Dems pushing to unseat Crenshaw
O’Rourke among those promoting effort to flip district
Democrats, including Beto O’Rourke, are ramping up their efforts to unseat freshman U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, making an ambitious play for a historically bright red district they say is trending in their favor.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ campaign arm, on Thursday added Crenshaw’s 2nd Congressional District to its list of 2020 targets, making it the seventh GOP-controlled seat in Texas to garner the group’s attention. The move signals that the DCCC, which last week announced a $125 million fundraising haul in 2019, intends to put resources into flipping the district.
A day before the announcement, Democratic candidate Sima Ladjevardian — a former O’Rourke adviser — announced she had raised more than $407,000 in the first three weeks of her campaign. On Tuesday she held a formal campaign kickoff
attended by O’Rourke and a handful of local officials.
“The guy who is in there right now, Dan Crenshaw, this is Trump’s guy in Texas,” O’Rourke told a crowd gathered in front of Ladjevardian’s new campaign office. “He has the Trump embassy right here in Houston. He has the Trump seat in the United States House of Representatives.”
Ladjevardian introduced herself by saying, “For those of you who don’t know, my name is Sima, and together we’re going to unseat Dan Crenshaw.”
Also running in the Democratic primary are Navy veteran and science teacher Elisa Cardnell and former Homeland Security Department employee Travis Olsen. Both projected confidence about their chances of winning the seat after the DCCC’s announcement.
“Austin drew our district to create a ‘safe Republican’ seat,” Cardnell wrote Thursday on Twitter. “But now the tide is turning, TX-02 is in play, we are going to win, and we are going to end gerrymandering.”
O’Rourke’s trip to the district also appeared to generate a fundraising boost for Crenshaw, a Houston Republican whose campaign said it took in $50,000 from Tuesday night through the end of Wednesday. Crenshaw will report a $1.6 million haul during the final three months of the year, according to his campaign, bringing his total fundraising to $4.3 million in 2019.
Crenshaw campaign spokesperson Kerry Rom said the freshman Republican’s opponents are “going to waste a lot of Democrat donor money attacking” the incumbent.
“They know he’s been extremely effective, so they’re going to throw anything and everything at him and try to distort his record as a hardworking advocate for the people of TX-02,” Rom said in a statement.
Crenshaw won the seat in 2018 by about seven percentage points, succeeding longtime Humble Republican Ted Poe. The district, which wraps around Harris County from Montrose to Kingwood and Atascocita, long has voted overwhelmingly for Republicans, though O’Rourke lost the district to Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz by just 1.2 percentage points.