Substitute while the actions of the article are loading
LAREDO, Texas – The final battle for power in the Democratic Party between centrists and liberals will be decided here on Tuesday, in a runoff between Republican Henry Cuelar and contender Jessica Cisneros, who pitted senior members of Congress against left-wing activists.
Tens of thousands of primary voters will decide whether to nominate 66-year-old Cuelar, the only Democrat against abortion in the US House of Representatives, or go with Cisneros, an immigration lawyer who turns 29 on Tuesday. Cisneros focused sharply on the final stages of the abortion race as Cuelar campaigned for border security.
Tuesday’s vote will test the strength of these two polarizing issues in a region that has shifted to the right in the last election. Cisneros, who raised $ 4.5 million, called Cuelar “Joe Manchin” of Texas, comparing him to the conservative West Virginia Democrat, whose votes blocked liberal priorities in health care, child care and abortion.
“Right now, he needs a champion, someone who will actually stand up and fight for reproductive freedom,” Cisneros said in a recent interview in San Antonio shortly before joining the abortion rights march. “We have almost 20 years of experience, which shows that he is not this champion,” she added for Cuelar.
Cuelar, who is backed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and has received campaign assistance from the House of Majority whip James E. Clayburn (DS.C.), warned that liberal Democrats like Cisneros push voters away from Democrats.
“They’re going to push a lot of people out of the party,” Cuellar said in a recent interview here, after greeting baseball fans who would come to watch the hometown of Tecolotes play Rieleros from central Mexico. “I was born a Democrat. I will die a Democrat. But I see that the party is changing. It’s like you have to be with me 100 percent, or you’re against me. “
Voters in the 28th Texas Congressional District, which stretches from San Antonio to the U.S.-Mexico border, have watched momentum shift back and forth between the two candidates since 2019, when leftist groups first headed to Cuelar for defeat. No candidate won a majority in the primary, sparking a run-off on Tuesday.
Cuelar supports maintaining a health order for a Trump-era pandemic that the Biden administration has continued to use to repel many migrants at the southern border. A federal judge recently stopped the Biden administration from revoking the order.
The congressman has released television commercials showing the disappearance of Border Patrol agents as part of an attempt to dramatize what would happen if Cisneros, who once called for a crackdown on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Service, fired him.
“He helped us get what we needed,” said Zapata County Sheriff Raimundo Del Bosque, a Democrat who backed Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for re-election but strongly supported Cuelar. If the incumbent is defeated, Del Bosque said, and the health order for Title 42 is revoked, “we will be overwhelmed with illegals.”
Cisneros’ focus has changed since she first challenged Cuelar, with less emphasis on immigration and more on abortion rights. Republicans say that while Biden can easily carry the area, they can compete for it in November.
The democratic race was also shaken by external events.
Weeks before the March 1 primary, in which no candidate won a majority, FBI agents raided Cuelar’s home and office; the congressman said the investigation would not show “no wrongdoing” on his part.
And just days before the start of the early vote in the runoff, Politico published a draft opinion of the Supreme Court, which will reverse Rowe vs. Wade a decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion – raising the debate on abortion rights in campaigns across the country.
Following the opinion, Cuelar said in a statement that “there should be exceptions in cases of rape, incest and danger to the mother’s life”, although he was personally against abortion. Although he said he was confident that most voters in the majority of Latin American regions agreed with him, he acknowledged that time had helped Cisneros.
As he shook hands at Laredo’s baseball stadium, Cuelar noted this deer it has been in force for nearly 50 years, becoming a new issue, thanks to the court, “a few weeks before my election.”
The leak apparently boosted Cisneros fundraising at the end of the race, in which candidates and outside groups spent a total of $ 12.5 million. The Workers’ Families and Democrats of Justice, which hired both Cisneros and the Republic of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) to run for Congress, spent $ 1.4 million on the race.
But centrist groups supporting Cuelar have spent more. The United Democracy PAC, founded six months ago and funded by the US Israeli Public Affairs Committee, has invested $ 1.8 million in the area, and the Mainstream Democrats, whose main donors include LinkedIn co-founder Reed Hoffman, have spent nearly $ 800,000.
On Friday, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) Went to San Antonio to meet with Cisneros, telling the crowd that he was “sick and tired of seeing billionaires pour millions and millions of dollars into ugly 30-second commercials trying to to defeat the good people who represent working families. “
Sanders, who backed Cisneros in both fights against Cuelar, stepped up his campaign for supporters and condemned the PAC, which is working to win them. Among them is Pennsylvania State Secretary Summer Lee, who struggled to win the party’s nomination last week in her state’s 12th congressional district.
The centrists were more successful in other primary elections, including in Ohio, where they twice spent millions to elect MP Schontel Brown (D-Ohio) over Nina Turner, a former co-chair of the Sanders presidential campaign in 2020. Last Tuesday, two North Carolina Democrats won the primary over the more liberal candidates.
“Far-left groups say they are carrying out what they call a ‘hostile takeover’ of the Democratic Party,” key Democrats told The Washington Post. “A Democratic Party, determined by the far left, will not be able to win a majority in Congress in 2022 or beyond.
At least $ 50 million was spent by the Super PAC in this year’s Democratic primary, more than was spent on all of the Democratic primary in Congress in 2018 and 2020 combined. Millions entered Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, where Representative Kurt Schroeder (D-Ore.) Tracked lawyer Jamie McLeod-Skinner, who is running on the left as votes count after the May 17 election and no winner has yet been announced. .
“You’re running so far to the right that running against you just means I’m a Democrat,” McLeod-Skinner told Schrader, a former leader of the Conservative Democrats of the Blue Dogs, in a debate last month.
Cisneros received a similar message in Texas, telling voters that the region deserves a credible Democrat to represent it. At a rally with Sanders Cisneros, she talked about the internship for Cuelar and was surprised to learn that a member of her party could be an “anti-immigrant.” At the time, Cuelar responded to a wave of migrant children at the border during Barack Obama’s presidency with legislation that would facilitate their deportation.
Cuelar rejected the idea that his disputes with the left-wing Democrats made him a disloyal member of the party. He has spoken frequently with Pelosi, he said, and few members have gathered more to elect Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Pelosi has repeatedly defended Cuelar since the FBI investigation, and she recorded an automated conversation he called Congressman a “hard-working family fighter” who “returned millions of dollars to the area.”
The spokesman, who is a Catholic practitioner like Cuelar, also said that while she disagreed with him on abortion, his vote on Capitol Hill was less decisive when it came to abortion law.
“He’s not in favor of the election, but we didn’t need him,” Pelosi told reporters after Cuelar opposed the Women’s Health Protection Act, passed by Democrats in Congress to put deerthe protection of abortion in federal law. “We accepted the bill with what we had.
At the baseball game, Cuelar asked voters what their main problem was and later said how often they cited security on the US-Mexico border – and how no one cited abortion. Left-wing pro-democracy activists were trying to oust him, Cuelar said, although he spoke on behalf of those voters, but they did not.
“I like Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin is a friend. I will take it as a compliment, “Cuelar said. “They are trying to demonize another Democrat, they are trying to demonize me and I think it is wrong.
Mike Debonis of Washington contributed to this report.
Add Comment