Like cocktail hour, it’s always election season somewhere.
Austin voters may believe we’ve earned a respite after the sometimes bitter May/June City Council contests, but the campaigns for next spring’s Democratic primaries and effectively next year’s general election have already begun. There was a judgeship kickoff a couple of weeks ago, and Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg draws the curtain today (Thursday). Last week, in the opening local round of a contest that effectively began earlier in San Antonio, state House Rep. Joaquin Castro opened his run at the spanking new Congressional District 35, where – if the courts don’t scramble the venue first – he will face longtime U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett for the newly drawn seat.
San Antonio homeboy Castro (his twin brother, Julian, is the mayor) formally opened his campaign with a “meet and greet” at East Austin restaurant Juan in a Million for the awkward reason that, simply to introduce themselves, the two declared Democratic candidates will have to spend more time on the trail where they don’t live than where they do. In the notorious GOP redrawing – still under court challenge – Travis County is split five ways, Bexar also five (although with one district wholly within the county). If the lines hold, both candidates would have to move to live in the new district (not a constitutional requirement, but an obvious expectation). Doggett, having moved from West Austin to the Eastside to his current District 25, is now outside the new 35 by a few blocks; Castro, who lives in Republican incumbent Rep. Francisco Canseco’s District 23, would have to move across town – and Doggett’s made it clear that he believes Castro should challenge Canseco instead. As drawn (58% Hispanic and with a larger Bexar population), District 35 favors a San Antonio Hispanic, but asked about it this week by phone from D.C., Doggett was quick to dispute the apparent odds against him. “Some folks at times, down in the Valley,” he joked, “said that I should change my name to ‘Eloy,’ instead of ‘Lloyd’ – but that was a district [25] that was more Hispanic than this one.” Doggett still won.
Something Old, Something New
Curiously, Castro has thus far declined to address the redistricting issue per se, instead calling Austin his “second home” and describing the new District 35 as an “opportunity to link two major American cities” in common economic efforts concerning transportation, clean energy, high tech, and cybersecurity, along an I-35 corridor that would become “a bridge to help us do that.” Doggett, at the center of the re-redistricting wars for a decade, is having none of it. “Let’s make it clear. I’m ready to run, I am working actively in both communities, but this district wasn’t built to unite; it was built to divide. If you talk with neighborhood leaders throughout Bexar County, the way that Bexar County was split up and divided – the African-American community, some other communities of interest involving principally Hispanics – it’s outrageous. It’s as outrageous as the divisions that occurred in Austin.”
Castro expressly punted a question from the crowd to describe policy differences between himself and Doggett, saying that would be a matter for later discussion. But he slyly pointed to Doggett’s age (64, to Castro’s 36), praising his “distinguished career” while simultaneously noting that Doggett was first elected to the Legislature the year before Castro was born. He left it to other speakers to argue that it’s time for “new leadership … a new demographic … and the time for sitting and waiting for our turn is over.” To the San Antonio media, Castro has taken a couple of shots at Doggett for informally jumping the gun, but at least last week, he was content to sound his optimistic campaign theme of “rebuilding the infrastructure of opportunity” and to declare in his beaming campaign signs, “Ahora es el momento” – “Now is the time.”
Choose Your Partner
As he said, Doggett’s certainly been in this position before, and faithful Democratic voters will likely be in a quandary when it comes to choosing between the steadfast warrior and the young challenger. Among the Castro observers last week were former state Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos (who’s both worked for and tangled with Doggett over the long years) and former City Council candidate Perla Cavazos; each declined to name a favorite, said they were “here to listen,” and praised both candidates for their progressive bona fides. Barrientos called it unfair that such a choice has been imposed on Democrats by the Republican redistricters and said he could only hope that “the courts would decide quickly” on fairer congressional lines.
Several San Antonio Democrats have been less equivocal, notably state Rep. Mike Villarreal, who bluntly told the San Antonio Express-News: “The creation of District 35 is the result of extraordinary growth of Hispanics in Texas. It would be a travesty to not use this opportunity to improve the under-representation of Hispanics in Congress. District 35 was drawn for just this purpose.”
Somehow I don’t think that’s quite what the GOP had in mind – considering how radically and unfairly they’ve whitened the statewide congressional map – but that will certainly be the argument. Doggett strongly disagrees: “This district was drawn to cheat Hispanics and African-Americans, not to empower them. We should be having three or four new seats for Hispanics, or perhaps three [for Hispanics] and one for African-Americans. [The GOP] denied opportunity districts in Dallas-Fort Worth, in Houston, and in South Texas, and claimed that they were responding with this district and renumbering one in South Texas.”
Long accustomed to divide-and-conquer, Doggett says he’s ready for another fight and points to his long public record of defending “social and economic justice.”
“I don’t claim by any means to have been perfect in that representation,” he told me, “but I’ve certainly struggled to keep the public interest first and foremost ahead, in my concerns. Instead, the only arguments that are made are ‘I’m new’ and to disregard the experience and seniority that [I bring] to the job. … Clearly, the Republican strategy was to continue to have me drawn into districts where people don’t know me and that I can’t work hard enough to connect fast enough to win before an election. That didn’t work in the Valley, I don’t think it’s going to work in San Antonio.”
Consider the reluctant battle joined.
This article appears in July 15 • 2011.
