Hurd always walked a thin line in congressional swing district

Over the past five years, I consistently carried two competing thoughts about Will Hurd’s future.

I thought he had the potential to reach the U.S. Senate and become a major national force in the Republican Party.

At the same time, I could also see him getting voted out of Congress in the very next election cycle.

That’s the thin line that Hurd, the Helotes-based congressman who graduated from San Antonio’s Marshall High School, has walked every day of his political career.

It’s the inevitable result of representing the 23rd Congressional District, a sprawling 29-county district that covers more than 800 miles along the TexasMexico border and stretches from the South Side of San Antonio all the way to El Paso County.

District 23 is this state’s one true 50-50 proposition, a short-term rental of a political office with a history of swinging back and forth from one election cycle to the next — Democratic in presidential years, Republican in midterm years.

After Hurd knocked off freshman Rep. Pete Gallego in November 2014, he became the fourth person to hold the seat in four terms. Compare that to the 20th District, which the late, legendary Henry B. González comfortably controlled for a cozy 38 years.

Hurd, 41, always exudes an easygoing confidence in public, but the strain of having to run a neverending campaign for political survival in District 23 surely took its toll over the congressman’s three terms in office. So while Hurd’s announcement last Thursday that he won’t seek re-election was startling, it also was vaguely predictable.

Hurd escaped defeat in his last two elections by outperforming the standard bearers of the GOP ticket. In 2016, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lost District 23 to Hillary Clinton, but Hurd managed to sway just enough Clinton voters to defeat Gallego.

Last November, with

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz losing the district to Beto O’Rourke, Hurd again found a way to win, this time by only 926 votes over former Air Force intelligence officer Gina Ortiz Jones.

With Jones again primed to run for the Democratic nomination (along with San Antonio activist Rosey Ramos Abuabara), and with Texas Democrats expecting a 2020 turnout surge, Hurd’s path to victory was narrowing by the day.

Two days before Hurd’s big announcement, Manny Garcia, the executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said Jones’s close finish in 2018 “reignited the support of national entities who had gotten a little tired of the 23rd Congressional District, but are now very excited about Gina and what she could potentially do.”

Hurd’s departure has jolted the GOP not only because he’s the lone African American Republican in the U.S. House or because his CIA background gave him special credibility on cybersecurity issues. There’s also the fact that he’s the sixth congressional Republican — and third from Texas — to announce his retirement in two weeks.

Die-hard Trump supporters view Hurd’s announcement as comeuppance for the congressman periodically criticizing the president’s boorish tendencies. Trump haters interpret the move in the opposite way, as Hurd’s political punishment for not doing enough to oppose Trump.

Much like another son of Bexar County, former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, Hurd was a traditional Republican grappling with the changing order created by the tea party movement (a movement that led to Trump’s ascendance). Hurd cast himself as a pro-business, free-trade pragmatist who valued America’s old alliances and believed in a bipartisan legislative process.

Progressives pointed to Hurd’s votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act and in favor of a deficit-busting 2017 GOP tax cut and branded his record as the amiable face of Trumpism.

Nonetheless, he bucked Trump, and his party, at some key moments: voting against a 2017 bill to repeal and replace the ACA; voting to condemn Trump for the president’s statement that four progressive women of color in the House should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

A little more than a week ago, when former special counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House Intelligence Committee, Hurd refused to walk the party line of attacking Mueller. Instead, he asked serious questions about the threat that Russian election hacking poses in 2020.

Knowing from the beginning how tough it would be to hold his seat, Hurd placed an emphasis on constituent services and community outreach, exemplified by his series of Dairy Queen town halls around the district. Last November, on Election Day, I saw an example of how that outreach enabled him to hang on to his seat.

Hurd spent several minutes at Parman Library at Stone Oak talking with an African American teacher who wanted his help getting scholarships for her students through the Congressional Black Caucus. Hurd promised to talk to Democratic Rep. Cedric Richmond, then the CBC chair, about her request.

As she walked away, the teacher muttered, “That’s why I support this man.”

She wasn’t alone.