Lessons From a Republican Survivor
Lessons From a Republican Survivor
Everywhere he takes me, Rep. Will Hurd tells people—coffee-shop staff, breakfasting retirees, the proprietor at the historic Mi Tierra Cafe—that I’m here to figure out how he keeps winning Texas’ big swing congressional district. Sometimes he’s more blunt: How does a black Republican get elected in an area that’s 70% Hispanic?
“It’s not rocket science,” Mr. Hurd says. “Look—show up, talk to people, represent them, right? It starts with the philosophy that my bosses are the 800,000 people that I represent, not anybody else.”
But clearly he’s doing something unusual. In 2016, 23 Republicans, including Mr. Hurd, won House districts that Hillary Clinton carried. Today only two of those seats are in GOP hands—Mr. Hurd’s and John Katko’s, in upstate New York. Democrats flipped the rest in November, beating many well-regarded GOP politicians. Minnesota’s Erik Paulsen and Illinois’s Peter Roskam—gone. Colorado’s Mike Coffman and Virginia’s Barbara Comstock—bye-bye. Texas’ Pete Sessions and John Culberson—hasta luego.
To reach back further, there were 13 House districts that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and then Mrs. Clinton in 2016. In the last Congress, they were all held by Republicans. Now they’re all occupied by Democrats, with the lone exception of Mr. Hurd. His most recent victory, a squeaker by 926 votes, wasn’t called until two weeks past Election Day. In the interim, his Democratic challenger attended congressional orientation with her fingers crossed. But a win is a win, so the question stands: What’s Mr. Hurd’s secret sauce, and can other Republicans learn the recipe?
On a cool Texas Friday two weeks before Christmas, Mr. Hurd runs a full schedule. Shortly past sunrise, he chats up a county commissioner over breakfast tacos—not “breakfast burritos,” which I’m told are a California invention. The agenda ends, half a dozen stops later, after nightfall with a Christmas parade in the town of Pearsall, population 10,345. All day, as we eat fajitas and brisket and drive around in his slate-gray Jeep Grand Cherokee, with holiday tunes playing softly on the radio, I plumb for what advice he might offer a colleague in a tight race.
“The campaign for 2020 is won or lost in 2019,” he says. “When the time comes for people to run crazy ads against you in the election that are completely untrue, the people that you’re asking to vote for you need to know that it’s untrue. And the only way you do that is by being in the communities.”
Given the expanse that Mr. Hurd represents, that’s no small job. Texas’ 23rd District runs up the Rio Grande between suburban San Antonio and El Paso County. “I don’t think people appreciate how big it is,” he says, adding that it’s larger than 26 states, covers 820 miles of the Mexican border, and takes 10 hours to drive end to end.
Last fall he visited all of the district’s 29 counties, holding meetings at local Dairy Queens. He even hit Loving County, the most sparsely populated in the contiguous U.S. Half the town of Mentone showed up, he says: “Nine of them—population 18 for the city, 95 for the entire county.” With so much time on the road, it can’t hurt that Mr. Hurd is energetically young, 41, and unmarried.
One lesson of such tours is that Capitol Hill is a bubble. At a taco joint in conservative Castroville, Mr. Hurd asks a breakfast group for their thoughts on the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and the table gets pretty quiet. That subject is remote compared with a future bypass on U.S. Route 90. “What people talk about in D.C. is different from what people talk about here,” Mr. Hurd says in the car afterward. “Man, Khashoggi has dominated Washington, D.C., for a month. None of them brought it up.”
The congressman thinks his omnipresence has also helped avoid any raucous—and embarrassing—town halls. “One of my colleagues in Texas—there’s a picture of him, and he’s in a high-school gym, and there’s like 4,000 people, and they’re going nuts,” Mr. Hurd says. Yet Republicans who stopped holding town halls were pummeled for dodging voters. Mr. Hurd went the opposite direction: “I did 30 that summer. I didn’t have people yellin’ at me, hootin’ and hollerin’. Why? Because I had been there 97 times before.”
As we pull up to a middle school, where Mr. Hurd is speaking to a technology class, he gets on a roll: “This is how you win suburban women: Actually talk to them. Talk to their kids. Do things to make sure their kids are ready for the future. Don’t be a racist, and don’t be a misogynist.”
The Republicans who lost last year, I suggest, don’t fit that description. “No,” he agrees. “But here’s the thing: When people start thinking the average Republican is one of those things, then that impacts everybody. And so that’s why you have to ensure that you distinguish yourself from that average. Or we all have to work together to make sure the average isn’t seen like that. That’s the biggest challenge.”
Mr. Hurd worries the Republican Party is atrophying. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, he says, won “staggering” percentages of young voters: “It’s almost the exact opposite of what it is today.” Already his home state is looking purple. “In 2016 in Texas, only one Republican congressman or woman got less than 55% of the vote—me,” he says. “In 2018, two losses, 10 Republican congressmen and women got less than 55% of the vote.”
He adds another statistic: “The average decrease in their victory was 15 points.” That’s true—I checked—and sobering. Some of this Democratic surge may reflect the weirdness of 2018, and regression to the mean is usually a good bet. Nonetheless, in Mr. Hurd’s view the trend is clear. “If the Republican Party in Texas doesn’t start looking like Texas,” he says, “there will not be a Republican Party in Texas.” Even nationally, it’s hard not to note that the defeat of Utah’s Rep. Mia Love has left Mr. Hurd the only black Republican in the House.
If expanding the GOP’s appeal presents a chicken-and-egg problem, a logical place to start might be with how Mr. Hurd became a Republican. “Oh, the question everybody always asks,” he answers, chuckling. “My dad would say he’s been a Republican since Lincoln freed us.” He goes on to cite other influences, none ideological: Growing up in San Antonio. Helping his parents run a small business. Studying at Texas A&M, where the George H.W. Bush library and grad school arrived his sophomore year. Joining the Central Intelligence Agency.
As an agent, he spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan, working officially for the State Department while doing undercover operations in other countries. “My job,” he says, “was to recruit spies and steal secrets.” He decided to run for Congress after briefing a group of lawmakers in Afghanistan. An Intelligence Committee member asked a clueless question about the difference between Sunni and Shiite, and Mr. Hurd figured he could be of use in Washington. Today he’s the one sitting on the Intelligence Committee. Is the other guy still around? “No,” he says, “but there are still people like him around.”
Mr. Hurd lost a GOP primary runoff in 2010, then ran again in 2014 and knocked off the Democratic incumbent. When he won a second term, it was the first time in six years that the fickle 23rd District re-elected a congressman. For voters outside Texas, if they’ve heard of Mr. Hurd, it’s probably for one of three reasons.
To start, he hasn’t been shy about thwacking President Trump when he thinks it’s warranted. Hours after Mr. Trump’s wild press conference in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin, Mr. Hurd said the president was “getting played by old KGB hands.” The congressman wants a “smart border wall” made of radar and drones, and he says a physical barrier is a “third-century solution.” In 2016 he voted not for Mr. Trump but independent Evan McMullin, a fellow CIA alum. “I served with him in Pakistan,” Mr. Hurd says. “He had my back in some really tough and nasty situations. And so I had his.”
Second is Mr. Hurd’s focus on cybersecurity and tech. He has written bills to ease data sharing among federal agencies and empower the U.S. chief information officer. His degree is in computer science, so it’s a natural niche—and, he adds, one that voters can appreciate: “You go into any crowd and you say, ‘Raise your hand if you’ve had to get a new credit card because of a hack.’ ”
Third is Mr. Hurd’s 1,600-mile road trip with then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat from El Paso. When flights between Texas and Washington were grounded by a blizzard in 2017, the two rented a Chevy Impala and drove. They streamed the trip on
Facebook
,
as they debated issues, sang a Johnny Cash duet, and answered questions from the public. The enthusiastic response, Mr. Hurd says, confirmed to him “that way more unites us than divides us, and people want us to be able to disagree without being disagreeable.”
This friendship may have subtly helped Mr. Hurd to re-election. Two weeks after the trip, Mr. O’Rourke launched a bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz. He narrowly lost, but turnout in El Paso surged, and Mr. O’Rourke comfortably carried the 23rd District. Throughout the campaign, he had refused to say a bad word about Mr. Hurd, to local progressives’ annoyance. Though Mr. Hurd says he doesn’t believe in coattails, there appear to be not a few O’Rourke/Hurd ticket splitters.
Even more important are the inroads Mr. Hurd has made in Hispanic areas on the Rio Grande. He cites Val Verde County, population 49,205. In 2014 he lost there by 23 percentage points. Two years later it was 9 points. Last November: 0.2. “We came 24 freaking votes away from flipping Val Verde County,” Mr. Hurd says, “one of the largest counties on the border, a majority Latino district, that we almost turned red—a county on the border!—in this crazy environment and election cycle.”
Mr. Hurd says it helps that he doesn’t look or talk like other Republicans. But the biggest thing, he insists, is showing up and engaging people. One bill he passed, suggested by constituents, renamed the port of entry in Tornillo after a Mexican-American hero from World War I, who fought for his adopted country years before naturalizing in 1924. “I’m in El Paso,” Mr. Hurd says, “and these veterans come up to me and be like, ‘Marcelino Serna deserves additional honors.’ ” The congressman hadn’t heard of him. “We took it and did some research,” Mr. Hurd says, “and it was like, man, this guy’s a 100% bad-ass.” The citation for one of his many medals reads: “Private Serna displayed exceptional coolness and courage in single handed charging and capturing 24 Germans.”
He tells a story about his first visit to Eagle Pass, another border town. Mr. Hurd showed up to a tardeada, an afternoon party, where there were hundreds of people. At 6-foot-4 he’s hard to miss, and he recalls that the band stopped playing when he walked in. “Everybody asked the question: ‘Why are you here?’ ” he says. “My answer was, because I like to drink beer and eat cabrito”—roast kid goat—“too. And everybody laughed. And the second time I showed up, people actually shook my hand, all right? Third time I showed up, you’d have people walk by”—he drops to a conspiratorial whisper—“and be like, ‘I’m a Republican.’ Fourth time, people would talk about some of the problems that they had. Fifth time, I was able to talk about, ‘Hey, here’s the way we can solve it.’ ”
His share of the vote in that county has since risen from 18%, to 21%, to 27%. “Now, it’s not huge,” Mr. Hurd says, “but that delta is what makes up—you know, you put those together in 29 different places, and this is how you win.”
Mr. Peterson is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
SOURCE LINK BEST ONLINE NEWS WEBSITE https://www.beviral.online
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario