2 years ago
National Democrats are making a last-minute foray into a special House election next week in South Texas, spending six-figures to keep Republicans from flipping a seat that’s been blue for decades.
House Majority PAC released a new Spanish-language TV ad attacking Mayra Flores, the leading Republican candidate in the June 14 contest to replace former Rep. Filemon Vela, who resigned earlier this year. The $112,000 buy represents the first major outside spending on behalf of the Democratic candidate, Dan Sanchez, who has been underfunded and swamped by Republican money.
The spot casts Flores, the wife of a Border Patrol agent, as an opponent of law and order and tries to tie her to those responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.
“Mayra supported the conspirators and conspiracy theories that were part of the armed attack on Jan. 6, leaving 150 police officers injured and 5 dead, all thanks to criminals who promote the same lawlessness that Mayra Flores supports,” a narrator says in Spanish in the spot.
If no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote next Tuesday, the race will advance to a runoff that will likely be held in August. Four candidates are on the ballot, but Flores is the only one who is well-funded, making an outright win possible.
Republicans view the race as an early chance to chip away at Democrats’ small House majority — and an opportunity to prove that they can win federal races in South Texas, which remained in Democratic hands but took a sharp turn to the right in the 2020 elections. Democrats, meanwhile, have been trapped in a quagmire.
The 34th District, which stretches from Brownsville up toward San Antonio, is currently highly competitive: President Joe Biden carried it by just 4 points in 2020. The special election will be held under those lines. But redistricting will go into effect by November and the seat will become far more Democratic — Biden would have won it by 16 points.
Party operatives don’t relish spending precious funds to defend a seat they feel they will easily be able to win in the fall. But some local Democrats were angry that Democratic groups were sitting out the special, potentially handing the power of incumbency and tangible momentum to Republicans ahead of a tough midterm.
“Republicans are dying for a Latino on the border to use as a poster child to falsely spread their right-wing message to our communities,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) told POLITICO last week. “It would be political malpractice if our party allowed this to happen in a district that has been blue for over a century.”
Gonzalez currently represents a neighboring South Texas district, but he will run in the new version of Vela’s district in the fall, instead of the newly drawn version of his current McAllen-based swing seat. But when Vela decided to resign and trigger a special election under the old district lines, Democrats had to recruit another candidate to run to fill the rest of his term.
Flores, a respiratory-care practitioner, is running in both the special election and for the full term in the fall. She has aired over $500,000 worth of TV ads ahead of the special election, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. The National Republican Congressional Committee made a coordinated ad buy with the Flores campaign worth $270,000, and the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House GOP’s main super PAC, spent about $200,000 on Flores’ behalf.
Sanchez, a trial attorney, has been unable to air TV ads and has spoken out about the disparity on the air. House Majority PAC's investment will help relieve that gap somewhat and could prevent Flores from hitting the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff.
The group's spot will run for a week, beginning Tuesday, in the Harlingen market.
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