It’s 11:00 in the morning in Crane, Texas, and a small white dog is standing on the hood of a truck outside My Friends Grill, patiently waiting for his owner to finish eating. I sit in the parking lot watching the scene for about 15 minutes before Rep. Will Hurd’s campaign bus pulls up to the restaurant. When the bespectacled 6′4″ congressman arrives, he greets me by the door—but I’m mostly distracted by the extraordinarily well-behaved dog. So is Rep. Mike Conaway, who is along for the ride for the next two stops of Hurd’s annual tour of the district. There’s not always a lot of excitement in this rural congressional district, so we’ll take our entertainment where we find it.
In a word, Texas’s 23rd District can best be described as gargantuan. Stretching from the suburbs of San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso, it occupies a geographic area roughly the size of Georgia and stretches along more than 800 miles of the border with Mexico. In a vast swing district, even the smallest towns can make or break a candidate. That’s why Hurd is here in Crane, population 3,353, sitting family-style at a long table with fewer than a dozen residents, talking about NAFTA. And this is far from the smallest town Hurd is stopping in. The day before, he paid a visit to Mentone, population 19. This is Hurd’s 10th town hall out of 32 in one week in mid-September, an expedition he calls “DC2DQ,” during which he visits all 29 counties in the district he has represented since 2015 and eats a lot of Dairy Queen Blizzards (final count this year: 12). The trip is central to Hurd’s leave-no-stone-unturned reelection strategy. For three days and roughly 1,100 miles, I watch as the former undercover Central Intelligence Agency officer hops from barbecue joints to local libraries in an arduous but necessary effort: Hurd is fighting for his life in Texas’s most competitive district, during a midterm election cycle that has the potential to shatter the Republican party’s tenuous grasp on power in Congress.
Hurd, 41, now lives in Helotes, on the outskirts of San Antonio, where he grew up. He was the first black Republican from Texas to be elected to Congress, but before that, he spent just shy of a decade at the CIA, working in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and New York City. He often says he chose to run for Congress after meeting woefully inept lawmakers during his time in the agency. Hurd might seem like a poor fit for a majority Hispanic district filled with remote, small towns, yet his enthusiastic efforts to acquaint himself with its far-flung places have earned him a good rapport with locals. He has taken this yearly pilgrimage to talk to constituents—he fondly refers to it as receiving his marching orders—since beating Democratic incumbent Pete Gallego in 2014 with a thin margin of around 2,400 votes. “My responsibility,” he likes to say, “is to represent everybody—the people who voted for me, the people who didn’t vote for me, the people who don’t vote.”
During his town halls, the centrist lawmaker shows a rhetorical nimbleness that allows him to diverge from President Donald Trump on border security, immigration, trade, and foreign policy, all the while walking a fine line between drawing too little or too much attention to the divide. Hurd is frank about his beliefs but avoids attacking those he disagrees with outright, whether it’s the president or his Democratic opponent, Gina Ortiz Jones.
But where he really shines is interacting with constituents. Hurd doesn’t get flustered easily. Standing in a Dairy Queen in Big Lake, population 2,936, he fields a question from self-described “1,000 percent Republican” Lanny Pullig, 76, who pulls his flip phone from his pocket and decries the fact that Facebook, which he later tells me he does not use, knows his precise location at that moment. Hurd first empathizes with Pullig by speaking about his days in the CIA, when he had to take precautions to prevent enemies from tracking his cell phone, before gracefully pivoting to discuss Russian influence efforts during the 2016 election and America’s need for top-notch cybersecurity. The congressman also has a dry sense of humor—at one point in the Crystal City Dairy Queen, when a cable news reporter flanked by a camera crew interrupts to tell an attendee he’s spending time in the small town in order to be a fly on the wall, Hurd mutters, “Pretty loud fly.”
Hurd surprised the political world when he held on to his seat in 2016 by a little over 3,000 votes in a challenging electoral environment. For the better part of two decades, Texas’s 23rd flipped parties every cycle. Hurd upset that trend, even as Hillary Clinton took the district by three points. Because it’s competitive, both parties invest heavily here. Hurd’s 2016 race was the most expensive in Texas history, and this year’s may break records too. National Democrats have high hopes for Ortiz Jones, an Iraq war veteran and former intelligence officer. If elected, she would be the first Filipina-American to serve in Congress and the first lesbian to represent the 23rd District. Ortiz Jones argues, among other things, that Hurd has not stood up to Trump strongly enough in the House and that his initial votes to repeal Obamacare before he ultimately voted against House speaker Paul Ryan’s American Health Care Act in 2017 should be disqualifying.
Yet in a year when a number of Hurd’s Republican colleagues in safer districts have struggled to tread water in the rush of a blue wave, the Texan has stood out. A September poll from the New York Times and Siena College found 51 percent of 495 respondents supporting Hurd, 7 percent undecided, and 43 percent supporting Ortiz Jones.
That isn’t the only encouraging sign: During my second day in the district, Republican Pete Flores won a special election in the state senate district that overlaps much of Hurd’s congressional district, beating Pete Gallego, the Democrat Hurd defeated in 2014, 53 to 47. And on October 10, National Journal’s Ally Mutnick reported that the National Republican Campaign Committee had canceled television and radio advertisements previously scheduled for the second half of October, which she interpreted as a show of confidence in Hurd’s prospects. NRCC spokesman Matt Gorman confirms her reporting, calling Hurd “one of our best candidates” and “one of our best members.”
In his four years on Capitol Hill, Hurd has shown a knack for introducing realistic legislation relevant to his constituents, such as ensuring overtime pay for Border Patrol officers. He jokes, though, that some of the niche issues he immerses himself in, like modernizing the federal government’s information technology procurement process, aren’t exactly sexy topics to talk up on the campaign trail. Hurd likes to survey his audiences by asking a simple question: Out of more than 850 bills passed in the House this Congress, how many were not done in a bipartisan fashion? “All of them?” one constituent offers at a bar in Brackettville, population 1,688. “No, lower than that,” Hurd replies, “11. That means 843 bills were actually passed in a bipartisan way. Whether you watch MSNBC or Fox News, you have never heard that stat. Some things are actually getting done. There’s some of us that are actually working together on behalf of our communities.”
Sipping Topo Chico mineral water on the campaign bus on the way from Eldorado, population 1,951, to Lala’s Mexican restaurant in Sonora, population 3,027, Hurd says he doesn’t expect fallout from President Trump’s controversial missteps to hurt his campaign. “People know my positions, my background,” he says. Voters appreciate his independent streak and his accessibility, he contends. “That’s why when it comes to this election, I’m not concerned, because people know where I stand on these things.”
Hurd was an early opponent of Trump’s campaign calls for a border wall, and he has been relatively unafraid to criticize the president. Of course, differing with Trump can be more helpful than not in Texas’s 23rd, where a bipartisan, moderate brand is essential to success. Hurd’s recent days in the House also feature moments of ideological rebellion. He not only voted against Obamacare repeal when it came to the House floor last spring, he introduced a bipartisan measure to protect Dreamers from deportation after Trump moved to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
In July, he made a splash with an op-ed in the New York Times responding to Trump’s disastrous press conference with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. “Over the course of my career as an undercover officer in the C.I.A., I saw Russian intelligence manipulate many people. I never thought I would see the day when an American president would be one of them,” he wrote. “The president’s failure to defend the United States intelligence community’s unanimous conclusions of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and condemn Russian covert counterinfluence campaigns and his standing idle on the world stage while a Russian dictator spouted lies confused many but should concern all Americans. ”
The congressman tells me he chose to write the piece after being “pretty horrified” watching the press conference. “It was important for people to understand the significance of that,” he says. “The case that I was making was Congress should take more of an active role when it comes to national security and foreign policy.” Asked whether he received feedback from the White House or fellow members of Congress, Hurd says the responses that were most valuable to him came from his former colleagues in the intelligence community, who were grateful he spoke up for them.
Not everyone is as enamored with Hurd’s willingness to speak his mind. At a Dairy Queen in the Republican-heavy city of Hondo, a veritable metropolis at just under 10,000 residents, tensions flare when Hurd is asked about Trump’s wall, which is by far the most common question he receives. “I think everybody knows my opinion on the wall,” says Hurd. “Building a 30-foot-high concrete structure from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security.” This line, which usually elicits appreciative nods from Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans, isn’t as popular here in Hondo, which is about 100 miles from the border. One attendee tells Hurd he disagrees and goes on to attack the congressman for his stance on Dreamers, eliciting an “amen” from across the room.
Throughout the heated, nearly hour-long town hall, constituents complain about government spending, which has grown since Trump took office. Others call Hurd a liberal and suggest they won’t vote for him. “I can tell you I will never vote for a Demo‑rat,” says Hondo resident David Bohmfalk, 57. Hurd pushes back on this insult to the opposing party: “Let’s be civil. Let’s be civil.” Bohmfalk continues, “I will burn in hell before I vote for a Demo‑rat. But I will say that at this point I’m reminding myself that there’s no law that says I have to vote for you. I can leave 23rd District of Texas blank when I vote.” Hurd takes it in stride. “That’s everybody’s right to decide who they’re ultimately going to vote for,” he responds.
Back on his bus, the congressman suggests that satisfying the most conservative and the most progressive elements of a swing district was never going to be easy. “When you represent a 50-50 district, you’re not always going to have people accepting that,” he says. “But here’s what people appreciate: They know I’m going to be honest and give my opinion and say why. . . . I’m going to agree when I agree and disagree when I disagree.” Partisan rancor aside, one valuable base of support Hurd has built can be found among local officials. In the border city of Del Rio, Democratic mayor Bruno Lozano, an Air Force veteran and the city’s first openly gay mayor, introduces the congressman to a large audience at Rudy’s Country Store & Bar-B-Q. Lozano was just elected in May, yet his relationship with Hurd already appears collegial.
“It’s important to ensure that we do have that dialogue with different ideas and perspectives,” says Lozano. And even though he’s a Democrat, the mayor declines to choose a side when I ask if he’ll support Hurd’s Democratic opponent come November. “They both have really great assets, really great contributions to give to our community,” Lozano tells me.
When Democratic mayor Ramsey English Cantu introduces Hurd at a burger joint in Eagle Pass the next day, he isn’t as shy about the matter. “We’re really proud of the work he does,” Cantu tells the crowd. “Take it from this Democrat that we have excellent representation in Washington. And Will Hurd and I know that we’ll continue to have that.” Afterward, Cantu tells me he supports Hurd “completely.” “He’s been able to show many people in this community what it takes in order to be bipartisan, to work across party lines and to get things done.”
