Progressive scientist Kristin Hook tries again in a Republican stronghold

In late 2018, Kristin Hook, then a biology postdoc researcher at the University of Maryland, had been talking with friends about all the government workers going without pay because of the federal shutdown, fueled by a dispute between Congress and the first Trump administration over the president’s proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall.  

Then she looked at her bank account and realized she was one of them. 

In December of the same year, she returned home to Corpus Christi for the holidays to find her conservative family watching Fox News and repeating talking points about immigrants and the same border-wall dispute that had led to Hook’s position going unpaid. 

“We’ve lived three hours north of the border all our lives, and I’ve never heard them care about whatever crisis Trump had manufactured,” Hook said. “But (my mom) said she didn’t trust news sources.”

Hook said she’d look at the immigration data herself, fact-check the claims, and present her findings to her mother. A friend of Hook asked to see it too, and motivated her to post it to Twitter. Then it went viral. 

Her postdoc adviser remarked that she may have just made a new career for herself in policy.

Hook, a progressive scientist, is now trying to have similar kitchen-table conversations with Hill Country voters in ruby-red District 21.

It’s her second time running for Congress in the district, which after redistricting is now an open seat that starts near Alamo Heights and stretches northwest past Fredericksburg.

But she’s still a long shot: The district hasn’t elected a Democrat in nearly 50 years.

Her opponent, Mark Teixeira, is a Trump-endorsed former MLB star with deep pockets. Refusing to accept corporate PAC dollars, Hook’s campaign has been outspent by nearly $4 million during the race. 

‘I had to run twice as hard’

Hook says her parents, who split when she was 7, struggled financially growing up. They favored free entertainment for her and her brother, like library trips and spending time in nature. It’s where her love for animals, reading and math began, she said.

She was raised mostly by her mother and maternal grandfather, a staunch conservative and WWII veteran. She said her father’s side of the family’s instilled the importance of education in Hook from an early age. 

Hook relied on scholarships and a federal Pell grant to attend the University of Texas, where she graduated with degrees in biology and Plan II Honors, a competitive multidisciplinary liberal arts program.

“I struggled to keep up with my peers,” Hook said. “That’s where I really learned about educational inequities, because a lot of my peers, especially in Plan II, came from very privileged, affluent backgrounds and had very different resources growing up than I did.”

“I had to run twice as hard to keep up with them. But I did.”

Hook had been eyeing graduate school and a career in academia, but she took a three-year “break” from coursework after graduating to teach middle school science in New York City through Teach for America. In 2016, she earned a Ph. D. in neurobiology and behavior from Cornell University.

Her viral tweet in 2019 planted a seed. Combined with what she described as blatant attacks on science, the environment and marginalized communities from the first Trump administration, she decided to step off her research career track and become a public servant. 

Starting in 2020, she worked as a science and tech expert for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the National Institutes of Health and the Government Accountability Office. 

In 2023, she launched her first bid for the U.S. House of Representatives, then against incumbent Rep. Chip Roy, who has held the seat since 2019.

Roy won comfortably with 61% of the vote in 2024. 

A bigger tent

Hook is hoping to convince conservative voters and those under the Make America Healthy Again movement that they have more in common with a Democratic nominee than they might assume — and that the current administration has misled them on who’s really to blame for the array of issues the country is facing. 

That includes topics like the environment, data centers and affordable healthcare, for example. 

“We need to regulate AI,” Hook said. “This is big tech infiltrating our communities to benefit off of our backs, and we can say the same thing about the chemical industry.”

“(In) Corpus Christi, we’re out of water. We are in a water crisis. We were saved by some rains, but thank God that happened because if it didn’t, the entire city, my entire family, was going to be out of water. That should be a lesson for all of us in Central Texas about the cost that comes with overdevelopment.”

Hook said she attended a public comment meeting in the Hill Country over a developer’s wastewater permit, which was full of locals who showed up in droves to protest. 

“It was full of Republicans in our district who were pissed off at (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality),” Hook said. “We need to name the real enemy here.” 

“The Republicans who have been in charge of this state for 30 years have defunded and defanged the regulatory agency that should be responsible for protecting our health, not for protecting industry, and that’s what we get when we put people in office who care more about serving their donors than serving people.”

Acknowledging major disagreements she has with the MAHA movement over vaccines, Hook said she still invites these folks under her tent. 

“To me, we are all up against the big billionaires that are capturing our government, capturing our regulatory agencies, trying to convince people to divide us instead of having us united and fighting on the same front to get the things we want, which is a better, healthy, safer world for everyone and their families.”

An uphill battle

The 21st Congressional district was redrawn by state lawmakers in 2025, removing a portion up to Austin and replacing it with a deeper reach into Bexar County. 

Susan Korbel, who chairs the North East Bexar County Democrats, said that the number of James Talarico signs in the district has been encouraging, but that Hook’s seat is challenging. 

“Unfortunately, her whole area is not like Bexar County, and it’s very difficult — that northern area was very difficult,” Korbel said. 

John Courage, a former city councilman who ran for the TX21 in 2002 and 2006, is now managing the Hook campaign’s finances. 

“There are more voters outside of the north central part of town than there were a few years ago, and so that’s an obstacle that any candidate would have to overcome,” he said. “However, I think that the time is right for a Democrat in this district to make a serious impact at election time.”

“I think people are very frustrated with the conditions in the country today, their personal economics are suffering, their fear about how this country is going to continue to prosper, be successful, their concern about the (Iran) War,” he added.

Korbel recalled door knocking with Hook as a unique experience. The strategy is to get to as many doors as possible as quickly as possible. But Hook favors longer conversations, even with folks who weren’t registered to vote.

“There was one day when Kristin met somebody as we were walking around this apartment complex,” Korbel recalled. “He was not registered, but she was talking to him, and we’d all finished up the rest of the doors that we wanted to knock on, and she was still talking to him.”

Hook was of the mind that it was important to talk to everyone and understand their concerns, as inefficient as it might be, Korbel said.

“That was during the last cycle,” Korbel said. “I think she’s learned a little bit about how to try to keep the door conversations a little shorter. But honestly, I hope she doesn’t cut it too short, because I think that’s one of her virtues, her in-depth questioning and really wanting to know how voters feel.”