San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Cuellar getswhat matters to rural voters in Texas
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar keeps winning elections. So he can live with the disdain of progressive Democrats.
The congressman from Laredo strolled to his ninth consecutive term on Nov. 3, taking 58.3 percent of the vote against GOP and Libertarian challengers. The real fight was in the Democratic primary in March, when his main opponent attacked him in TV ads as “Trump’s favorite Democrat.”
It was a riff on Cuellar’s previous designation as President George W. Bush’s favorite Democrat.
Jessica Cisneros, a Laredo immigration lawyer, had the backing of a constellation of unions and liberal groups in taking on Cuellar in the primary.
That included Justice Democrats, which helped Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez win in New York in 2018. In February, a month after dropping out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, former Mayor and HUD Secretary Julián Castro endorsed her, too — making things awkward for his twin, Rep. Joaquin Castro, in the Texas congressional delegation.
Cuellar, 65, a free trader who supports gun rights and opposes abortion, had business on his side. The rightleaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce loves Cuellar and spent tons of money to support his candidacy.
Oil and gas producers helped, too. The energy industry was Cuellar’s biggest contributor in 2019 and 2020, giving the congressman from Eagle Ford Shale a total of $218,500, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shrugged off House progressives — who were, and mostly remain, super-energized by AOC’s Green New Deal — to campaign for Cuellar in Laredo and help him raise campaign funds.
Congressional District 28 is weirdly gerrymandered. It’s anchored in Laredo, sweeps along the U.S.-Mexico border to McAllen and juts north to take in a thick slab of San Antonio’s East Side. (The map works for Cuellar’s fundraising: San Antonio has more deeppocketed corporate and individual donors than Laredo does. USAA and Southwest Business Corp. have been among his major contributors.)
In the March 3 Democratic primary, Cuellar defeated Cisneros by 2,690 votes — 51.8 percent to her 48.2 percent.
But she crushed him 2-to-1 in Bexar County, a clear demonstration of the urban-rural split that bedeviled Democrats on Nov. 3. The party lost House seats, thinning its majority, and failed to take control of the Senate — for now anyway. Two Senate runoffs in Georgia will decide the matter in January.
Cuellar has a story that sums up Democrats’ conundrum and sheds some light on why he’s a pariah among progressives.
A year after the November 2017 massacre of 26 churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, he attended a memorial service with Joaquin Castro. The small Wilson County town, about 30 miles east of San Antonio, is in Cuellar’s district.
“On church grounds — after this shooting — there were people carrying guns, not concealed,” Cuellar said. “And Joaquin looks at them and looks at me, and then he leaned over and he says, ‘Man, there’s a lot of people here with guns.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know — and then you wonder why I vote a certain way? This is my district.’ ”
Maybe it’s the urban marshmallow in me talking, but I can understand Castro’s unease. Open carry at a memorial service for victims of a mass shooting?
Still, point taken.
In South Texas, Trump stunned Democrats on Nov. 3 by winning Zapata County and making big gains in Starr County and other border communities. That includes Cuellar’s home base of Webb County, where his brother Martin is the sheriff and his sister Rosie is the tax assessor-collector.
There, Trump won a scant 23 percent of the vote against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Against Joe Biden this year? He won 38 percent.
First, Cuellar’s disclaimer: “There’s no realignment because the other Republicans
did not win. None of the Republicans (the party’s candidates for Texas Senate, Congress, etc.) won those counties. President Trump did that. So it was more of a one-person show.”
Nevertheless, in Trump’s showing on the border, Cuellar identifies the issues he believes could continue to hurt Democrats in his neighborhood: the “defund the police” movement (South Texas voters, he says, have great respect for law enforcement) and the fear that Biden is dead-set on ending oil and gas fracking.
It’s not that simple, of course. The president-elect favors a big push into clean energy — he wants to end oil and gas subsidies and forbid drilling on public lands. But he’s also said he won’t seek a fracking ban. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t stop Trump from hammering him as a disaster for the oil industry.
In Trump, many of us — myself included — see a scary demagogue. A lot of South Texas voters, though obviously not a majority, see a champion of law and order, and someone who’s looking out for their jobs.
When oil prices collapsed last spring, producers slashed 26,300 jobs in Texas, many of them in the Eagle Ford Shale. Those losses softened up voters for Trump’s misleading message.
Overall, joblessness remains high in the region. Laredo’s unemployment rate was 9.4 percent in September. McAllen’s was 12.8 percent.
Cuellar is a devout Catholic, but he also worships at the altar of business — and government largess.
A member of the House Appropriations Committee, whose job is meting out scarce federal funds, he’s one of the few remaining Congress members who take considerable, voter-facing pride in delivering projects and money to their constituents.
The headline on a Oct. 29 news release from his office is representative of the many that preceded it: “Rep. Cuellar Delivers $549,948 to the Rio Grande Valley.” Most of the funding will go to expand services for sexual assault victims. The rest will be spent on small-business development.
Cuellar’s message to his fellow Democrats, however, isn’t just about economics or the importance of law enforcement. It’s also about what he sees as crucial parts of Hispanic culture in South Texas: patriotism, religious belief and social conservatism.
“I keep saying this: ‘We cannot win rural Texas, guys, if we don’t spend time there and talk to them — and understand there are certain issues there that might not be important to San Antonio, but are very important to us,’ ” Cuellar said.
Since Biden’s victory, the Democratic Party’s liberals and moderates have shredded their election-year peace agreement, blaming one another for losses in the House and the failure to take the Senate.
We know where Cuellar comes down.
“We’ve got to be worried about making sure that we keep the majority” in the House, he said. “Because the last time we were in the majority, we were there four years — 2006 to 2010. And we overreached and said the wrong things. And then we lost the House badly in 2010.
“This time, it’s been two years under a Democratic majority. So we’ve got another two years to go, and that’s going to determine whether we end up like we did in
2010.”
However it shakes out in 2022, Cuellar will survive with the help of his many industry friends and Blue Dog Democrats like himself.