How lesbian in Texas could win House seat
Here’s what that recordbreaking wave of female candidates is carrying toward the midterm shore: candidates like Gina Ortiz Jones. If she’s elected — “you mean when I’m elected,” she corrected me during her recent fundraising visit to San Francisco — Ortiz Jones would be the first out lesbian, first Iraq War veteran and first Filipina ever elected to Congress from Texas.
Yes, a candidate like that has a shot at being elected in Texas in a district the nonpartisan Cook Political Report says now “leans Republican.” The November midterms could be that kind of wave election. Or that wave could crest a mile offshore. Nobody knows because, as President Trump taught us two years ago, a lot can happen in the 73 days until election day.
But what we know for sure is that this campaign season has shown the rest of America what the Bay Area has known for years: Political candidates come in sizes other than “Straight White Male” and “Has Connections to Money.”
The selections now include a lot more candidates like Ortiz Jones.
She’s the daughter of an immigrant — a college graduate — from the Philippines who came to the U.S. for more opportunity and raised two daughters here on her own.
They had little. Ortiz Jones was on the reduced-price lunch plan at school and her family lived in subsidized housing. Whenever she or her sister would complain in the least — whether they wanted a new pair of shoes or another scoop of ice cream — their grandmother would remind them: “You know, your cousin in the Philippines doesn’t have that.”
“We were reminded every single day of how fortunate we were and, frankly, the need to give back to a great country,” Ortiz Jones said.
Because she couldn’t afford to attend college, she earned an ROTC scholarship and went to Boston University. She served in Air Force intelligence operations in Iraq and later worked in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative during the Obama administration and, for a brief time, under President Trump.
She soon found that the political operatives appointed above her in the new administration were, in her words, more interested in enriching themselves than in public service. So she left and returned home to run for office with a resume and a background rarely seen in politics.
But she is not running on being gay or Filipina or female. That’s not going to win in Texas, even in a district that narrowly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump.
“Some folks will say, ‘You’re just playing identify politics,’ ” Ortiz Jones told me on my “It’s All Political” podcast. “I’m just talking about my lived experiences and how that allows me to understand why it’s important that we protect investments like subsidized lunch and affordable housing — the things that allowed somebody like me to go on and serve our country.”
She is not a “Dreamer” — someone like the 3,500 people in her congressional district who were brought to the U.S. by an adult who is not a legal immigrant. But she tries to emotionally connect her experience serving under the millitary’s now-defunct “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy to that of the Dreamers.
She tells young Latino voters that she feared that her military scholarship — and her shot at a college education — could be taken away if people found out she was a lesbian while she was in college.
“I know exactly what it is like to have worked hard for something and live in fear every single day that it could be ripped away from you through no fault of your own,” Ortiz Jones said. “It’s the fear that our young (Dreamer) students have at University of Texas El Paso.”
She may be a 37-yearold first-time candidate, but she’s sharp enough to slip my question about whether she will support House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for speaker, should Democrats retake the House. Fifty-one other Democrats — many of them running in leftleaning districts — say they won’t back Pelosi.
But Ortiz Jones isn’t going there.
“I don’t know the full slate of folks, so it would be premature to say who I would support,” Ortiz Jones said. “But these are the things that I will be considering when I do take that vote: Who is going to do the most to protect health care? Who is going to do the most to ensure that we have quality jobs to bring to the district? And who is going to do the most to ensure that we have an immigration policy that reflects our values?”
It’s a decent answer to a question with no good answers for a first-time Democratic candidate. Say yes, and get hit with an ad telling Texans that you’re a puppet of a San Francisco liberal. Say no and you could be on the bad side of your future boss before you get the job.
Nearly two years ago, a few weeks before the presidential election, Emily’s List President Stephanie Schriock told me that after Hillary Clinton won, “I believe it is going to plant seeds all over in young women and girls about the importance of public service and running for office.”
Schriock’s prediction was half right. And she never could have predicted that Ortiz Jones would be one of the 40,000 Democratic prochoice women to contact Emily’s List after Clinton lost and that her organization would support the young woman’s candidacy.
“Yes, someone like that can win in Texas, and it’s not because of all the categories we put on Gina Ortiz Jones,” Schriock told me after an Emily’s List fundraiser in San Francisco. “It’s such a different life perspective. It’s sort of capturing the imagination of voters .... (who are saying), ‘OK, we are looking for somebody different and somebody who can bring a fresh perspective.’ And that’s why this is in play.”