What today’s Texas congressional primaries can tell us about the battle for Congress

The first participation by American voters at the polls in the 2022 battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives will occur today in Texas when 44 contested Democratic and Republican congressional primaries take place.  

The outcome of two contests in particular, the Democratic and Republican primaries in Texas’s 28th Congressional District, will have important consequences for Democratic prospects of holding the seat, and for Republican prospects of flipping the seat, as part of the nationwide effort by each party to achieve control of the U.S. House for the upcoming 118th Congress.

A victory by Rep. Henry Cuellar in the TX-28 Democratic primary would likely lock down the district for Democrats, while a victory by challenger Jessica Cisneros would provide an opening for Republicans to flip the seat, especially if Republicans choose either Cassy Garcia (a former Ted Cruz staffer from Laredo) or Willie Vazquez Ng (a former police officer and federal marshal from San Antonio) as their nominee. (There are five other GOP candidates.)

TX-28 runs from the U.S.-Mexico border to San Antonio. Its population is split in equal proportions between the Laredo metro area (35 percent) and a portion of the core (Bexar County) San Antonio metro area (33 percent), with the remaining one-third of district voters split between two San Antonio exurb counties (20 percent) and five counties (12 percent) stretching between the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) and San Antonio.

The 2021 redistricting process boosted the proportion of TX-28 registered voters from the San Antonio area and decreased the number from the RGV, to the detriment of Cuellar and to the benefit of Cisneros, who Cuellar narrowly defeated (52 percent to 48 percent) in the 2020 Democratic primary. 

Cuellar has represented TX-28 since 2005, and over the past decade has been one of the most centrist Democrats in Congress. Cuellar’s tendency to challenge the Democratic Party’s ascendant progressive wing resulted in him becoming a top target for progressives in 2020, and again in 2022. 

Cisneros is backed by a who’s who of national progressive Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who travelled to the district in mid-February to campaign for Cisneros, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), as well as by national and state progressive organizations such as Indivisible, Justice Democrats and the Texas Organizing Project.  

There is a third candidate in the race, Laredo community organizer Tannya Benavides, but her only notable impact would be forcing Cuellar and Cisneros to compete again in a May 24 runoff if neither receives more than 50 percent of the vote on March 1. Cisneros would be considered the odds-on favorite in a runoff.

The newly redrawn Texas 28 provides a built-in advantage to a generic Democratic candidate of approximately 10 percent over their Republican rival. Cuellar’s long track record as an elected official in the region combined with his moderate stance on many public policy issues result in him being more in sync with TX-28 voters than the average Democrat. 

For instance, while in 2020 Cuellar was reelected by an 18 percent margin over his GOP rival, in TX-28 the baseline Republican margin of victory was 10 percent, and Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by a narrow 4 percent. 

Unless the current FBI investigation of Cuellar yields more than vague allegations of improprieties related to a country (Azerbaijan) that few TX-28 voters know anything about, the investigation should not derail a Cuellar victory in November. Thus, if Cuellar is the Democratic Party’s nominee, barring more serious revelations, TX-28 is almost certain to remain blue, regardless of whom the GOP nominates.

But if Cisneros is the Democratic Party’s nominee, her ideological and policy positions, which are significantly to the left of the median TX-28 voter, could provide an opening for Republicans to flip the seat. The probability of Republican success will hinge on the GOP nominee, with the final decision unlikely to be made until May 24, when the top two vote getters on March 1 will face-off in a runoff.

There are seven candidates competing in the TX-28 Republican primary. In addition to Cassy Garcia and Willie Vazquez Ng, the other two leading candidates are Ed Cabrera (a businessman from outside the new district in nearby Mission) and Sandra Whitten (a Laredo GOP activist and the party’s 2020 nominee). 

Either Garcia or Vazquez Ng would provide the GOP with its best hope for defeating a Cisneros candidacy in November, followed by Cabrera. If Whitten is the Republican nominee, however, GOP hopes for defeating Cisneros would dim considerably given Whitten’s more extreme position on the rightward edge of the Texas GOP ideological spectrum and status as an Anglo in a district that is 75 percent Latino.

Mark P. Jones is the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy’s fellow in political science and the Joseph D. Jamail chair in Latin American Studies at Rice University as well as a co-author of “Texas Politics Today.” Follow him on Twitter @MarkPJonesTX.