By Eric Benson
Texas Monthly
W hen Vicente Gonzalez was first elected to Congress to represent Texas’s Fifteenth District, in November2016, he looked to have won the kind of seat where the general election is a formality. The Rio Grande Valley had been a Democratic stronghold for decades, and Gonzalez’s predecessor, Rubén Hinojosa, had rarely faced a serious Republican challenge.
With Donald Trump ascending to the presidency for the first time and talking about a “big, beautiful wall” and “bad hombres,” heavily Latino South Texas seemed likely to get only bluer.
Instead, the opposite happened. Starting in 2020, South Texas swung dramatically to the right, and Gonzalez has been fighting tough reelection battles ever since. Now, after the Legislature’s overhaul of Texas’s congressional map, he finds himself running in what has become a solidly red district.
(President Trump would have won the new district by ten percentage points in 2024.)
On March 3, Gonzalez easily won his primary. But in November’s general election he’ll face Eric Flores, a former federal prosecutor who was endorsed by Trump, and likely millions of dollars in spending from the national Republican Party, which is targeting the district.
Gonzalez, though, thinks he’ll prevail. From the start of his career, he has ranked among the most conservative Democrats in Congress, and in 2025 he was named a co-chair of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition. In the previous cycle he showed himself to be something of a political unicorn, a Democrat deeply attuned to his district who is capable of winning thousands of Trump voters.
Texas Monthly sat down with Gonzalez in late January in Corpus Christi, his hometown, part of which is a new addition to his district.
TEXAS MONTHLY: You won’t remember this, but you and I met briefly when I was covering the Beto O’Rourke–Ted Cruz senate race in 2018.
VICENTE GONZALEZ: That was a good year. I won by twenty points. It’s very different now.
TM: You went from that landslide in 2018 to barely winning at all in 2020.
VG: Seven thousand votes—which is still a lot of votes but a major difference from where we were two years before that.
TM: Did you see that coming?
VG: No, but I did sound the alarm to the D-triple-C [the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee], in Washington, that I was seeing Latinos fascinated with the whole Trump movement. We had a ton of voters that had never voted come out for the first time. Dems thought they were coming out to vote against Trump. Trumpers thought they were voting for Trump—and they sure as hell were, by about two to one.
TM: When you talked to people who voted for Trump in your district, why did they say they were Voting for him?
TM: But he was the same guy in 2020 that he had been 2016. What changed?
VG: It’s hard for me to give you a scientific answer.
TM: I’m not asking for a scientific answer. I’m asking for your opinion.
VG: Well, that gave him four years to be in office and create another following. People got to see him in action, and he excited the nonvoting population and brought an untraditional, unconventional voter out. Then in South Texas, in 2020, the [Republicans] hit me hard on the Green New Deal and oil-and-gas jobs. I chair the oil-and-gas caucus for the Democratic Party, so I’ve been as pro-energy as any me. I support their industry, and I support a lot of other things that they believe in. Some of them are also like, “Okay, I don’t agree with Vicente on a hundred percent, but I agree with him on ninety percent, and I trust him.” I think really it comes down to trust. I do what I feel is right for my district even when it’s not popular in my party.
TM: And now your district has changed again, and you’re in a plus-ten Trump district.
VG: And we’re going to win it again.
TM: How?
VG: People are really upset at some of these Trump policies. Health-care costs have [risen] for working-class Americans. Inflation persists when it comes to rent, when it comes to food, when it comes to utilities. The American people are struggling right now. On top of that they’re seeing all these policies that are an eyesore for the country. Tariffs that have created inflation for so many people. The world—I mean, we have a president who’s talking about invading Greenland, for God’s sake. He’s got a lot of normal people that voted for him saying, “Wait a minute, that’s not what I signed up for.”
TM: When you talk to people in this district who have made a U-turn on Trump, what do they say to you? What are the biggest issues?
VG: I think the ICE raids are a major issue for Hispanics. Across the country, we’ve seen veterans, people who wore our uniform and fought for our freedom, being handcuffed and mistreated by ICE. It’s heartbreaking for a lot of Latinos. Some of them say, “I voted for him because the border was out of control, but I definitely don’t agree with all this that’s happening.”
TM: More recently, you were one of seven House Democrats to vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Two days later, Alex Pretti was killed in Minneapolis. New York Congressman Tom Suozzi, who voted with you, said afterward that he regretted his vote. Do you?
VG: The reason I voted for that bill was not because I was in support of ICE. ICE had seventy-five billion dollars from the “big ugly bill” that Trump passed last cycle that I voted against. If we’d shut the government down based on that DHS vote, it would have only affected other agencies—airport security, the Coast Guard, FEMA. It doesn’t affect ICE at all. It shouldn’t be misconstrued for support for ICE or the behavior that we’ve seen.
3 comments:
It's pretty obvious the GOP is going to lose and for too many reasons. The polls are in VG's favor, i get it.
I hope VG doesn't take our vote for granted because people are going to vote for the next candidate that's anti-war. Forget about Israel too, these anti-BDS laws are nothing more than cancel culture policies. You know what's not healthy, self-censoring ourselves to not speak out against genocide, mass starvation, and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. We should also keep speaking out against funding Israel.
This war is costing 2 billion dollars a day. In 10 days this would have funded all Texas public schools for a year, two times over and would have properly funded our schools which he haven't achieved in a long time. Time to grow a spine and make hard decisions.
All Bingo players. All loteria players. Vote for Vicente Gonzalez. He likes to play loteria. I saw it in a picture. It is true.
Do you really want them to have nuclear weapons at their disposal? This is for everyone’s safety, what don’t you get?
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