On the last Sunday of September, a dozen volunteers gathered on the South Side of San Antonio alongside Republican candidates Jorge Borrego and Carlos De La Cruz. “This is where our efforts matter the most,” said Borrego, who is running for Texas House District 118. “If we win this district, it’ll get us over the finish line in November.”
The group of volunteers at Mission De Lago Golf Course bowed their heads in a prayer for victory before they set out to knock on doors. “The church needs to get engaged in government and put a final end to the separation of church and state,” local pastor Mark Lugo said. “Lord, I pray for these two gentlemen that are in this fight.” The group then split off to load up their cars with campaign swag and literature.
The 118th is a purple-ish swing district that forms a crescent around San Antonio from the southwest to the northeast. It’s considered to be the most flippable of the Texas House seats this cycle, and it’s also a microcosm of this year’s gubernatorial race. The Democrats’ champion Kristian Carranza, a 36-year-old political organizer who has aligned herself closely with gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa and her plan to end school vouchers. Borrego, who is 30 years old, comes straight from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), the influential conservative think tank where he helped push the private school voucher program that Governor Greg Abbott signed into law in 2025.
Borrego is hoping to thwart Carranza’s second attempt to flip the district, which was once a Democratic stronghold until Republican John Lujan flipped the seat in a low-turnout special election upset back in 2021. Ever since, it’s been a top target for state House Democrats, who’ve thus far failed to wrest back the South Side-centered seat. In 2024, an overall disappointing cycle for the minority party, Carranza lost by 3.5 points to Lujan. But this time, the seat is up for grabs after Lujan made a failed primary bid for Congress, and Carranza is hoping to ride a wave of growing discontent with Republican Party leadership in Texas.
“She has a real shot,” Jon Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told the Texas Observer. “Not only is she getting good support from state and national Democrats, but looking at her contribution list, there are a lot of individual donations.” Carranza has raised a total of over $800,000 throughout the course of her campaign from over 5,000 individual donations, campaign finance records show.
As the former education policy director at the TPPF, Borrego has earned endorsements from Abbott and numerous other state representatives, as well donations from top conservative political PACs. Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC, one of the biggest political donors to Texas Republican candidates, has poured roughly $400,000 into Borrego’s campaign. That, and contributions from other PACs, makes up the vast majority of his over $700,000 total haul throughout the campaign. But Borrego burned through much of that cash early in the cycle. As of October, Carranza has a significant cash-on-hand advantage of $383,000 to Borrego’s meager $22,000, per the latest campaign finance filings.
Right now, the Republican said he’s less concerned about funding and more focused on making connections at the door. “My opponent in the primary also had a significant amount of cash on hand over myself, and I still won two to one,” Borrego said.
Borrego hopped in his truck to blockwalk in a quiet South Side neighborhood near the golf course, like he’s done almost every day since July. He set a goal to knock on twice as many doors as the margin of victory between Carranza and Lujan in the previous race, which was 2,600 votes. Carranza told the Observer she’s knocked 7,000 doors so far this cycle and knocked 10,000 during her first campaign.
For every unopened door, Borrego left a handwritten note with his phone number. Others welcomed him into their homes. He pitched them on lower property taxes, public safety, and higher quality schools for their kids. But Borrego said he doesn’t think public schools need more funding. When asked about the 170 public schools that have closed in Texas since 2023, Borrego told the Observer that superintendents simply aren’t budgeting properly.
“We fund public schools at $105 billion a year. If you break that down, that’s enough to send every student in Texas to UT-Austin twice over,” Borrego said, citing a statistic that experts have said is technically accurate but doesn’t account for inflation and one-time federal funds. Borrego put per-student funding at $18,000 based on the total state education spending, which includes local, state, and federal dollars that are divided and stretched differently depending on the district. The actual per-student allotment is $6,215, putting Texas among the lowest in the nation for public school funding.
Borrego said he would, however, be interested in expanding the state’s Texas Education Freedom Accounts, which funneled $1 billion of public funds into vouchers for private and home schooling. “If we have another surplus, and the composition of the wait list is right, I would 100 percent be willing to expand the school choice program,” Borrego said. The recently appointed Texas comptroller and GOP nominee Don Huffines has called for the Legislature to double its funding of the program.
The candidates were planned to participate in a forum last month with the League of Women Voters (LWV) and Raise Your Hand Texas, a public education advocacy group. It was a rare opportunity for citizens to hear from both candidates about their policy positions, but the room full of attendees was left anxiously waiting for any sign of Borrego. The Republican never showed, forcing the LWV to pull out of the event based on their rules of non-partisanship.
“We cannot proceed with just one candidate,” said Jill Torbert, president of the San Antonio LWV, before they vacated the room.
Borrego told the Observer there had been a scheduling conflict with a private event that he would not disclose. It was later revealed that Borrego had sent the League an email less than two hours in advance explaining that he would be unable to attend.
“I tried my best to make both events work,” Borrego told the Observer, “and it’s with deep regret that I couldn’t make it.”
Carranza stayed behind to speak with a representative of Raise Your Hand Texas, a group that Borrego was at odds with during his time at TPPF. In hearings before the Texas Senate Education Committee, Borrego dismissed Raise Your Hand’s statistics showing that Texas wasn’t adequately funding public schools, and spoke in support of the $10,000-per-student private school voucher allocation.
In Borrego’s absence, Carranza directed her message at the crowd. “I’m so grateful that you showed up for me. As you see, I’m here. I’m always going to show up for you.” She went on to propose an increase to the basic allotment and said she would vote to end school vouchers, the STAAR test, and state takeovers of local school districts.
Carranza said growing up in San Antonio public schools taught her the importance of a strong public education. Her views were fortified by her public university education at Texas A&M Universtiy-Corpus Christi. But at the age of 21, Carranza was forced to pause her higher education to take care of her mother, who suffered from chronic health issues. She returned to college this year on a grant program and graduated this summer.
“For me, this is all about making sure that I’m providing more opportunities for other families like mine to get ahead,” Carranza said.
After the event, she called out Borrego on social media for being a no show, and he responded by challenging her to a debate in Spanish. “Mr. Borrego could have shown up to our scheduled forum and spoken in whatever language he wanted to,” Carranza told the Observer, “but he decided not to show up.”
It’s not the first time the two candidates traded barbs on social media. In late August, news outlets reported on a maelstrom of salacious old tweets that Borrego posted between 2011 and 2016. Many of the posts referenced cocaine use, sexual acts, and deployed a variety of curses, slurs, and stereotypes. “The posts in question were crude and immature jokes I made when I was a kid,” Borrego told the Texas Tribune, also stating on X that he was around 16 at the time. “Those posts do not reflect the husband, father, or public servant I am today.”
Carranza posted a condemnation of Borrego’s “lude, racist, and perverse” posts, stating that he was “unfit and unable to serve in a position of public trust.”
Controversies aside, both candidates have tried to recenter the conversation around affordability. Borrego said he would support Greg Abbott’s plan to lower property taxes, which includes an elimination of school district property taxes and a requirement for localities to get two-thirds voter support to raise rates. Like Abbott, he believes this can be achieved without raising other forms of taxation if the state has another budget surplus.
Rachel White, a University of Texas professor focused on education policy, said Abbott’s plan could likely only be achieved “with a complete overhaul of the state’s school finance system.”
Carranza said she thinks the best avenue to lower school district property taxes is to ensure that the state is carrying its fair share of public education funding. “When the state underfunds schools and diverts money to vouchers, the burden shifts onto homeowners through local property taxes,” she said. “Raising the basic allotment and putting a surplus into public schools is the most direct way to bring property taxes down.”
With Election Day approaching, the contest for the South Side seat is shaping up as a test of voters’ satisfaction with the state’s leadership and the future of Texas education. Failure to take back the most flippable Texas House seat in would spell disaster for Democrats. But if Carranza makes it across the finish line, it’s possible she’ll be accompanied by a wave of others.
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