior.
“Great day talking to supporters about the issues important to our community,” Cuellar wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday, adding a photo from outside his campaign office alongside about two dozen supporters. His team did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
But as Cuellar diehards are prepared to go to bat, his progressive challenger is just down the road in a smaller shop, sporting her signature magenta-pink campaign signs. Cisneros’ team for months has been organizing to unseat the congressman; she previously ran against him in 2020, but came less than 3,000 votes shy in the Democratic primary.
And while the Cisneros campaign was originally somewhat tight-lipped about the FBI investigation, in the waning days of the campaign they’ve been letting loose, plugging footage of the raids into their recent advertising. Cuellar claims the investigation will show no wrongdoing on his part—but the controversy has inevitably made the tight race even more competitive.
Gloria Jackson, a Laredo resident, told The Daily Beast she was historically an avid Cuellar supporter. But she now says “it’s been a long time” with Cuellar in office—and she’s ready for a change.
She thinks the district needs “fresh blood” for its representation and believes Cisneros deserves a chance, while acknowledging the young challenger would still have “more to learn.” But Cuellar’s record has jaded Jackson’s outlook on the congressman—and the FBI investigation didn’t help.
“I just don’t trust him anymore,” she said.
And while it’s the folks back home who actually vote, Cisneros’ candidacy has also piqued the national interest of progressive organizations. A number of outside groups are fueling Cisneros in hopes of toppling Cuellar, the last anti-abortion Democrat in the House, putting their resources and money behind her.
The climate change-focused group Sunrise Movement has been hosting virtual phone-banking sessions, having already passed 200,000 calls for Cisneros. NARAL, an abortion-rights group, sent three members of its own team to the district to help with organizing efforts. Cisneros is also backed by Justice Democrats, a group known for supporting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s successful 2018 bid to oust incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY).
Cisneros’ national backers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez have also flown down to the Lone Star State in recent weeks to campaign for the insurgent candidate. Texas has the first primaries of the 2022 cycle, meaning the results on Tuesday could be a temperature check for progressives hoping to unseat incumbents this year.
Cisneros’ campaign, like Cuellar’s, did not have any events open to the press this weekend. But she has previously made herself available to the press—and has get-out-the-vote events scheduled all across the district leading up to Tuesday’s election.
“We’re spending the entire weekend trying to reach as many voters as possible, letting them know that change is on the ballot,” Cisneros told supporters while on the road Saturday.
Barbara Hines was once Cisneros’ professor at the University of Texas—but now she’s a regular volunteer for her former student on the campaign trail. During Cisneros’ 2020 bid, she worked in Laredo to help boost turnout, and this year she’s spending most of her time helping the campaign in San Antonio.
Having spoken to voters in the area over the past two years, Hines, who is based in Austin, is confident “the district is ready for someone who has new ideas.”
“I think that the media and Cuellar are taking her very seriously, as they should,” she told The Daily Beast.
Hines also noted that Democratic voters in San Antonio—the northern end of the district—and in Laredo are certainly different. Metropolitan San Antonio generally encompasses more liberal voters, while Democratic Laredoans tend to remain on the moderate end of the political spectrum.
Recent redistricting for TX-28 could give Cisneros a boost, with new district lines drawing in more of San Antonio, making the area somewhat more favorable to progressives.
If neither Cisneros nor Cuellar hit 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday, the top two finishers in the race will go to a runoff on May 24. Tannya Benavides is the only other Democrat running for the district’s nomination, but she’s struggled to gain traction.
Whoever does ultimately win the district’s Democratic nomination will be up against a different force in November: Republicans who are eyeing TX-28 as a pickup seat. The GOP has been emboldened in South Texas after making notable gains with Latino voters in 2020 and the National Republican Congressional Committee already had Cuellar’s seat as one of their 2022 targets.
Cecilia Ballí, an anthropologist at the University of Houston who’s done extensive research on South Texas voters after 2020, told The Daily Beast she doesn’t necessarily believe Latino voters are becoming more conservative, but rather the “taboo” of voting Republican in South Texas is fading.
“Down there on the border, you have a combination of a lot of poverty, historically low levels of opportunity—that naturally has led people to vote for the Democratic Party, which they used to see as being the advocates of the little guy,” she said. But Republicans are managing to tap into the idea of the American Dream among South Texas’ large immigrant and Latino community.
Joshua Blank, director of research for the Texas Politics Project, told The Daily Beast there’s a lot of “framing” happening in Texas, with the GOP touting their gains among Latino voters “while ignoring the far larger gains Democrats have been making in urban and suburban areas in the state.”
And while speculation grows that Cisneros could have vulnerabilities headed into a general election as an avowed progressive, Blank noted Cuellar also has his work cut out for him.
“This is a marginally Democratic district where Cuellar has historically overperformed, but that overperformance has been waning in recent cycles,” he said. ”And the ongoing FBI investigation into the incumbent should make anyone claiming that only one of these Democrats may be unelectable in the general election think twice.”
