TX-23: GOP Rep. Will Hurd’s Thursday announcement that he would become the third Texas Republican to retire this cycle (a phenomena the DCCC has aptly nicknamed the Texodus) caught just about everyone by surprise, but it didn’t take long for Roll Call to mention a few Republicans who could try and hold this 50-46 Clinton seat.
One possible candidate is state Sen. Pete Flores, who pulled off a 2018 special election upset for the 19th State Senate District, a seat that takes up just over half of Hurd’s seat. Flores will be up for a full term next year in a 54-42 Clinton seat, so a congressional campaign may be a better bet for him. Roll Call also mentions former Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, who was appointed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott in early 2017 and resigned late last year. (In Texas, the secretary of state is not an appointed official.)
On the Democratic side, 2018 nominee Gina Ortiz Jones, who only narrowly lost to Hurd, has been running for months and ended June with just shy of $600,000 cash-on-hand. There was no word about any other serious Democratic candidates running before Hurd retired, though Roll Call name-dropped state Reps. Poncho Nevárez and César Blanco on Friday. Nevárez represents about a quarter of the 23rd District, but very little of Blanco’s seat is here. Last cycle, Blanco considered running against both Hurd or for the safely blue 16th District, which contains almost all of his state House seat, but he passed on both races.
Hurd’s decision to leave is certainly a big blow for Republicans looking to hold his seat, but Team Red still has a real chance to hold on here. That’s due in large part to the fact that Republican mapmakers drew up this district to disadvantage Latino voters. The GOP deviously added low-turnout Latino populations to the district so that it has a large Latino majority population, yet Latinos make up less than a majority of the electorate itself. Those tactics very likely made all the difference for Hurd, who pulled off three very tight victories here.
Still, Republicans will need to look hard to find a candidate as formidable as Hurd, a former CIA officer who won this district during the 2014 GOP wave on his second attempt. Hurd first sought to challenge Democratic incumbent Ciro Rodriguez in 2010 in the previous version of the 23rd District, but he lost the GOP primary runoff to Quico Canseco 52.6-47.4. Canseco beat Rodriguez in November, but he lost re-election two years later to Democrat Pete Gallego.
Both Hurd and Canseco decided to take on Gallego in 2014, and the pair once again advanced to a runoff. This time, though, Hurd was the one who prevailed 59-41. Both parties targeted this seat in the fall, and Hurd pulled off a close 50-48 win.
National Democrats immediately called for Gallego to run again, and he soon obliged. However, while Team Blue hoped that stronger presidential-year turnout among Latino voters would reverse the 2014 result, Hurd proved to be a very strong fundraiser and campaigner. Democrats tried to tie Hurd to Donald Trump, but while the seat did swing from 51-48 Romney to 50-46 Clinton, Hurd held on 48-47.
Gallego considered running again but ultimately decided to sit the race out. That left a wide-open battle for the Democratic nomination that was won by Ortiz Jones, a retired Air Force intelligence officer who would be Texas’ first gay member of Congress as well as the body's first ever Filipina-American.
Ortiz Jones was an even better fundraiser than Hurd, but this race looked like an uphill climb for her. Hurd proved to be very good at generating positive media attention with activities like his bipartisan road trip with Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke (O’Rourke, who represented the neighboring 16th District, remained neutral in this race). Hurd was also smart about breaking with Trump on key issues like immigration, a very important topic in a district that stretches across much of the border with Mexico, while still backing most of his agenda.
Several poll showed Hurd well ahead, and Democrats also got more ominous news in September when Gallego lost the aforementioned state Senate special election to Flores, a sign that Team Blue would again struggle to turn out Latino voters in a midterm election. National Democratic groups were initially reluctant to spend much money on what looked like a very uphill race, and the NRCC even canceled its final 3 1/2 weeks' worth of ad reservations in early October in a big sign of confidence in Hurd.
However, the DCCC and House Majority PAC ended up spending a total of around $840,000, and the NRCC went back on the air in the final week of the race with a $554,000 buy, both of which indicated that this race was getting closer late in the game. Still, it was a big surprise when Hurd won just 49.2-48.7, a margin of only 926 votes.
Ortiz Jones soon made it clear that she planned to run again, and this time, both parties seemed to quickly recognize that this would be a competitive race. Now that Hurd is retiring, though, the onus is on the GOP to find a strong candidate to hold a seat where Trump is unlikely to be anything other than a liability.