Henry Cuellar, the only House Democrat who voted against his party’s federal abortion bill, appears to have survived a primary challenge from the left.
Henry Cuellar, the only House Democrat who voted against his party’s federal abortion bill, appears to have survived a primary challenge from the left.
W ith all precincts reporting, Representative Henry Cuellar, a member of the moderate Blue Dog caucus, leads his progressive primary opponent, Jessica Cisneros, by 177 votes in Texas’s 28th congressional district.
While Cuellar has declared victory, he of all people should know that although it may be unlikely for a House candidate to overcome a 177-vote deficit through the counting of provisional ballots and (potentially) a recount, it is not impossible. During a 2004 Democratic House primary, Cuellar trailed his opponent by 145 votes after all the ballots had been counted. He ended up on top by 58 votes following a recount.
But whatever the final outcome, perhaps the most remarkable fact of the primary in this South Texas district is how little events — particularly those related to the issue of abortion — have had an impact on Democratic primary voters.
Cuellar is the last House Democrat who calls himself pro-life, and he was the only House Democrat who voted in September 2021 against the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), a radical measure that would strike down nearly all state regulations on abortion and enshrine in federal law a nationwide right to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. Naturally, he was a top target of NARAL and Emily’s List this cycle, with both groups pouring money into Cisneros’s challenge.
There were some major events that should have helped boost the prominence of the issue of abortion over the past couple of years. In September 2021, the Texas Heartbeat Act, which bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, took effect. At the beginning of this month, Politico published a leaked draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion in the Dobbs case that would overturn Roe v. Wade and return to the states the authority to set policy on abortion. Since then, there has been wall-to-wall media coverage of Roe’s imminent demise, and on May 11, Chuck Schumer held yet another vote on the WHPA with the explicit purpose of putting the legislation front and center for Democrats to run on in November 2020.
Yet when Democratic primary voters in Texas’s 28th congressional district had the opportunity to throw an opponent of the WHPA out of office, they chose not to do so. In fact, since 2020, there has been almost no change in polls of the race between the aspiring “Squad” member Cisneros and the Blue Dog Cuellar. In their first primary matchup back in March 2020, Cuellar defeated Cisneros 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent. In March 2022, after the district lines were slightly redrawn, Cuellar edged out Cisneros 48.6 percent to 46.7 percent, and he now appears to have won yesterday’s runoff 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent.
It is true that Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders continued to back Cuellar, in part because he’s an incumbent and in part because they thought he was their best and possibly only hope of winning a district that is trending toward Republicans. It’s also true that Cuellar hasn’t always been a stalwart pro-lifer: Although he has voted against taxpayer funding of abortion and for the Hyde amendment on many occasions, he did vote in July 2021 to pass out of the House an appropriations bill that lacked the amendment. Some of his pro-life Democratic allies point out that the Senate filibuster was certain to keep that appropriations bill from ever becoming law, but his vote created real doubt about whether he would save the Hyde amendment if its ultimate fate rested on his vote. When the Dobbs leak emerged, he criticized the opinion for not being incremental and not following precedent, but he also indicated he supports abortion bans with exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s life is endangered.
Cuellar’s likely victory is just one of several interesting data points suggesting that the issue of abortion is unlikely to upend the 2022 election. In last fall’s Virginia gubernatorial election, which followed the implementation of the Texas abortion law, Terry McAuliffe bet big on the issue and lost. In Texas, a heavily Hispanic statehouse district that Joe Biden carried by 14 points in 2020 elected a Republican by two points in November 2021.
Since the Dobbs leak on May 2, there’s been little sign that abortion is changing the fundamentals of November’s midterm elections. On May 2, Republicans held a 2.4-point lead over Democrats in the FiveThirtyEight average of “generic congressional ballot” polls; today, more than three weeks after the leak, Republicans hold a 2.3-point lead. Over that same time period, President Biden’s job-approval rating has ticked down a point from 42.0 percent to 40.9 percent, and his disapproval rating has ticked up a couple of points, from 52.3 percent to 54.4 percent.
Polls in May aren’t proof that abortion won’t matter in November. A shift of two or three points on the “generic ballot” question could limit Democrats’ losses, even if it doesn’t save their majority. As Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report wrote on May 19: “Ultimately . . . abortion could impact individual races, especially in blue or purple/blue states or districts where a GOP candidate takes positions on the issue that are portrayed as well-outside the mainstream opinion. But abortion isn’t going to change the overall trajectory of the midterm elections.” The results of the Cuellar–Cisneros primary are just one more piece of evidence to back up that assessment.