Can Justice Democrats Swing Two Texas Congressional Districts to the Left?

San Antonio rock club Paper Tiger is one of the cooler places in the Alamo City. In recent months, it’s hosted a who’s who of the hottest names in indie rock—Idles, Japanese Breakfast, and Julien Baker among them—and its lineup on Saturday morning drew a similar crowd of young folks in Doc Martens and Converse. The headliner? Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, hosting a rally in support of two Texas congressional candidates: Greg Casar, the Austin city council member running in the open primary in the Thirty-fifth Congressional District, which includes portions of Austin, Hays County, and San Antonio; and Jessica Cisneros, the 28-year-old immigration attorney challenging longtime incumbent Henry Cuellar in the Twenty-eighth, a sprawling district that stretches from Rio Grande City to Laredo and all the way up to the east side of San Antonio. (Adding to the rock and roll atmosphere, Austin musician Jackie Venson opened the show.)

Casar and Cisneros—like AOC in the 2018 campaign that made her a political superstar—are running with the support of Justice Democrats, the political action committee that was formed in 2017 to recruit candidates in local and statewide races around the country who would excite the same young, progressive voters who were activated by Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run. As the organization has developed in the years since the 2018 election, it has narrowed its focus, from endorsing dozens of candidates in Senate, congressional, gubernatorial, and other races to a tight collection of a half-dozen House primary races in 2022—a third of which, represented by Casar and Cisneros, run through Texas.

At Paper Tiger on Saturday morning, Cisneros shouted out Justice Democrats in telling the story of how she was recruited for her first congressional run in 2020, and was met with chants of “Jess-i-ca, Jess-i-ca” from the crowd—a reception that was matched by Casar’s, and topped by AOC’s. But despite the rock-show vibe, packing several hundred enthusiastic young voters into a bar is only part of what the candidates—and a progressive movement that needs to prove it can win elections in a state like Texas—need to accomplish.

In 2020, Justice Democrats put forth a slate of eight new candidates, plus another seven incumbents. The incumbents, all of whom ran in safe districts, sailed to reelection. The newcomers—a group that included Cisneros, whose current challenge to Cuellar amounts to a rematch—had more mixed results. Five of them advanced beyond their primary, and the organization’s final tally brought just three new progressive candidates into Congress. (Only one of them, Illinois representative Marie Newman, ran in a competitive district that November.) Of the candidates who came up short, Cisneros had the most promising result, losing to Cuellar by just 2,690 votes.

Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/can-justice-democrats-swing-two-texas-congressional-districts-to-the-left/