Progressive Democrat Jessica Cisneros, who narrowly lost the 2020 Democratic primary by 2,746 votes to longtime District 28 Congressman Henry Cuellar, announced Thursday that she will challenge Cuellar once again in the 2022 primary.
Her announcement included a call for funding, with Cisneros noting that Cuellar has a war chest of $1.74 million.
The average donation to the Cuellar campaign in 2020 was $2,800 to Cisneros’ $32.
The disparate ideologies of both candidates about fundraising, campaigning, their public service priorities, and engaging with the electorate surfaced as mirror image opposites in the 2020 race.
What the native Laredoans have in common is that they are both the children of Mexican immigrants, and that both are attorneys. The similarities end there.
Cuellar is glib, polished, and is cloaked in the sheen of a veteran politician. Cisneros, her own spokesperson, speaks of working at providing a fair shot at a better life for immigrants, the working class, and the disenfranchised poor, and for access for all to equitable health care and education.
Cisneros’ energetic and gritty grassroots campaign in 2020, which Cuellar under-estimated and discounted as viable, contrasted starkly with that waged by the comfortably-ensconced-in-D.C. conservative Congressman who has been supported financially in the past by the NRA, the private prison for profit industry, PACs and lobbyists, and the Koch brothers.
Cisneros block-walked, made personal appearances at meet ups and neighborhood gatherings, traveled throughout the counties of District 28, and was endorsed by the Working Families Party, EMILY’s List, the Communications Workers of America District 6, J Street, MoveOn, NARAL, the Texas AFL-CIO, and the Texas Organizing Project.
Cuellar was most visible in the 2020 campaign in $900,000 worth of TV ads — paid for by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Workers for Progress — and in the barrage of glossy postage paid flyers that filled the mailboxes of District 28’s constituents.
The website video Cisneros released with her campaign kickoff on Thursday chided the eight-term Congressman for his alignment with Republicans on anti-immigration legislation that separated families, putting the interests of his corporate donors before the needs of the people of District 28, and for being the sole Democrat to vote against the historic Workers Rights Bill. She has called Cuellar “Trump’s favorite Democrat” and was critical of his role last year in bringing with much fanfare what would turn out to be $500,000 of bogus COVID-19 testing kits to Laredo. The fanfare, which was recorded for public relations posterity, included a sirens wailing and lights a-blazing Webb County Sheriff’s Department escort for a red 18-wheeler flatbed carrying a few boxes of the useless kits that Cuellar was on hand to receive and carry into a local medical facility.
Cisneros’ campaign video presents a compelling, unvarnished look at the landscape of poverty and its resolute hold on the quality of life for many Laredoans and other South Texans for whom the American dream is beyond reach. Her accompanying narrative tells that “the dreams of immigrants, truckers, rancheros, and teachers are just as powerful” as the corporate dollars that funded Cuellar’s campaign. “We are back to finish what we started,” said Cisneros, a human rights and immigration attorney who once again has the support of Justice Democrats.
According to a story by Patrick Svitek in Thursday’s Texas Tribune, Cuellar’s campaign spokesperson, Colin Strother, diminished the significance of Cisneros’ narrow loss in 2020, calling it “a free pass.” He continued, “We’re not gonna put up with it this time…She’s gonna find out what South Texas politics is really like” — drawing a line in the shifting, wind blown sands of an electoral landscape likely to see Congressional district lines re-drawn by Republican lawmakers.
Cisneros and Cuellar will square off with a third candidate, Tannya Benavides, who announced her entry into the District 28 race in June. (See subsequent story.)
