DUELING ENDORSEMENTS: EDDIE FOR SHARIFF; GONZALEZ FOR GARCIA

 

Special to El Rrun-Rrun
As far as anyone can remember, we have never had local candidates for the board of the Brownsville Navigation District endorsed by other candidates on top of the ballot.

Both candidates for Place 2 – Shariff Gonnella and David Garcia – are being endorsed by other candidates, Gonnella by Eddie Treviño, the incumbent Cameron County Judge, and Garcia by District 34 U.S. Rep Vicente Gonzalez.

At the local level, Treviño has been reelected to office twice, and Gonzalez is running for re-election after the original district was changed to favor Republicans from the Corpus Christi area. 

Endorsements, besides giving candidates a boost, also carry some risk. Although the race for the BND is strictly nonpartisan – as is the Texas Southmost College and the City of Brownsville and the Brownsville Independent School District – the political lines have been blurred.

Treviño is currently in a runoff race with outgoing Brownsville Navigation District chair Steve Guerra for county judge as a Democrat, and both he and Gonzalez, who easily won the Democratic primary nomination, face Republican challengers this coming November in the general election.

Behind the scenes lurks Guerra –  the proverbial 800-pound gorilla – who is supporting Garcia and has apparently talked Gonzalez into publicly endorsing him against Treviño's candidate Gonnella. 

U.S. House District 34 covers Cameron, Willacy, Kenedy, and Kleberg counties, including parts of eastern Hidalgo County. 

Gonzalez is currently serving his first term as a representative of the US House District 34. He previously represented US House District 15 from 2017 to 2022, and is currently serving his fifth term in the U.S. Congress.

His Republican challenger is Eric Flores, who won the Republican nomination in the U.S. House District 34 race by a margin of 10,000 votes. Flores will face off Gonzalez this November in a district that favored Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Flores led the primary polls against five other Republican candidates, earning 16,781 votes.

And Gonzalez would do well to remember that Treviño was the top vote getter over Guerra in his race for re-election for Cameron County Judge– which is critical to his own race against his Nueces County opponent Flores. Treviño received 14,505 votes, or over 43 percent to Guerra's 30 percent of the votes, or 9,961.

South Texas Democrats have long memories. Come November, will Treviño supporters remember that Gonzalez – by unnecessarily endorsing Garcia against Treviño's choice for the BND down the ballot – was in effect working against their candidate for county judge and, just as they did for Trump in 2024, cast their votes for Trump's Republican candidate Flores?