Article One, which focuses on Kopser’s background in science.
Joseph Kopser
Crowded around a circular wooden table in a loud bar on Sunday night, Joseph Kopser raises his voice in an effort to be heard, as rock music duels with a football game on several large television screens.
Surrounded by energy and environmental experts, the Democrat campaigning to represent Texas’ 21st congressional district is trying to nail down what questions he should ask at an upcoming event. The gathering itself will focus on issues like renewable energy and sustainability, but as with everything else in this district, phrasing will be tricky.
“The term ‘climate change’ will shut them all down,” says Kopser pointedly. “What are the words I should use to keep the conversation going?”
“Stewardship,” one man suggests. “Emphasize preserving the land.” Kopser points and nods. Bingo.
Article Two, about Kopser’s appeal to students, which is important given the large presence of universities in the district.
It’s a deeply gerrymandered district, one that has been held by Republican Lamar Smith for decades. Running to replace Smith, who is retiring, is Kopser, an Iraq war veteran and a Democrat new to politics.
Kopser is up against Chip Roy, a Republican who once served as chief of staff for Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and who leads in the polls, albeit by an increasingly narrowing margin. Their match-up is a study in opposites: Roy is a hardline conservative in keeping with the legacy of Smith. Kopser, by contrast, is a tech entrepreneur with a background in renewable energy, who studied aerospace engineering while at West Point.
And while Roy would continue Smith’s lengthy history of support for rolling back environmental regulations and refuting climate science, Kopser has made his support for sustainability and belief in climate change a core pillar of his campaign.
“I was definitely drawn to his science background,” Vinit Shah, 17, told ThinkProgress while riding in the back of a car en route to his assigned canvassing addresses. “That’s very important to me. He believes in climate change, in science. Both [political parties] need to be better about that. I think he can bring people together across party lines.”
Both of these are from a couple of weeks ago, but there’s been so much current news that it’s been hard to post everything that I draft, and time’s running out for some of the things in my queue. Kopser was the clear centrist/businessman candidate in the primary, and he defeated two leftier candidates to make it this far. That doesn’t seem to be an issue now, which is good because we all need to be focused on the big picture. CD21 is not a top tier pickup opportunity – specifically, I’d say it’s in the second tier, along with CDs 02, 06, 22, and 31. If the early voting numbers portend a truly close contest at the state level, then all of those districts become in play, with the kicker that the Democrats in most of them have raised more than enough money to fund real campaigns. There will be many things to keep an eye on this Tuesday, with this race being among the ones I’ll be watching.