The Squad Is in Trouble

6. Texas’ 23rd District

An expensive Cruz-Trump proxy war, and for what?

Remember when Ted Cruz and Donald Trump spent six months in 2016 trying to bury each other? (This followed the six months in 2015 when they were strategically pretending to be best friends.) With so much mutually assured destruction seemingly in the air, it was the last time the Surge truly felt alive. How can we return to such green pastures? Well, in a way, we recently did. The Republican primary runoff for the nomination in Texas’ 23^rd District—a vast border district stretching from San Antonio to El Paso—served as a proxy fight between the Trump and Cruz camps. Tony Gonzales a military dude, was the preference of the 23^rd’s retiring representative Will Hurd, and House Republican leaders convinced the president to endorse Gonzales as well. Cruz, though, had backed the campaign of Raul Reyes, another military dude for whom Cruz’s 2016 campaign manager, Jeff Roe, was working. Trump recorded robocalls for Gonzales, Cruz’s PAC put in money for Reyes, and the winner of the July 14 runoff was … one second here, hang on, tabulating … holy smokes, this runoff is within seven votes out of 24,000+ ballots cast! Way closer than Ted Cruz ever got to Donald Trump. Huh! Anyway, the winner will face the Democrat’s 2018 candidate, Gina Ortiz Jones, who’s the favorite to flip this highly flippable district now that Hurd is out of the picture.

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