A new congressional district on San Antonio’s Southeast Side was drawn to give Republicans a leg up in their fight to hold onto a narrow U.S. House majority.
But days out from a primary runoff election where both parties will choose their nominees for November, Republicans’ best-laid plans are hitting a speed bump.
They redrew Texas’ congressional maps last summer at President Donald Trump’s request, placing the reshaped 35th Congressional District right over the state House district of one of their party’s rising stars.
Yet the popular state Rep. John Lujan (R-San Antonio) is now being massively outspent by conservative newcomer Carlos De La Cruz, who scored an endorsement from the President just before the March primary.
Texas Republicans have been purging their own party’s moderates with great success in recent years, even in districts that aren’t overwhelmingly red.
But to squeeze more Republican congressional districts out of Texas like Trump wanted this year, they’ve had to divide up blue urban centers like Bexar County into some riskier bets.
Democrats who’d once written off the reshaped district as too red now say backlash to Trump has made TX35 a viable target, and they’re reserving ads to compete there this fall.
“It worries me,” Lujan said Thursday. “Democrats outvoted Republicans in the primary for this district. If we don’t have the right person [as the nominee] … we could very easily lose this district.”
Early voting starts Monday for the May 26 primary runoff election.
Democratic runoff takes a turn
Republicans aren’t the only ones struggling to sell centrism to their party’s ever-more-extreme base.
While the GOP was redrawing Texas congressional districts last summer, Democrats who fled the state to fight the new maps failed to land a high-profile recruit for this new district.
Since then, they’ve watched special election after special election where Trump districts have swung toward Democrats, growing more optimistic about their chances with longtime sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia — a first-time candidate who wooed national party leaders with his “old-school” values.
“Democrats are sweeping elections across this nation, and the House majority is in our grasp,” Garcia said at a recent forum at Brooks City Base. “… Our campaign was just nominated for the red-to-blue distinction by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and that’s huge news for a district that Donald Trump and Greg Abbott redrew to silence your voices.”
But Garcia finished second in the March primary behind local housing activist Maureen Galindo, who spent less than $5,000 on her TikTok-fueled campaign and has railed against Garcia’s support from the moderate Blue Dog Coalition and a pro-Israel PAC.
A month ago, party leaders chalked up Galindo’s success to random results in a primary where turnout was unpredictably high thanks to a marquee race between U.S. Senate candidates James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett.
But now they’re headed into a low-turnout runoff, fueling worries about how the untested district might perform in a race where neither candidate is well-known.
Read more: 43% of Bexar County residents are in a new congressional district after redistricting
At a forum hosted by the League of Women Voters last week, Galindo warned that even a Democrat-controlled U.S. House wouldn’t solve the party’s lack of power in Washington if they’re not selective about their candidates.
“This could be a Democratic majority in the House by one person, and there are Democrats who consistently vote to fund ICE, to continue going to war with Iran, to not impeach Trump,” Galindo said. “Every single time that there’s a vote where, if those Democrats didn’t vote [with Republicans] then we could have won it, it involved Blue Dog Democrats.”
In a nod to Democratic worries, this week a PAC aligned with the Blue Dogs announced plans to spend $450,000 on ads promoting Garcia ahead of the runoff — a major investment in a race where neither candidate has raised much money.
But the last-minute efforts seem to have also thrown fuel on Galindo’s anti-establishment campaign, which has now found a spotlight once unthinkable for a grassroots housing activist.
National news organizations jumped to point out pro-Galindo ads from a GOP-aligned group that’s been boosting liberal candidates who they think will alienate the more centrist voters needed to win a general election.
Some of her more controversial comments about Garcia’s pro-Israel supporters have also landed her in the social media feed of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and on the opinion page of The New York Times, where an author urged Democrats to stop this “antisemitic sex therapist” from taking the national stage.
While local Democrats are now rushing to endorse Garcia and even take back endorsements from Galindo, her comments on the campaign trail have been less extreme.
Galindo once helped the City of San Antonio craft a housing displacement plan that she later turned into a master’s thesis on participatory government. And at the League of Women Voters forum, she spoke with candor about her lived experiences securing housing as a single mom and navigating the bus system when her car broke down in the heat of the summer.
All of it potentially plays well with primary voters — even if it complicates Democrats’ path to retaking the U.S. House.
“If it’s John Lujan and Johnny Garcia, they’re the exact same people,” Galindo said in a recent interview. “Just moderate cops who are going to do the same thing.”
The last of the GOP moderates
As Abbott likes to boast, Lujan is the only Republican who has ever won Texas’ 118th House District. He flipped a seat that voted for President Joe Biden and has held onto it even through tough general elections — the likes of which most of his party’s up-and-coming talent has never seen.
“It’s all that life experience that set me up, running a small business, coaching football, teaching Sunday school,” Lujan said in a May 7 interview at his campaign headquarters. “I don’t know if any Republican could win — it had to be somebody that’s in the district that knows the people and has been involved.”
The former San Antonio firefighter first got a taste for politics while serving on the union’s legislative committee, and his personal charm would later make him a salesman — first selling confetti for San Antonio’s celebratory cascarones and then IT services — before Republican leaders saw a future for him in the Texas House.
But the Texas House will still have a Republican majority without Lujan while the GOP’s razor-thin U.S. House majority is much more precarious.
At a press conference at Lujan’s headquarters, small-town mayors described a San Antonio congressional delegation that’s already been ripped apart by scandal and retirements.
Now national Republican leaders in D.C. are asking them to take a chance on a newcomer, but Texas GOP leaders are still supporting Lujan.
“I trust Austin more than Washington,” said Von Ormy Mayor Art Martinez de Vara.ng Lujan.
Republicans fight over home turf
But Lujan has never faced a primary like his race against De La Cruz.
A heated primary runoff between U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Attorney General Ken Paxton is dividing the party, and Lujan is fighting to hang on in a district with many more rural voters than he’s used to.
Redistricting turned TX35 from a solidly blue Austin-to-San Antonio district to a potential GOP pickup opportunity, cupping San Antonio’s southeast side and stretching west into Karnes, Guadalupe and Wilson counties.
While Lujan has represented part of that territory, De La Cruz’s sister, U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Edinburg) currently represents some of its more conservative parts, which will move from her district to TX35 when the next Congress is sworn in.
By his own telling, De La Cruz doesn’t have much political experience. The 47-year-old spent 20 years in the Air Force, which brought his family to San Antonio in 2012. He trained dogs to detect bombs and narcotics and later moved worked in intelligence, where he had several deployments to the Middle East.
But he raised more than any other candidate running for Congress in this area in the first quarterly reports of 2026, and now touts endorsements from Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minnesota), as well as Trump, who made his endorsement just hours before the start of voting in the March primary.
“I think this administration realizes that me being a military veteran, me having been a small business owner, me not being a establishment politician is what this community needs,” De La Cruz said in a May 14 interview outside the Bexar County Republican Women’s luncheon. “… I wasn’t the only one to actually go up [to D.C.] and speak with [the White House] — my opponent did so as well. They saw that the contrast was crystal clear.”
This month he held a fundraiser with RFK Jr., drumming up money that’s helped his campaign label Lujan as too moderate for the job.
“I know that they’re both probably good candidates, and John Lujan has a lot of experience,” said Charlotte Folson, a GOP precinct chair at the women’s luncheon whose precinct was moved into TX35 during the summer’s redistricting. “But a lot of us are more conservative, and I’m probably going to be with Carlos De La Cruz.
“Trump endorsed him, and that’s a big deal.”
