TUESDAY, MAY 24 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
BY DAVID WEIGELlaredo, tex. — The latest battle
in the fight for power in the
Democratic Party between cen-
trists and liberals will be decided
here Tuesday, in a runoff between
Rep. Henry Cuellar and challeng-
er Jessica Cisneros that has pitted
top members of Congress against
left-leaning activists.
Tens of thousands of primary
voters will decide whether to
nominate Cuellar, 66, the only
antiabortion Democrat in the
U.S. House, or go with Cisneros,
an immigration attorney who
turns 29 on Tuesday. Cisneros has
focused sharply in the closing
stage of the race on abortion,
while Cuellar has kept his cam-
paign pointed toward border se-
curity.
Tuesday’s vote will test the
potency of these two polarizing
issues in a region that has shifted
to the right in recent elections.
Cisneros, who’s raised $4.5 mil-
lion, has called Cuellar the “Joe
Manchin” of Texas, comparing
him to the conservative West
Virginia Democrat whose votes
have blocked liberal priorities on
health care, child care and abor-
tion rights.
“Right now, this moment
needs a champion, someone
that’s actually going to stand up
and fight for reproductive free-
dom,” Cisneros said in a recent
interview in San Antonio, shortly
before joining an abortion rights
march. “We have close to a 20-
year track record that shows that
he isn’t that champion,” she add-
ed of Cuellar.
Cuellar, who is supported by
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-
Calif.) and has gotten help on the
campaign trail from House Ma-
jority Whip James E. Clyburn
(D-S.C.), has warned that liberal
Democrats like Cisneros are driv-
ing swing voters away from Dem-
ocrats.
“They’re going to be pushing a
lot of people out of the party,”
Cuellar said in a recent interview
here, after greeting baseball fans,
who’d come to watch the home-
town Tecolotes play the Rieleros
from central Mexico. “I was born
as a Democrat. I’ll die as a Demo-
crat. But I see the party changing.
It’s like you need to be with me
100 percent, or you’re against
me.”
Voters in Texas’s 28th Congres-
sional 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 left-wing groups first
targeted Cuellar for defeat. No
candidate won a majority in the
primary, triggering Tuesday’s
runoff.
Cuellar supports maintaining
a Trump-era pandemic health
order that the Biden administra-
tion continued to use to turn
away many migrants at the south-
ern border. A federal judge re-
cently stopped the Biden admin-
istration from terminating the
order.
The congressman has run TV
ads showing Border Patrol agents
vanishing — part of an attempt to
dramatize what would happen if
Cisneros, who once called for
breaking up U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, un-
seated him.
“He’s helped us get what we
need,” said Zapata County Sheriff
Raymundo Del Bosque, a Demo-crat who has endorsed Republi-
can Gov. Greg Abbott for reelec-
tion but strongly supports Cuel-
lar. If the incumbent were defeat-
ed, said Del Bosque, and the Title
42 health order rolled back, “we’d
get swamped with illegals.”
Cisneros’s focus has changed
since she first challenged Cuellar,
with less of an emphasis on immi-
gration, and more on abortion
rights. Republicans argue that
while Biden carried the district
easily, they can compete for it in
November.
The Democratic race has also
been rocked by external events.
Weeks before the March 1 pri-
mary in which no candidate won
a majority, FBI agents raided
Cuellar’s home and campaign of-
fice; the congressman said an
investigation would show “no
wrongdoing” by him.
And just days before early vot-
ing began in the runoff, Politico
published the draft of a Supreme
Court opinion that would reverse
the Roe v. Wade decision that
established a constitutional right
to abortion — elevating the de-
bate over abortion rights in cam-
paigns all across the country.After the opinion was leaked,
Cuellar said in a statement that
there “must be exceptions in the
case of rape, incest and danger to
the life of the mother,” though he
is personally antiabortion. While
he said was confident that most
voters in the majority-Latino dis-
trict agreed with him, he ac-
knowledged that the timing had
helped Cisneros.
As he shook hands inside Lare-
do’s baseball stadium, Cuellar re-
marked that Roe had been in
place for nearly 50 years, becom-
ing a fresh issue, thanks to the
court, “a few weeks before my
election.”
The leak clearly boosted Cisne-
ros’s fundraising, at the end of a
race where the candidates and
outside groups have spent a com-
bined $12.5 million. The Working
Families Party and Justice Demo-
crats, which recruited both Cisne-
ros and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez (D-N.Y.) to run for Con-
gress, have spent $1.4 million on
the race.
But centrist groups supporting
Cuellar have spent more. United
Democracy PAC, founded six
months ago and funded by theAmerican Israel Public Affairs
Committee, put $1.8 million into
the district, and Mainstream
Democrats, whose major donors
include LinkedIn co-founder
Reid Hoffman, spent nearly
$800,000.
On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.) went to San Antonio to
rally with Cisneros, telling a
crowd that he was “sick and tired
of seeing billionaires pour mil-
lions and millions of dollars into
ugly 30-second ads, trying to
defeat good people who are repre-
senting working families.”
Sanders, who endorsed Cisner-
os in both of her runs against
Cuellar, has stepped up his cam-
paigning for like-minded candi-
dates and his condemnation of
the PACs working to beat them.
Among them is Pennsylvania
state Rep. Summer Lee, who nar-
rowly won the party’s nomination
last week in her state’s 12th Con-
gressional District.
Centrists have found more suc-
cess in other primaries, including
in Ohio, where they twice spent
millions to elect Rep. Shontel
Brown (D-Ohio) over Nina Tur-
ner, a former co-chair of Sanders’s
2020 presidential campaign. Last
Tuesday, two North Carolina
Democrats won primaries over
more liberal candidates.
“Far-left groups say they are
executing what they call a ‘hostile
takeover’ of the Democratic par-
ty,” Mainstream Democrats said
in a statement to The Washington
Post. “A Democratic party defined
by the far left will not be able to
obtain a congressional majority
in 2022 or thereafter.”
At least $50 million has been
spent by super PACs in Democrat-
ic primaries this year, more than
was spent across every Democrat-
ic congressional primary in 2018
and 2020 combined. Millions
went into Oregon’s 5th Congres-
sional District, where Rep. Kurt
Schrader (D-Ore.) has trailed at-
torney Jamie McLeod-Skinner,
who ran to his left, as votes are
counted in the aftermath of their
May 17 primary and no winner
has yet been declared.
“You’ve run 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 BlueDog Democrats, in a debate last
month.
Cisneros adopted a similar
message in Texas, telling voters
that the district deserved a reli-
able Democrat representing it. At
her rally with Sanders, Cisneros
talked about interning for Cuellar
and being surprised to learn that
a member of her party could be
“anti-immigrant.” Cuellar, at the
time, had responded to a surge of
child migrants at the border dur-
ing Barack Obama’s presidency
with legislation that would have
made it easier to deport them.
Cuellar rejected the idea that
his disputes with left-wing Demo-
crats made him a disloyal mem-
ber of the party. He has talked
frequently with Pelosi, he said,
and few members raised more to
elect House Democrats.
Pelosi has repeatedly defended
Cuellar in the wake of the FBI
investigation, and she recorded a
robocall that calls the congress-
man “a fighter for hard-working
families” who “has brought back
millions of dollars to the district.”
The speaker, who like Cuellar
is a practicing Catholic, has also
argued that while she disagrees
with him on abortion, his vote on
Capitol Hill hasn’t been as deci-
sive when it comes to abortion
legislation.
“He is not pro-choice, but we
didn’t need him,” Pelosi told re-
porters after Cuellar opposed the
Women’s Health Protection Act,
crafted by congressional Demo-
crats to put Roe ’s abortion protec-
tions into federal statutes. “We
passed the bill with what we had.”
At the baseball game, Cuellar
asked voters what their top issue
was, and later said how frequent-
ly they cited security on the
U.S.-Mexico border — and how
none cited abortion. Left-wing
Democratic activists were trying
to oust him, Cuellar said, even
though he spoke for those con-
stituents, and they didn’t.
“I like Joe Manchin. Joe Man-
chin is a friend. I’ll take that as a
compliment,” Cuellar said.
“They’re trying to demonize an-
other Democrat, they’re trying to
demonize me, and I think it’s
wrong.”Mike DeBonis in Washington
contributed to this report.Texas runo≠ tests divisions over abortion, immigration
ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Democratic congressional candidate Jessica Cisneros speaks before a February event i n San Antonio.RELIABLE DECK EXPERTS
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