On a Thursday in late August, Republican Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson was on a campaign swing through a handful of key congressional districts in South Texas that will be critical to whether he keeps his job next year.

One of those stops was an early-afternoon rally for Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina at Tijerina’s new campaign headquarters in Laredo. Together, Tijerina, who is challenging longtime Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar for Texas’ 28th Congressional District, and Johnson sounded the alarm about the creeping rise of socialists and communists in the Democratic Party. 

“This isn’t your father’s Democratic Party,” said Johnson, a Louisiana native, as he reminisced about growing up surrounded by god-fearing, conservative Yellow Dog Democrats. In his own brief, unmemorable stump speech, Tijerina warned the crowd of about 100 attendees not to dismiss the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America as a “facade” and said that the Dems’ electoral strategy is to “divide and conquer.” 

Nary a mention was made, however, of Tijerina’s opponent, Cuellar, who is a notoriously conservative member of his own party. The Republicans’ warnings in Laredo were not dissimilar to those Cuellar was making a few years back when he faced an insurgent primary challenge from a young progressive named Jessica Cisneros, backed by the Justice Democrats and a litany of other left-wing national groups. In two consecutive primary cycles, Cisneros came within a hair of ousting the powerful Laredo politician, who has throughout his roughly two decades in office staked out both an influential role on the House Appropriations Committee, which controls the nation’s pursestrings, and a reputation as an ideological pariah in his party—staunchly pro-oil and gas, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-union. 

“You’ve got a for-profit group of a bunch of New York intellectuals that have never had the red dirt of South Texas on their boots, they probably don’t even have boots, coming in saying how this district should be represented … that’s just not going to fly,” Colin Strother, Cuellar’s sharp-elbowed former longtime political consultant said of Cisneros and the Justice Democrats during that first primary. 

Cuellar survived those primary challenges only to become the target of a federal corruption investigation in which he was charged and indicted on multiple counts of bribery and abuse of power for an alleged scheme in which he took favorable legislative action in exchange for cash from an Azerbaijani state oil company and a Mexican bank. (Strother pled guilty for his role in the bribery scheme and struck a deal with the feds to inform on his former boss.) 

The Laredo Democrat was temporarily stripped of his appropriations subcommittee chairmanship and on the verge of standing trial in a federal courthouse in Houston when Donald Trump was elected president again and, shortly after moving back into the White House, issuing a pardon of Cuellar, claiming the latter was politically targeted by President Joe Biden for criticizing Biden’s border policies. “Crooked Joe used the FBI and DOJ to ‘take out’ a member of his own Party after Highly Respected Congressman Henry Cuellar bravely spoke out against Open Borders,” Trump posted at the time. “Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — Your nightmare is finally over!”

Cuellar and Tijerina campaign signs posted next to each other in Laredo (Justin Miller)

Trump apparently expected the Democrat—who despite his maverick leanings has repeatedly pledged staunch allegiance to his party—to then either bow out of office or switch parties. (After Cuellar did neither, the president eventually endorsed Tijerina, posting: “The fact that Henry Cuellar would be running against Donald J. Trump, and the Republican Party, seems to be a great act of disloyalty.”)

National Republicans, meanwhile, were seeding what they saw as newly fertile soil in the wake of Trump’s historic 2024 performance in the Hispanic-heavy swathes of South Texas—which included his narrowly carrying Webb County, typically as blue as the big sky, by a couple thousand votes. 

Within weeks of those November elections, Tijerina, who himself was a quintessential conservative border Democrat in county office, signed on with a prominent national GOP political consulting firm called Axiom Strategies—which has worked for Ted Cruz’s campaigns and is currently running Ken Paxton’s Senate bid—and went on Fox News to declare himself a Republican. 

“Over the years, I’ve watched the Democratic Party shift further and further to the left and leaving the values that I hold dear to my heart,” Tijerina said on Fox. “I’ve always been a conservative, and the radicalization of the national Democrats pushed me away a long time ago.” 

Soon after, he made his intentions clear that he was running for the 28th. Republicans in Austin lent a hand by redrawing the congressional maps to reconfigure many of the South Texas districts, including Cuellar’s, to reflect Trump’s strength at the top of the ballot. The 28th was redrawn to remove the portion around San Antonio and extend along the border back into Hidalgo County and Maverick County. While the new boundaries made it more Hispanic and more heavily Trump-favored, it also actually improved the net margins for Democratic congressional candidates who were on the ballot. 

“Of the five seats that Republicans changed to make more favorable, they basically did the least [in the 28th]. You could argue that they made it more favorable because the Trump vote went up but the combined congressional vote went down,” said Kyle Kondik, a national elections analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “There are all sorts of indications that the Trump ’24 Latino numbers are not going to come even close to replicating in ’26. Tijerina is a better challenger than [Cuellar saw] in ’24. But the environment is worse.” 

Johnson called Tijerina the “poster child” for the strength of their midterm candidate slate. “I talk about Tano all around the country,” said Johnson, whose speech was littered with various Trump impressions, including comments on Tijerina’s muscular physique. “He’s straight out of central casting,” he said, mimicking Trump. 

Indeed, the 52-year-old Tijerina is something of a MAGA dream. The brawny Latino rancher pulls off the South Texas cowboy aesthetic without a whiff of cosplay. He leans into humor and has a vibrant social media presence. It’s a stark contrast with Cuellar, who looks every bit his 70 years of age and whose campaign videos on social media are decidedly low-energy. 

Tijerina was a high school baseball star in Laredo and was drafted into the Major Leagues. His career as a pitcher, however, fizzled out in the lower levels of the minor leagues. He returned to Laredo, playing some seasons for local independent pro teams. He wed a member of one of Webb County’s wealthiest families and, eventually, set his sights on running for the highest political office in town—county judge. Tijerina narrowly lost his first attempt in 2010, running on a platform that included improving county infrastructure, such as the local jail, and expanding green energy. He ran again in 2014, stressing his experience as a businessman in various industries, and won. 

Cuellar in 2019 (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Cuellar is, in his own right, the head of a political dynasty in Laredo—though it may be a fading one. His sister, the former county tax assessor, lost a contested primary for a state House seat in 2024. His brother, the longtime county sheriff, is about to go on trial for federal corruption charges involving a COVID-related contracting scheme. 

Tijerina’s aunt serves with him on the county court as a Democratic commissioner. His wife’s family has ties to GOP politics from before his party switch. According to federal disclosure filings, Tijerina is worth between $3 and $10 million, and his family has sprawling business interests that include a hemp farm that produces CBD products, a ranch, an oil and gas venture, and a real estate firm, according to the Texas Tribune. 

Still, in his bid against Cuellar, Tijerina has tried to cast himself as an anti-establishment crusader. “I’m not a career politician. I’m an outsider, a businessman, but most importantly I’m a leader who delivers,” he said in one of his ads. In his campaign, Tijerina has sought to undermine what has long been Cuellar’s calling card in the district: bringing home the federal bacon. 

“He comes around here with the checks, and he acts like he presents all this money to us. In reality, the cities and counties, 95 percent of those are grants, and we [the local governments] go out and get those grants,” Tijerina said in an interview with Spectrum News. “He has not done anything. He’s been a stumbling block for 21 years. It’s been a facade, so I think it’s time to change it now.”

Tijerina specifically claimed credit for delivering local initiatives, including an expansion of Meals on Wheels. (Cuellar and Tijerina appeared together at the groundbreaking for that project.)

In a recent campaign fundraising email, Cuellar shot back. “He’s taking credit for dollars that I delivered to our district: As a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, I fought in Washington to secure those federal dollars for senior meals. … My opponent just showed up for the press conference,” the email read. 

The two have also sparred over local data center concerns, including rumors of a project involving a development controlled by the Walker family—the same wealthy family that Tijerina married into—which the Walkers have denied. Cuellar filed a “ratepayer bill of rights” aimed at protecting constituents from exorbitant energy costs from data centers. 

In his own statement, Tijerina said: “We can lead in technology and still refuse to trade away the water, land, and affordable power our children will inherit. It’s disappointing to see some local officials, including my opponent, grandstanding on this issue when they haven’t taken any official action. South Texas deserves action, not political posturing.” 

Neither Cuellar nor Tijerina’s campaigns responded to the Texas Observer’s interview requests. 

Despite his very public legal troubles, Cuellar’s allies say he remains a stalwart elected official. In 2024, he was reelected over his Republican opponent by 5 points and outperformed Trump throughout his district. 

Sylvia Bruni, the Webb County Democratic chair, said that local voters still trust Cuellar to deliver for their interests—despite the controversy over the indictment. “[The indictment] certainly created turmoil. And it certainly created a great deal of concern. But the bottom line is the alternative to have a Republican in that spot would be disastrous. We need to turn this around, not go back,” she told the Observer. 

She also says that, at least in Webb County, the hullabaloo over South Texas turning red has been dramatically overblown. Trump won the county by just 2.2 percentage points—1,432 votes—and was the only Republican on the ballot to win in the county.

It was on that thin margin that Tijerina decided to take an opportunistic leap, she said. “As soon as Webb went ‘red’ … all of a sudden Tano sees the light.” 

Bruni has been generally unimpressed with Tijerina’s tenure at the helm of the county. “I’ve never known him to represent anything. He’s a very attractive man. He takes advantage of that,” she said. She said that Trump’s narrow vote margin was bought with false promises of immediate reward and believes those who opted to take a chance on Trump have buyer’s remorse. “The Trump checks never came. But the tariffs came. The SNAP cuts. [ICE is] picking people left and right.” 

Back at the Tijerina campaign launch event, Jose Salazar, who was elected GOP county chair in Webb in 2024, said that he doesn’t think the last election was just a flash in the pan for Republicans. Voters have grown tired of political parties and incumbents: “Being an incumbent is not necessarily the best thing for a race,” he told the Observer. “Henry Cuellar, he’s a great guy, I mean, he is a nice guy. But one of the things that Henry Cuellar has, he has many, many years in D.C. And I think that that has changed Henry Cuellar over time. People can identify with Tano Tijerina and the things he’s done here with the county.” 

Laredoans, he said, are seeking change. “If you’re gonna vote for the same candidate that you’ve been voting for the past several election cycles, you’re going to expect mostly the same thing. I think that, ‘What do we have to lose with Judge Tano?’” 

Beas, who would provide only that name and is a 24-year-old currently in between jobs, echoed that sentiment. He showed up for the event because he hopes Tijerina can win the seat and shake things up. He lingered along the back wall waiting for the event to start. “People don’t like to switch it up” in Laredo, he said, talking about longtime Democratic voters. But “it’s Cuellar’s time to go.” A lot of people his age in Laredo have given up on political parties and consider themselves to be more independent, he said, and Tijerina is emblematic of that impulse.

Still, as Cuellar has proven repeatedly, it’ll be hard to topple the most powerful politician in Laredo. 

A poll by Texas Southern University, released soon after Tijerina’s campaign event, showed Cuellar leading Tijerina 45-34—with support from almost a quarter of 2024 Trump voters. 

The post In Laredo, a County Judge and MAGA Convert Seeks to Topple Henry Cuellar appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Water is one of many issues at the forefront of Texas politics this election cycle, no place more so than in Corpus Christi. 

Texas’ sparkling city by the sea has received national attention in recent months over ever-worsening conditions for residents deluged by years of drought restrictions. Predictions of an impending water emergency have been pushed back month by month thanks in part to some timely rains, but still remain within arm’s reach. Governor Greg Abbott previously indicated a state takeover of the city may be necessary to handle its water woes. 

Local leaders have faced intense scrutiny over their perceived lack of foresight to get ahead of the crisis and more recently, a lack of sufficient action coupled with controversial policies allowing industrial plants and factories to use large sums of water amid drought restrictions in exchange for a monthly fee.

Now, the race for Texas House District 34, which includes half of Corpus, could in some ways serve as a referendum on the region’s water crisis and even help shape the future direction of its water policy. Once a relatively safe blue seat, incumbent state Representative Able Herrero opted not to run again in 2024, and Republican Denise Villalobos, a former local school board trustee and oil and gas project manager, flipped the seat by a margin of over 10 points—marking a notable down-ballot extension of the Trump-fueled wave among South Texas Latino voters. Trump won the district by 2 points. 

The last time a Republican held that seat was when Connie Scott, now the Nueces County judge, ousted Herrero in the tea-party wave of 2010 but only held onto the seat for one term. 

While she won in a red wave, Villalobos now faces reelection in a potential blue wave season and will face Democratic challenger Stephanie Guerrero Sáenz at the ballot box in November. 

It’s a top race for state Democrats this election cycle, one of the highest priority targets in their effort to expand their numbers or even take control of the Texas House. Per the latest census data, about three-quarters of the district’s constituents are Hispanic. Now, that could be changing as polling data suggests Latino voters who voted for Trump and other down-ballot GOP candidates in 2024 are swinging the other direction. 

“If Democrats are going to take back the Texas House, they have to flip seats like this,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “This is a heavily Latino seat, and the trends for Democrats have been moving in a favorable direction.”

(Photos courtesy of Villalobos, Guerrero Saenz campaigns, Texas Legislative Council; Illustration by Texas Observer staff)

The Texas GOP is also working hard to defend vulnerable incumbents like Villalobos. In 2024, Republicans poured more than $1 million into Villalobos’ campaign, funded largely with contributions from GOP and business interest groups, including $200,000 from Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR) and $255,000 from Governor Greg Abbott’s war chest.

This cycle, Villalobos has raised just over $200,000, as of the latest campaign finance records released in July, which includes $15,000 from TLR, $5,500 from the Texas Oil & Gas Association PAC, and $5,000 from the Koch Industries PAC, whose company operates a refinery in Corpus Christi. 

That haul is so far more than double Guerrero Sáenz’s nearly $85,000 in fundraising. 

Guerrero Sáenz’s campaign is buoyed largely by Democratic groups. The House Democratic Campaign Committee has given her camp $25,000 and a Democratic aligned PAC, the Lone Star Project, gave $15,000.

Rottinghaus said an urgent issue like Corpus’ water crisis could shake up the county’s traditionally conservative and industry-centric lean. “The water variable could scramble the normal partisan calculation. … Villalobos had a pretty healthy margin [in 2024], but this is a district that’s otherwise pretty close,” Rottinghaus said, noting that Trump won by just a couple points while Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke won it by around 15 points in 2018. 

Predictably, both candidates have made water a pillar of their campaign platforms ahead of the 2027 legislative session. 

Villalobos’ campaign website highlights her efforts on water in the 89th legislative session, including $46 million in state support she says she helped secure for water-related projects, but lacks any additional information on future efforts or policy plans addressing water in the upcoming session. At the height of the water crisis, the state representative said that she plans to file major legislation aimed at reforming the state water system and addressing her district’s issues, including proposals to centralize control of local water supply infrastructure. “There’s so many different water entities and no one is actually taking the lead,” she told the local TV station KRIS in March. “There needs to be someone that says, nope, A, B, C, D absolutely needs to happen within the next 10 years or we won’t be on track for whatever this future Texas economy looks like. And that does not exist today.” She has also worked to end the state-mandated release of water from local reservoirs into the Nueces Estuary. 

Villalobos’ campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment and expansion on her potential proposed water policies. 

Guerrero Sáenz, a former public school teacher, initially agreed to an interview on her plans for water policy, but did not respond to repeated attempts to schedule the interview nor requests for comment via email. Her website includes a section entitled “Protecting Our Water and Natural Resources,” which states in part: “Stephanie believes economic growth and environmental stewardship go hand in hand. She supports investments in water security, resilient infrastructure, and innovative energy solutions that create jobs while protecting the bays, waterways, and natural resources that make the Coastal Bend unique.” 

The key debate among stakeholders is over how the region balances water use between industrial users, including the region’s numerous petrochemical refineries, and residential users. Industry accounts for more than half of the city’s daily water use, with just three refineries and one plastics complex accounting for 40 percent of the city’s annual water use in 2025. Residents account for about a third of the city’s use, and their consumption is on the decline, while industrial use is on the rise, according to Corpus Christi Water. According to city data, commercial, large volume, and wholesale water sales account for roughly 88 percent of total water consumption.

Bob Paulison, executive director of the Coastal Bend Industry Association, which represents the largest industrial water users in the Corpus Christi region, says much of that use is carefully calculated. “The industry approach to this has always been to be efficient and careful users of water, and help support the city,” Paulison said in an interview. “They realize that they’re a big user, a big proportion of the water supply, and so … they’re continually evaluating the best management practices to use.” 

Plants and factories surround Corpus Christi Bay and the Coastal Bend, consuming large amounts of freshwater. (Photo by Justin Doud)

Local activists disagree.

“During these drought conditions, residents and small businesses, who are all facing rising costs and stagnant wages, were required to conserve or face fines and surcharges for misuse, while the city allows exempted industrial users to avoid drought surcharges and even some conservation requirements,” said Chloe Torres, the Coastal Bend regional coordinator for the Texas Campaign for the Environment. “Fundamentally, that’s unfair.”

The City of Corpus Christi allows large volume industrial users to pay a voluntary “Drought Surcharge Exemption Fee,” which exempts them from additional fees for water use when certain drought conditions occur. For the city’s largest industrial customer, which uses around 12.5 million gallons of water per day, that adds up to just over $116,000 a month. A report by Inside Climate News recently revealed that residents have unknowingly footed the bill for industrial water use for years after the city miscalculated rates.

In the absence of state legislation limiting industrial use or mandating an equitable structure for fees, environmental advocacy groups like For The Greater Good, the Texas Campaign for the Environment, and CHISPA Texas joined together to propose what they call the Fair Water Amendment, which would change city code to remove the surcharge exemption option for industrial and wholesale users and require everyone to adhere to the same restrictions and economic penalties facing residential users. 

“[Current policy] absolutely limits our ability to grow,” Elida Castillo, CHISPA Texas program director, said of the impact tax and fee exemptions can have. “Our communities cannot pay for all of [their] infrastructure up front, and priority [for state and federal support often] goes to the bigger cities.”

The water amendment received over 12,000 signatures of support, surpassing the minimum required for the amendment to get on the ballot, which only adds to the importance of water policy in the November elections. 

Industry representatives have cautioned against calls amid the crisis to install restrictive new policies on industry. “We know that we live on the edge of a desert in a semi-arid location that is prone to droughts, and for the last 100 years we’ve been able to manage to keep the appropriate balance,” Paulison, of the local industry association, said. “We think that that’s entirely possible going forward, and we think that people that are advocating for arbitrary restrictions and limitations are just misguided.”

While a similar state-level policy seems unlikely in the near future, advocacy groups hope other efforts are made as additional approaches are proposed, like the construction of desalination plants in the region. In the event those controversial projects move forward, the groups are calling on state legislators to ensure environmental precautions are taken, including salination studies in the bay and estuaries that would be impacted and studies on the impact the plants could have on local communities. Such concerns led a heavily hyped project, the Inner Harbor Desalination Plant, to be voted down by city council, though other plants are in planning stages for the near future, and the Inner Harbor plant is now being reconsidered. 

Supporters of those projects, including the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, an industry group that advocates for businesses involved in water infrastructure, say they provide critical stability without having to pray for rain. “Corpus got a get out of jail free card with the weather, but they could easily be back there in a year. They may not have that luxury in the future,” Perry Fowler, the group’s executive director, told the Observer.

At the state level, the nonpartisan policy research group Texas 2036 found in a new report that the state’s decades of water plans failed to predict any impending crisis in the Coastal Bend, and called for revisions to how the state drafts predictions and water policy.

“A planning process that could not see the Coastal Bend water crisis coming should not, unchanged, direct that investment,” wrote Jeremy Mazur, Texas 2036’s Director of Natural Resources & Infrastructure Policy.

The situation facing Corpus is not unique for a city like it in Texas, but its severity and immediacy stands apart.

Water remains at the top of constituents’ minds. Isabel Araiza, For The Greater Good’s cofounder and director, said that since the group was founded back in 2016, residents have gone from reading pamphlets on “desal” and assuming it referred to diesel gas to becoming vocal stakeholders in the future of their communities. Now, she says that Corpus area voters have become much more attuned to the ins and outs—and urgency—of water policy.

The post One of the Top Texas House Races Could Come Down to a Single Issue: Water appeared first on The Texas Observer.