Checking in on Garcia v Green

An update on how the biggest primary fight in the county is going.

Rep. Gene Green

U.S. Congressman Gene Green has taken Texas’ 29th District Democratic primary to television, leveraging his substantial financial advantage over challenger Adrian Garcia to pour more than $240,000 into network and cable advertising over the next three weeks.

Green’s English- and Spanish-language ads focus on his involvement in the community, providing a contrast to Garcia’s more aggressive negative messaging about the incumbent.

Seeking to fend off his first primary challenge in two decades, Green is relying on his war chest and deep roots in the 77-percent Hispanic district that curls around eastern Houston from the near north side to the Hobby Airport area.

“Welcome to my office. To solve problems, you have to get out in the community,” Green says in an ad that is set to begin airing Wednesday on Comcast. “That’s how we turned a cantina into a thriving clinic expanding access to health care.”

Green has spent $141,000 on cable ads running in the North Houston, Baytown, Pasadena and Pearland areas, and another $100,000 on ads set to begin airing on KHOU-11 next week, records show. The campaign expects to spend a total of $350,000 on television advertising by the end of the week, including on Spanish-language channels.

Adrian Garcia

“Getting people’s attention is going to be hard,” Green consultant Robert Jara said, noting that the presidential race soon will hit Texas in full force. “We wanted to make sure we got things locked in before the presidential candidates started moving into Texas.”

[…]

Comcast and Federal Communications Commission files for major Houston-area channels had no record of advertising purchases by Garcia’s campaign.

Instead, Garcia, who was sitting on just $73,000 in his campaign account at the end of last year, has focused on free media, sending near-daily campaign announcements and news releases, many of which attack Green on issues ranging from gun safety to the environment.

“Benzene Gene is not for District 29,” read a Garcia press release emailed Tuesday afternoon.

For what it’s worth, I think both candidates have run the kind of race they’ve needed to run (yeah, there’s a third candidate, but he’s not done much of anything). Green has rolled out a bajillion endorsements, and now he’s hitting the airwaves to remind people that he’s good at his job and they’ve never had any complaints about him before now. Garcia has been busy attacking him on issues like marriage equality, gun control, and the environment, where Green’s record is not exactly in line with many primary-voting Democrats. He’s also made the pitch to be the first Latino member of Congress from the Houston area – this Trib story from a few days ago sums up that aspect of the race well – and has thrown in some economic inequality stuff as well. It’s all what I’d have done if he’d have asked for my opinion.

The identity politics stuff is interesting and necessarily dominates the discussion. It may work well in this race, though it will be hard to tell exactly by how much. I’m more intrigued by the issues arguments. A few years ago I had a conversation with the founder of a lefty 527 PAC, who wanted to pick my brains about finding someone to challenge Gene Green from the left. I told him that wouldn’t be easy, for all the reasons you’d expect – Green was well-liked, he performed very well in elections, all of the potential challengers you could think of were allied with him, etc – and also noted that CD29 wasn’t exactly a hotbed of liberal agitation. Green’s more conservative record, on the issues mentioned above and on other things, was in line with the district, I said. The question now is whether that’s still the case. Nationally, the Democratic base has shifted to the left – one need only look at the Presidential primary to see that. That doesn’t mean that said shift is uniform, or universal. CD29 is the kind of place where you might not see such a difference – it’s blue collar, working class, and heavily dependent on the oil patch for its jobs. Yet that’s part of what’s driving this race. Whether that will have any effect one way or the other on the outcome, and whether that effect will be part of the postmortem, is unclear to me. But it is happening, and we should keep an eye on it.

Related Posts:

• Endorsement watch: Collegiality and cover
• Endorsement watch: Latino electeds for Gene Green
• Endorsement watch: The Congress you expect