Texas 15th race tests whether Democrats can win back Trump-shifted Hispanic voters
EDINBURG, Texas — A 15-year-old girl rushed up to Bobby Pulido within minutes of his arrival at a high school football game here last month. The Tejano music star turned Democratic congressional candidate had barely begun canvassing when she cried out to him: months earlier, he had made a surprise appearance at her quinceañera, the coming-of-age 15th birthday celebration that is a rite of passage in the Texas borderlands, and serenaded her with Desvelado, his blockbuster love song.
The encounter crystallized what Pulido calls his “quinceañera strategy.” He has performed at 81 such parties; each is attended by scores of family and friends, most of them eligible voters, and many broadcast the events over their smartphones to additional scores of voters. “She presented us with an opportunity for a very unique kind of field plan,” said Abel Prado, Pulido’s campaign manager.
The tactic was handed to him, inadvertently, by his rival. In March, De La Cruz posted a video in which she derided Pulido as a quinceañera singer and argued that the election “isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera. It’s about who you trust with your family’s future.” Pulido responded with his own video accusing De La Cruz of belittling a cherished local tradition and inviting families to have him perform: “I’d be honored to stop by and celebrate with you,” he said. Within 24 hours, the campaign had received more than 1,000 invitations. By September, that number had surpassed 5,000.
Pulido, 53, is hoping to convert the quinceañera strategy and the rest of his tireless retail politics into a winning political formula. According to the Guardian, his mission is to take back the congressional seat and in the process help the national Democratic Party regain control of the US House while offering the party lessons in Mexican American politics.
Pulido has made accessibility a defining feature of the campaign. He attended his 526th in-person event at the Edinburg football game, where both the Sabrecats and the Yellowjackets — schools in the 15th district — were playing. (The Sabrecats won 31-14.) His record is 12 stops in a single day. Asked what the point was of working a crowd of mostly underage students, he quipped, “To win re-election.” Then, with more reflection, he added: “If you treat kids good, their parents will like you.” Pulido has a catchphrase: “Any occasion, big or small.” He means it.
The candidate leans on near-universal name recognition in the Rio Grande Valley, where his family has roots stretching back seven generations. Desvelado, his first and biggest hit — with the 1995 album of the same name going platinum — has been played 615 million times on Spotify. He has won two Latin Grammys for best Tejano album and, the day before the Guardian’s visit, was nominated for a third, for Una Tuya, Una Mía, Vol 2. His father, José Roberto Pulido, 75, is also a Tejano music star who rose to prominence decades ago.
The stakes of flipping the seat are not only national. The 15th district sits in the Rio Grande Valley, the overwhelmingly Hispanic border region in south Texas that for over a century was solidly Democratic but swung hard for Donald Trump in 2024. The district itself — more than 300 miles of borderland running from the US-Mexico line to San Antonio, 81% Mexican American — voted for Trump by 18 points, part of a broader swing that delivered the president 55% of the Texas Hispanic vote. In Pulido’s analysis, Trump won those voters by appealing to their longing for upward mobility. “We know we’re broke, but don’t tell us we’re poor” is a popular phrase in the valley, he told the Guardian. “If you’re poor, you’ve already lost; if you’re broke, you could still make it one day,” he said. “Trump kind of won because of that message. ‘Look at me, I’m rich, and some of my richness will transfer to you’ — that was music to people’s ears.”
Since Trump returned to the White House, however, Pulido believes the political weather has shifted. “Under Biden, the border was chaotic,” he said. “The tent cities, the visible hardship, so many coming across.” Pulido believes Trump has squandered much of the goodwill from closing the border by making Texas the ground zero of mass deportation, the Guardian reported. The Deportation Data Project recorded 12,086 ICE arrests in Texas in July — nearly twice the number in Florida (7,405) or California (6,464), the Guardian reported. “People are angry, ICE enforcement is splitting up families and spreading fear,” Pulido said. “And it’s hurting our economy. There’s not a building in the Rio Grande Valley that was put up without immigrant hands. None. There is a reckoning coming, that’s for sure. I see it. We’ve polled it. People don’t like what the Republican party is doing.”
The most recent survey of the district, from Texas Southern University, puts Pulido five points ahead of De La Cruz, 50% to 45%. Among Latino likely voters, the gap widens to 25 points, 60% to 35%. Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University and a co-author of the poll, said the result suggests the 2024 Hispanic shift toward Trump is already reversing. “This election is showing that the Trump bubble is burst,” he said. “We did see a temporary shift towards Trump among Latino voters, but now we’re coming back to a more standard status quo.”
Pulido’s performance is being watched by Democrats beyond the district: fellow party member James Talarico is in a currently neck-and-neck fight for a US Senate seat against the state’s Republican attorney general Ken Paxton. Talarico’s chance of success is also heavily dependent on Latino turnout.
The Guardian spoke to several 2024 Trump voters who have grown disaffected.
Yajaira Martinez, 43, is a naturalized citizen who came to the US from Mexico when she was six. In 2024, she voted for Trump because she believed his promises about bringing down prices and improving the economy, and because she supported his desire for a stronger border. She heard him pledge to remove undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “If you want to take the criminals out of the country, by all means go ahead,” she said. But she did not expect the breadth of ICE arrests, including several people she knows who have been deported even though they had legitimate work permits. “ICE is breaking the law, they are assaulting, they are chasing down. They are terrorising. This administration doesn’t care about anybody’s rights.”
Juan Cantu, 66, was born in Mexico and became a naturalized US citizen. He makes his living as a cabinet maker and rancher. He voted for Trump in 2024 because he was fed up with Democrats talking about social issues such as abortion and transgender people using women’s bathrooms, and he thought Trump would be on his side as un trabajador, a worker. But he has been appalled watching “the politics of Trump spinning out of control, harming so many working people.” Rising diesel prices — pushed to $6 a gallon, in his telling, by a war in Iran that he said he did not understand and by tariffs — have compounded his concerns. Cantu said he likes Pulido’s father’s Tejano music. “That’s the music of my epoca,” he said. And he warms to the candidate’s politics. “From what I’ve heard, he wants to help the poor, the working people.” He will vote for Pulido.
Juan Pablo Lopez, 41, a first-generation Mexican American born in the US, is the owner of a real estate and construction company in McAllen. He voted for Trump because he liked the way he spoke the language of business. In the past year, though, his view has soured; he estimates that about 60 of his co-workers and friends have been detained by ICE and deported. “Everybody here believed in him, and instead of helping us, he’s hurting us,” he said. Lopez said he likes Pulido personally. “I was born and raised with his music. He’s a family guy, and I like that he’s very conservative.” But he remains reluctant to vote for a Democrat, citing what he described as the party’s “Robin Hood mentality.” “They take from the rich to give to the poor — let’s give everybody food stamps, let’s make sure everybody’s on housing. I’m a hardworking American,” he said. That leaves him in a bind. “I’m faced with a very hard decision of who I’m going to vote for,” Lopez said. “I don’t want to vote Democrat, but look at what Trump has done to us.”
Pulido is trying to convert that reluctance by projecting a brand of cultural conservatism familiar in the border region but often absent from national Democratic messaging.
There is a populist side to his politics that bears comparison to Bernie Sanders. He denounces “crony capitalism” and demands that corporate money be removed from US elections. Pulido doesn’t have health insurance because, he said, “it’s not worth it.” “I should not feel obligated to feed those monsters,” he added. “Health insurance companies get away with it, and doctors can’t even be doctors any more.”
Beneath the populist patina, his cultural conservatism — typical of this border region — is glaringly apparent. He is a man of faith, personally opposed to abortion though he would not impose his views on anybody else. “Pro-life is a choice too. It’s my choice,” he said. He supports the second amendment — he named his son Remington, after the Remington 700 bolt-action rifle that he loves — and opposes restrictions on oil and gas extraction, including fracking, which he said accounts for a significant share of Valley jobs. He wants the border to remain locked down even after Trump has gone, though he wants that to be done humanely. “I do not mention blue waves. Not ever,” he said.
If you described a politician with that set of convictions to a person in Brooklyn or Santa Monica, they might assume he were a moderate Republican. So what makes him a Democrat?
“I’m a Democrat because I lead with my democratic heart,” he said. “I understand that there are people out there who need help, and that it’s my obligation as a Catholic and as a Christian to do what I can to help my fellow neighbor.”
The candidate’s positioning carries an implicit critique of his party’s national leadership. “In music, you have to know your audience,” he said. “I’m smart enough to know that you don’t take a symphonic orchestra to the dance hall — people want to dance. But that’s what my party is doing, taking the east coast and west coast politics of the liberal elites and bringing them to where they do not resonate.” Warming to the theme, he added: “What plays well in New York City likely won’t play well among Democratic voters in the valley. The party has become too one-size-fits-all, and that’s a big mistake.” His main takeaway from his months running for congressional office is that Democrats “let other people define us.” He said: “When I first told people in this district that I was running as a Democrat, their automatic assumption was that I was going to take away their guns, that I was for trans in women’s sports, that I was going to take away their oil and gas jobs. That’s the narrative they were fed by Republicans.”
De La Cruz has tried to slow Pulido’s momentum with attack ads casting him as a “corrupt liberal celebrity.” She has highlighted revelations that an accordionist in Pulido’s band who played on the Desvelado recording later became a registered sex offender, accusing Pulido of “endangering our families”; Pulido has said he learned of his former bandmate’s record only years later. She has also resurfaced a 2020 video in which Pulido was seen laughing as a comedy host made remarks about women’s bodies after childbirth, and past social media posts in which he used racist and homophobic slurs. Pulido has admitted that some of his comments crossed the line and apologized for them. But he argues that De La Cruz has supported a president who has repeatedly attacked women’s appearances. Asked to comment on Pulido’s political record and the state of the race, De La Cruz’s campaign manager James Shook described Pulido as “a silver-spooned scumbag who enabled a sex predator.” “Anyone starstruck by this pedo-protecting loser should be ashamed of themselves,” Shook said in the statement.
Independent of the attacks, the district itself has been redrawn in ways that may work against the incumbent. The 15th district was redrawn with the aim of preserving De La Cruz’s lead while at the same time attempting to flip neighboring seats from the Democrats. Almost two-thirds of the voters in the reconfigured 15th district are new to De La Cruz, many of whom have little or no idea who she is — a disadvantage against a candidate with Pulido’s level of name recognition. “When I saw the map, I was very happy,” Pulido said.
A bittersweet undercurrent runs beneath the campaign. Last year Pulido announced a farewell tour of his music career; his final performance, “La Última Desvelada,” is scheduled for Edinburg 17 days before the November 3 election. A win would send him to Washington; it would also close the book on his performing life.