Progressive primary challenges to conservative Democrats along the Texas border have significantly weakened in 2024, despite earlier high-profile efforts. This decline is attributed to past progressive defeats, redistricting that made seats more conservative, and national Democratic concerns over Latino voters shifting right after Trump's 2024 gains.
The primary race in Texas's 15th District exemplifies the dynamic, where centrist candidate Bobby Pulido receives heavy national financial support, while progressive-leaning challenger Ada Cuellar largely self-funds. National Democratic groups are betting on centrist candidates like Pulido to win competitive general elections, leaving progressive candidates in other districts, such as Etienne Rosas in the 34th District, with minimal resources.
Some observers argue national Democrats may be overcorrecting for 2024's results, potentially missing a progressive shift among Democratic base voters desperate for change. However, the current landscape shows a clear institutional preference for funding centrist candidates in these border districts.
Main Topics: The decline of progressive primary challenges in Texas border districts; the strategic funding decisions of national Democratic groups; the specific primary race between Bobby Pulido and Ada Cuellar; analysis of shifting voter demographics and party strategy.
Just four years ago, a progressive primary challenger with endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., fell 281 votes short of toppling scandal-stained incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas.
Cuellar went on to win the general election in the 28th Congressional District. Then he won again in 2024, despite a federal bribery indictment. In December, President Donald Trump granted Cuellar a pardon from federal charges.
Trump’s assist might have generated a serious primary challenge for a Democrat elsewhere, but Cuellar does not have any well-funded opponents this time around in Texas’s primary elections on Tuesday.
That trend has repeated itself along the Texas border. In districts where progressives once drew national attention and fundraising dollars, a handful of candidates in the left lane are mounting shoestring campaigns.
Texas politicos chalked that phenomenon up to the disappointment from the defeat of progressive candidates in 2022 and 2024, mid-decade redistricting that made several seats in Texas more conservative, and concerns from national groups that some Latinos have permanently swung to the right after voting for Trump in 2024.
Some observers, however, believe that there’s a chance that Democrats may overlearned the lessons of 2024, when Trump made historic inroads among Latino voters along the border.
“I think there’s a decided progressive shift, especially among Democratic voters who are desperate for real change,” said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “But I think they’re desperate to find candidates who can articulate that.”
One of the candidates who is vying for progressive votes Ada Cuellar, an emergency room doctor who has tapped her retirement fund as national donors line up behind a centrist competitor.
Ada Cuellar, no relation to Henry, is running in the Democratic primary against Tejano music scion Bobby Pulido in the 15th Congressional District, which stretches from McAllen on the border to the suburbs of San Antonio. Pulido has cast himself as the candidate most attuned to the district’s attitudes on social issues such as guns and abortion rights.
Washington Democrats are gushing over Pulido’s prospects to win over Republicans in a district that went 58 percent to 40 percent for Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024. Only a shotgun-wielding centrist like Pulido has a chance, the theory goes.
Cuellar disagrees. While she eschews the “progressive” label — she considers herself an “independent Democrat” — she is running on a platform that includes support for Medicare for All and abortion rights.
“The establishment has misread the moment, and they really shouldn’t have made a pick here,” said Cuellar. “I really think they shouldn’t make picks in general.”
Early polls, including one conducted by Cuellar’s campaign, showed her far behind the singer. The $824,000 that Ada Cuellar has loaned her own campaign, though, appears to be evening the score.
And national groups are rushing to prop up Pulido. Blue Dog Action is running ads responding to Cuellar’s attacks on Pulido over his views on abortion, for example. The centrist Democratic PAC spent close to $1 million in support of Pulido in February alone, campaign finance records show.
Cuellar is not the only candidate in the progressive mold running without national support.
In the 34th Congressional District, policy researcher Etienne Rosas is trying to take on conservative Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez — with $7,900 in cash on hand compared to the incumbent’s $1.3 million.
Gonzalez co-chairs the Blue Dog Coalition and voted in favor of the January appropriations bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, factors that would make him a tempting target for progressives elsewhere. Still, national groups have stayed away.
“To be honest, as a socialist myself, I’ve been kind of dismayed how much little outreach leftists that have a national platform have done to this district,” Rosas said.
Rosas is hopeful that support from local Democratic Socialists of America members will give him a people-power boost. Still, he wishes that more national progressives would turn their eyes to the border.
Gonzalez’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
Down in the Rio Grande Valley
National progressive groups and political figures have had a mixed record in supporting campaigns in the Rio Grande Valley.
In 2020 and 2022, Henry Cuellar faced serious primary challenges from immigration legal aid lawyer Jessica Cisneros in his district, which stretches from Laredo to the outskirts of San Antonio. Buoyed by the backing of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, she fell short by a few hundred votes of toppling Cuellar on her second try.
In the 15th Congressional District, where Ada Cuellar and Pulido are competing now, Michelle Vallejo secured the Democratic nomination in 2022 and 2024, first as a progressive, then as more of a centrist.
Vallejo drew national support, but that was not enough to put her over the top in two races against Republican Monica De La Cruz. In a January 2025 report, the local group Cambio Texas said that Vallejo’s campaigns fell short in part because she relied too heavily on national groups.
The report was also critical of national progressives’ alleged overreliance on “purity tests” and “ideological language.”
“When progressive messaging fails to resonate with Texas voters, the problem often lies with the messenger,” argued the group, whose executive director at the time, Abel Prado, is now serving as Pulido’s campaign manager. “Winning elections requires a willingness to engage with people outside one’s own social or political comfort zone.”
The defeats of Cisneros and Vallejo left a bitter taste in the mouths of national progressives and may have contributed to their relative absence this time. Another key factor is the redistricting that Trump pushed through the Texas legislature last year.
Under the new maps, every district along the border voted for Trump by a more than 10-point margin, save for the compact seat in El Paso represented by Democrat Rep. Veronica Escobar, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
That redistricting may make it difficult for Democrats to win even in the 23rd Congressional District, where sitting Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales is being dragged down by a scandal involving an affair with a former staffer. None of the candidates in the crowded Democratic primary there have seen significant donations come into their campaign thus far.
In recent years, national groups such as Justice Democrats pursued a strategy of trying to get the most progressive candidates possible elected in districts that are already blue, rather than attempting to boost candidates who share their views in purple or red districts.
“Redistricting has a part in it, absolutely,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director at Justice Democrats. “We look at pretty deep blue districts.”
Still, Andrabi is critical of the strategy that national Democrats have pursued of supporting conservative Democrats such as Henry Cuellar.
“You have a Democratic establishment that is actually OK with having a diet Republican represent south Texas, as long as they have a D after their name,” he said.
Along with Gonzalez, Cuellar was one of seven House Democrats to vote for funding the Department of Homeland Security last month. He is the House’s sole Democrat opposed to abortion rights. And he voted against a war powers resolution that would have forced Trump to seek congressional approval for further attacks on Venezuela.
Cuellar’s campaign did not respond to a request for his pitch to progressives in his district.
The argument from national Democratic groups for supporting relative conservatives such as Cuellar, Gonzalez, and Pulido is consistent: They are all the most likely to win a general election in districts that voted heavily for Trump.
Yet as polls show Democrats fired up and Latinos shifting away from Trump, candidates such as Rosas and Ada Cuellar believe that national Democrats have misjudged the border. Cuellar says she is hardly bothered anymore when people call her a progressive.
“It’s not really a scary thing to get that label,” she said. “I have noticed that the Democrats get very energized by a person who is more progressive. And I have also noticed that right now, there is such a hunger for a person who is a fighter and who is competent.”
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