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After red wave that wasn't, former GOP congresswoman hoping for better luck next year [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2023-07-11  

Former Republican Rep. Mayra Flores announced Tuesday that she would seek a rematch with Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who convincingly beat her 53-44 in an unusual incumbent vs. incumbent contest last year. National Republicans, however, are hoping that 2024 will be a strong year for them in Rio Grande Valley constituencies like this one.

The Texas Tribune reported last week that, not only was the NRCC working to recruit Flores for a second bout in this Brownsville-based seat, which has the largest Latino population of any House district in America, its late May internal from 1892 Polling found her and Gonzalez deadlocked 42-42. Reporter Patrick Svitek, though, noted that Republicans fell victim to over-optimism in south Texas last cycle, and Flores herself tweeted on election night that "the RED WAVE did not happen."

Flores' frustration came at the end of a cycle in which Republicans expected to make huge gains up and down the ballot in a region that had once been reliably Democratic but seemed to be wavering, as her own special election win months earlier had suggested.

Other data supported that notion: Under the previous map, the 34th District, which was represented by Democratic Rep. Filemon Vela, had moved dramatically to the right between 2016 and 2020, supporting Hillary Clinton 59-38 but Joe Biden just 52-48. Gonzalez, meanwhile, had represented the neighboring 15th District, which experienced a similar shift.

But redistricting and a retirement shuffled the map: Vela opted against seeking reelection, while GOP mapmakers made the 34th District bluer in order to strengthen their position in the neighboring 15th. As a result, the revamped 34th supported Biden 57-42 but the 15th backed Trump 51-48.

Gonzalez unsurprisingly went on to announce that he'd run in the new 34th rather than the 15th, even though he only represented about a quarter of the former. (While Gonzalez would blame Republicans for moving him out of his district, it was a fellow south Texas Democrat who proposed the amendment that awkwardly transported Gonzalez's home from the 15th to the 34th. It passed almost unanimously.)

The move made sense for him personally, but by leaving the 15th open, he made it ripe for a Republican pickup—and the GOP did in fact capitalize (more on that below). In the 34th, though, Gonzalez started off looking like the favorite against Flores, a local conservative activist who'd never run for office before. But her prospects started to improve after Vela resigned a few weeks after she convincingly won the GOP primary in order to take a job at a lobbying firm.

That triggered a June special election to succeed him in the old 34th, which ultimately set up the strange November face-off between Flores and Gonzalez. Ordinarily, when a retirement unexpectedly turns into a resignation, that creates an opportunity for the two candidates seeking the seat in the general election to both run in the special. But in this case, the Democrat was Gonzalez, who already had a seat in Congress and therefore had no incentive to join the race for the final six months of Vela's term.

That task instead fell to former Cameron County Commissioner Dan Sanchez, while Flores eagerly jumped at the opportunity. Republican outside groups saw an opening and deployed $1 million to aid Flores, while Democrats only began airing TV ads in the final week. Flores ended up beating Sanchez 51-43 in a win that made her the first House Republican elected to represent portions of the seat since 1870, fueling GOP certainty that a red wave was looming.

It didn't take long, however, for the new congresswoman's extremist views to start attracting attention in a way they hadn't during the special after Media Matters and CNN both reported that Flores had repeatedly used the "#qanon" hashtag on social media (she later claimed to the San Antonio Express-News during the special election that she had "never been supportive" of the conspiracy theory).

She had in fact spent the weeks after the 2020 elections denying Trump lost, including on Jan. 6 itself. "If we allow the Democrats to steal THIS election," she tweeted, "they will steal EVERY election moving forward!" Flores wrote later that day that the attack "surely was caused by infiltrators" and falsely insisted that one rioter was a Black Lives Matter activist. When the New York Times repeatedly asked the congresswoman if she considered Biden's win to be legitimate, she responded four times, "He’s the worst president of the United States."

While Democrats had run some ads during the special tying Flores to the rioters, they deployed far more money to advance that point during her showdown with Gonzalez. The congressman's allies also went after her ardent opposition to abortion rights, an issue she said led her to leave the Democratic Party a decade earlier. Republicans, meanwhile, tried to portray Gonzalez as hostile to the police and tried to attack him over his past career as an attorney.

Altogether, the four largest House groups spent $11.1 million on a contest that seemed to be anyone's race going into Election Day. It ended, however, in a comfortable 9-point romp for Gonzalez, even as Republican Monica De La Cruz was simultaneously flipping the 15th District; the GOP also failed to unseat another Rio Grande Valley Democrat, conservative Rep. Henry Cuellar, despite another expensive effort. Gonzalez's win, according to Bloomberg's Greg Giroux, also came as Democrat Beto O'Rourke was carrying the 34th 56-43 despite losing his campaign for governor, another sign that Democrats were by no means a spent force in the area.

Flores is hoping that 2024 will be the red wave that 2022 wasn't, though it's not quite clear yet whether she'll have an obstacle-free path to the general election. Her only notable intra-party foe so far is perennial candidate Mauro Garza, a self-funder who most recently lost last year's primary in the 15th to De La Cruz 57-15. A more serious potential opponent is former Secretary of State Carlos Cascos, who recently told the Texas Tribune he'd decide after Labor Day. Pastor Luis Cabrera, however, told the site in May he'd only get in if Flores passed on the race.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/11/2180495/-After-red-wave-that-wasn-t-former-GOP-congresswoman-hoping-for-better-luck-next-year

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