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SAN ANTONIO and LAREDO, Texas—When Jessica Cisneros was 13, her aunt was diagnosed with stomach cancer. “I remember seeing [my uncle] and his family go through this difficult period in their lives where they just could not afford the treatment my aunt needed,” she recalled as she drove from San Antonio to the border city of Laredo, two days before Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Before the age of GoFundMe, Cisneros and other family members sold food at the side of the road and held lotería fundraisers to help raise money for her aunt’s care, but when she died, they still struggled to pay for the cost of her funeral. “We did everything we could so that my aunt could get what she needed, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t enough,” Cisneros said.
Cisneros, the 26-year-old immigrant rights attorney running to unseat the long-standing conservative Democrat Henry Cuellar, has told this story over and over again on the trail. It’s meant to bring a human, and personal, element to her call for ambitious public policies like Medicare for All, and to highlight how out of touch her opponent is with the needs of his district. In Laredo, the poverty rate hovers around 30 percent, and about a third of the district’s residents don’t have health insurance. “It resonates with folks, because it’s happened to a loved one, or they know somebody that has,” she told me. She added, “No family should have to go through that.”
Incumbents rarely lose, but Cisneros, who has been lauded as the latest insurgent candidate challenging the Democratic establishment, has what feels like the full weight of the progressive movement behind her. On Tuesday, all eyes will be on Cisneros and the district she’s hoping to represent, a gerrymandered, massive swathe of south Texas that stretches all the way from San Antonio to Laredo and down the border. Her primary race against Cuellar, which has drawn an outsized amount of both attention and money, is widely seen as the latest test of whether a progressive, outsider candidate can take down a standing member of Congress that has the full backing of party leadership. (Just don’t call her the next Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, please, a tokenizing comparison that does neither of them justice.)
If she wins the primary, which would all but guarantee that she would become the youngest woman to become a member of Congress, it would be an upset, but one that would bolster the argument that the political winds are shifting. Cisneros, a Laredo native from a working-class family who has spent her career defending immigrants in detention, is reflective of what the Democratic Party can, and needs to, become. On paper, it should be easy for party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to throw Cuellar to the side and embrace Cisneros. Cisneros calls her opponent “Trump’s favorite Democrat” for a very good reason—namely, his willingness to vote for Trump’s policies almost 70 percent of the time during the president’s first two years in office. Give his record even a cursory examination—from border security (Cuellar has claimed to oppose building a border wall but has voted to fund new wall construction) to abortion access (he’s one of the few remaining anti-abortion Democrats in Congress) to gun rights (Cuellar has long had an A rating from the NRA and has accepted money from the group) to the private prison industry (as one outlet put it, “No congressional Democrat has received more financial backing from private prisons”)—and it seems obvious that Cuellar is a relic of a Democratic Party that no longer exists.
But for Democratic Party leaders, challengers like Cisneros represent an existential threat, and the only lesson they seem to have taken away from the last two years is the need to prevent an AOC-type defeat. At a recent fundraiser for Cuellar, Pelosi called for a “resounding” victory for the eight-term congressman, pitting herself squarely against the party’s left flank. “We assume that Henry will win, but we don’t take anything for granted,” Pelosi said. “The word ‘assume’—ass of you and me. Assume nothing.” Cisneros, whose platform includes support for the Green New Deal and a $15 minimum wage, has been endorsed by the Justice Democrats, which recruited her to run against Cuellar, as well as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, a slew of progressive groups and unions, and more mainstream organizations like EMILY’s List, many of which have spent heavily to support her campaign. On Cuellar’s side, on the other hand, are an array of special interest groups, including some that would seem to be a more natural fit for a Republican, including the Koch political network, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the oil and gas industry. Cuellar, who hasn’t faced a serious challenge to his seat in more than a decade, is clearly worried by Cisneros, and the special interests that have donated to his campaigns over the years are clearly worried as well, protecting their investment by pouring huge sums of money into the race in the final stretch. Taking a page from the Republican playbook, Cuellar has accused Cisneros of being a socialist who wants to destroy jobs.
For all that Cisneros’s campaign has been framed as some sort of bellwether for the Democratic Party, she
For her part, Cisneros is banking on her belief that the voters in the solidly Democratic district, which backed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by a wide margin in 2018, are not as conservative as Cuellar believes. “That idea that south Texas is super conservative is a myth being perpetuated by people like Henry Cuellar so he doesn’t have to justify why he’s been voting the way he’s been voting,” Cisneros told me. She pointed to Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign in 2018 as proof. “South Texas went for him even when the person who was anti-choice and had an A rating from the NRA was Ted Cruz,” Cisneros noted pointedly.
Still, it would be foolish to think that a relative newcomer like Cisneros, even one with the progressive political establishment squarely behind her, could easily unseat a powerful Democrat who’s known in south Texas for bringing home the bacon. I got a reminder of that in Laredo on Monday when I met 28-year-old Freddie Chavarria, who told me he was a hardcore Bernie Sanders supporter, and had even convinced his grandmother, who had voted for Trump in 2016, to vote for Sanders on Tuesday. Chavarria was critical of Cuellar’s support for building a stretch of the border wall. But he planned on voting for Cuellar, whom he described as a known quantity. “He’s always taken care of Texas as a state,” Chavarria said. “I can’t agree with everything he says, but I trust him.”
For all that Cisneros’s campaign against Cuellar has been framed as some sort of bellwether for the Democratic Party, Cisneros is keenly aware that in politics, everything ultimately boils down to the local. Cuellar often touts that he has the support of most of the district’s Democratic leaders and elected officials; Cisneros’s game plan has been to take the argument straight to voters, holding town halls and doorknocking throughout the district.