Another contender for Eddie Lucio’s soon-to-be-former seat.
Rep. Alex Dominguez
State Rep. Alex Dominguez is running for Texas Senate, hoping to succeed retiring Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., a fellow Brownsville Democrat, in a race filled with implications for Texas Democrats and the Rio Grande Valley.
“I think that our office is perfectly situated to take on the next generation of leading South Texas and” Senate District 27, Dominguez said in an interview with The Texas Tribune.
Dominguez said his platform would center on improving health care access, workforce training and infrastructure. And he made clear he would run on his experience as a two-term House member and former Cameron County commissioner, noting Lucio also had that resume before getting elected to the Senate.
Lucio announced earlier this month that he was retiring after serving three decades in the upper chamber. He become well known for breaking with his party on some major issues — most notably abortion — and the race to fill his seat is set to test voters’ appetites for continuing his legacy.
Already, the primary challenger who forced Lucio into a runoff last year, Sara Stapleton Barrera, has announced she is running for the open seat.
Dominguez said he wanted to continue Lucio’s legacy of focusing on the Valley’s educational needs. But he suggested he would be different from Lucio in at least a couple ways, including on abortion.
“I think people know that we come from two different generations,” Dominguez said. “I’m a great deal more inclined to to let women make educated decisions about their own bodies and, more importantly, allow that personal responsibility and decision to lie in their hands and remove government meddling when it’s not necessary.”
Lucio is a devout Catholic, and Dominguez noted he grew up as Catholic but said he does not believe it is the the job of policymakers to “use that religion to influence other people’s views.”
Dominguez also pointed out that he and Lucio had different approaches to the battle earlier this year over the GOP’s priority elections bill. Dominguez was among the dozens of House Democrats who fled to Washington, D.C., in protest of the legislation, and while Lucio voted against it, he declined to join most other Senate Democrats when they briefly visited the nation’s capital to support their House colleagues.
“The difference is I’m willing to bring the energy needed to do what we have to do as Democrats to preserve the rights of all Texans,” Dominguez said.
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Dominguez currently represents House District 37, which he was drawn out of during redistricting and which is now a new battleground district in the Valley. Dominguez previously considered a run for the 34th Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville, is retiring. However, those deliberations were complicated by the decision by U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, to seek reelection in the 34th District rather than his current district, which was redrawn to be more favorable to the GOP.
See here for the background. It would be hard not to be better than Lucio on a range of issues. The one downside to Rep. Dominguez running in SD27 is that he won’t be running in HD37, which was made considerably less blue in redistricting, and will be a tough hold as an open seat. Perhaps the MALC lawsuit in state court, which challenged the way the county line rule was broken to redraw HD37, will help with that. In any event, this will be a marquee race for Dems in March. The Texas Signal has more.
23 days and counting………