Despite deeply conservative personal beliefs, Republican John Lujan (R-San Antonio) has long found unusual success in a district with more Democrats than Republicans.
But after a landmine-filled legislative session, an 11th-hour campaign misstep and abandonment by some his closest allies, Lujan is now suddenly scrambling to defend his positions on the hot-button issues as he tries to hang on in one of Texas’ toughest House battlegrounds.
Last session Lujan, whose past campaign ads featured his mother helping him make the case as a public school advocate, was finally forced to take a position on the school voucher issue he’d been avoiding for years.
He ultimately sided with Gov. Greg Abbott on an unsuccessful plan that not only sought to direct taxpayer money to private schools but held public school funding hostage as leverage to get it.
“I don’t like being in this position,” Lujan said of his new outlook at an Oct. 8 debate. “We need to do our job in Austin. We need to get our schools funded, and we need to do that immediately.”
In the final weeks of his reelection race, Lujan’s campaign has also been fighting to clarify a Sept. 27 interview with Texas Public Radio, during which he volunteered that if he had a daughter who became pregnant as the result of rape, he wouldn’t allow her to have an abortion.
After hearing from constituents on the issue, Lujan said at the debate that he now agrees Texas’ law needs to change — and vowed to pursue exceptions to the state’s near-total abortion ban for cases of rape and incest.
“[While] door-knocking, I talked to a young lady that she said she was worried that if something happened to her or her daughter, she would have to flee [the state for an abortion],” Lujan said. “Women shouldn’t have those fears.”
“I’ll be working with colleagues in those committees to do the right thing,” he added.
While Lujan was seeking to repair his image, however, some of his most cherished cross-party relationships were starting to unravel that same night.
Hours before he was expected to take the stage, text messages from his Democratic colleagues rolled in, alerting Lujan that they’d reneged on plans to stay neutral in his race, penning a scathing letter suggesting that his “extreme” positions on vouchers and abortion had become a threat to the district.
“It really, really hurt me. I didn’t expect that,” Lujan recalled in a Oct. 15 interview with the San Antonio Report. Feeling demoralized, he hung back from plans to greet voters before the debate. “I had to regroup. … I’m just not used to that.”
Last election cycle, House District 118 gave Lujan a comfortable 52% victory in a race that Texas Democrats hardly fought for.
Now, his colleagues are lining up behind an opponent who grew up in the district but spent much of her career running campaigns for national Democrats.
From the other podium at the debate, 34-year-old Kristian Carranza used the TPR interview and voucher vote to attempt to redefine Lujan as just as extreme as the state and national Republicans the district has long rejected.
“I’m not going to create hypothetical examples about what women go through, because I am a woman — living and planning a family — under the country’s most extreme abortion ban,” Carranza said. “More than 26,000 women in Texas have had to carry their rapist’s babies, and it’s unacceptable.”
A blank slate
Lujan’s new reality comes after having enjoyed an unusually charmed political career during the decade between his first race to represent his Southside district and his first session in the Texas Legislature.
The former San Antonio firefighter first flipped the district for his party in a 2016 special election but lost the seat to a Democrat that year before getting the chance to serve in the state’s every-other-year Legislature.
Since then, Republicans’ interest in making inroads with Hispanic voters has only grown, and they continued recruiting him to run several times, pouring more than $1 million into helping him through the general election in 2022.
“I have always lost John Lujan’s district,” Abbott said Tuesday at a campaign rally in Universal City. “So has [U.S. Sen. Ted] Cruz and [U.S. Sen. John] Cornyn and every other statewide candidate.
“The only person who can win that race as a Republican is John Lujan.”
While Republican leaders openly acknowledge that Lujan’s success has relied on his cross-party appeal — not a rightward shift among his San Antonio-area constituents — their partisan fights in the last legislative session set him up for a much tougher race this time around.
“I knock doors every single day, and it is so clear that voters are ready for a change,” Carranza said at the debate.
This year Carranza is raising the money that was absent from her predecessor’s campaign, lining up big-name endorsements and getting help from powerful progressive groups that have made Lujan a top target.
Now in the final stretch of a tough race, Lujan is scrambling to hold on to some of his old supporters while she’s trying to show voters she’s the better fit for a district President Joe Biden would have carried by roughly 2.7 percentage points.
In acknowledgment of his new reality at a Northeast Neighborhood Alliance meeting on Monday, Lujan made a half-hearted joke about his long path to a tough job: “Sometimes you’ve got to watch what you wish for, right? I won.”
School vouchers
Of the many votes taken last legislative session, school vouchers has been among the most perplexing for Lujan to defend.
He walked a fine line during the debate, describing his personal experience enrolling his adopted sons into a charter school but distancing himself from a school voucher fight that’s clearly driven a wedge with many in his district.
Vouchers would allow parents to take their child out of a school they didn’t like — as Lujan did with his adopted sons — but they would direct tax dollars toward tuition for private schools, which critics say would decimate the public school system that 90% of students rely on.
Lujan, who is less pessimistic about the idea, put it this way at the Oct. 8 debate: “Vouchers, ESAs [educational savings accounts], they don’t bother me that much because a school district that’s thriving, that really wants to uplift the children, they’re going to be the ones to win.”
But it’s clear the governor’s approach of withholding funding from public schools to create a voucher program is causing Lujan problems.
Last session a number of pro-public education Republicans put their careers on the line to try to approve public school funding separately from vouchers, but Lujan wasn’t among them.
“I think we need to unravel [those two things],” Lujan said at the debate — a clear departure from his November 2023 vote. “I know the superintendents in my district. I know school board members in my district. This is a really difficult situation for everyone.”
Carranza, meanwhile, has made stopping vouchers a cornerstone of her campaign, in part because Democrats don’t need an impossible electoral feat to pull it off. They only need to flip a handful of seats.
“Me and my opponent have very different views on this issue,” she said at the debate. “…You can’t be pro fully funding public schools and be pro vouchers.”
Abortion at the forefront
On abortion, Lujan now finds himself answering for policies he wasn’t a part of creating, thanks to the TPR interview, which placed a spotlight on the issue.
His new defensive stance was on full display at the debate as he interjected one of Carranza’s responses to correct his comments, which he said resulted in him receiving a number of “ugly” phone calls and personal threats.
“I never said the word ‘force,’” said Lujan, whose staff had advised him not to bring the interview back up at the debate.
” … In that interview, what I wanted to say is — I know my staff is saying, ‘Don’t say it,’ but I want to say it — if I did have a daughter that was raped, I would, we would, I would encourage us to choose life.”
Lujan wasn’t in the Legislature in 2021 when Texas debated its near-total abortion ban, which doesn’t have exceptions for rape or incest. But he said that after hearing from constituents about the issue, he’d push colleagues to revisit those provisions in the next session.
“I don’t feel comfortable [applying personal views] to everybody, because I don’t know your family situation,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a single parent or you’re struggling … if [someone has] a tragedy like that. That’s their decision. That’s where I stand.”
A Republican among Democrats
Lujan’s current situation comes as he approached the Legislature with optimism that his conservative background had never stopped him from working closely with Democrats in the past.
And among the bright spots of his first term, Lujan did seem to enjoy his role in Bexar County’s heavily Democratic delegation, where he said he helped colleagues get their ideas in front of the House’s GOP leaders.
In one remarkable example, Lujan partnered with state House Rep. Diego Bernal (D-San Antonio) on a bill the latter had been working on for a decade, helping it move from the GOP’s blacklist to a popular idea on the House floor.
The bill would have created harsher penalties for people who house migrant workers in unsafe facilities, something Lujan said spoke to him because his father was a migrant worker. It passed the House and failed in the Senate but, to Lujan, set a high-water mark for collaboration with his new colleagues.
“Diego came out with tears in his eyes hugging me, thanking me” when the bill finally made it to the floor, Lujan said. “We’re going to pass it next [session].”
If he makes it back to the Legislature next year, Lujan said his staff has already encouraged him to be less generous when the Democrats come asking for his help.
“They’re always telling me, ‘We’re staying out of your race. We need you,'” he said of the Democrats who came out against him. “I’m not expecting them to endorse me, because I know it’s a partisan game, but never did I think they would do that.”
But after building his career on personal relationships, Lujan doesn’t want to change his approach now, he explained while hosting a Texas Senate debate watch party, where supporters ate pizza and brought their kids.
“I don’t want to change and become vindictive or angry,” Lujan said in the interview. “… I don’t want to change who I am because of politics.”
