Texas' 9th Congressional District race | What's Your Point?

In the heady days surrounding the controversial mid-decade redistricting here in Texas, Republicans projected five clean pickup seats. Well, that's not happening. In fact, there's a distinct possibility they could add only one if upstart Democrat Leticia Gutierrez pulls off an upset here in Texas 9 over Republican Alex Mueller. Leticia Gutierrez, I recently posed the question. Can a veteran respected environmental and labor activist effectively collaborate with the petrochemical complex, a complex that generates 20% of the state's GDP approaching a trillion dollars? And you wanted to answer that question, so here you are. I'm not a lobbyist for anti-oil, I'm an advocate to make sure that there are guardrails for industry to make sure that they're not polluting and that they're not affecting our health in a negative way. Look, I sit on the board of the Port of Houston's Community Advisory Committee, and I've helped the Port of Houston pull down a lot of those federal monies and helping them write grants to make sure that they're retrofitting, whether it's dirty diesel or doing business a little bit cleaner. That again, not just impacts community, But it also impacts workers, I'm friends and I have family inside industry that tell me every single day, please keep doing what you're doing. Because right now with a lot of the federal rollbacks that EPA and this administration have done, I'm very worried, everyone is worried for the next explosion. And again, this isn't scare tactics and this isn't to scare anyone, but we have to make sure that yes, we're about making money. This is, you know, Biggest economic engine. I'm not just the state, the country and parts of the world. At the same time, there's ways to do it better. The latest polling we had on this race had Alex Mueller up five, but that was before this onslaught of early voters in Harris County. That means Mueller will need to count more heavily on folks in Liberty County. To get her across the finish line. All right, Charles, your take. Yeah, and I think she is. I mean, I've seen pictures of her even bringing Briscoe Cain out there advocating for her in Liberty County in the general area. Listen, I think this is kind of similar to the Abbott and Hinojosa race where, yes, the challenger has a unique opportunity to actually make a play in it. But I do think at the end of the day, the Republican is going to pull it off. All right, tomorrow, you say Letitia has worked hard. Letitia has worked very hard. Alex, you know I'm proud of your history and everything, but these people, like people from their community, Letitia has been there for decades. When they had to fight without 45, she was out there. When they had to fight with the Bayou, when they had to fight with Spur 5, we have been together for over 10 years, but probably going on 20, and she's done the groundwork with these people. I think this redistricting is going to backfire because when they redistrict, they were thinking on the amount of Latinos that have voted for Trump back in 2022, and that ain't happening now. Bill, a quick take. Yeah, so Mark Jones and I wrote a paper for Brookings about this earlier. The Republicans thought they were going to get five seats, and we never thought that was realistic. There were two seats in Dallas and Houston where they crammed all the black voters together to create these non-black districts, and this was one of them. And then there were three seats in the Valley. They're not winning any of those seats in the Valley right now, at least it didn't look that way. It looks like the Dallas seat, they probably win. This one's now in question. So Mark thinks it's either one or two pick up at most. Yeah, Bob Price actually has daily contact with East Texas folk, like in Liberty County. I think Alex pulls this off by a three to four point margin. And across the state, the five districts that you were talking about, I think we pick up at least two, maybe three of those. Chris, you're a Democrat. Mr. Cratt, Did you like how Gutierrez? played this very important issue of a balance between safety and economy? She couldn't answer that question any better than the way she did. Yes, she did. You asked her a direct question. She answered that question, and she did it directly, completely, and said, this is why I do what I do, and I do it to make us safer, not to shut down the industry, not to keep them from working, not to keep the economic engine from working, to make us safer, and I do it for the industry and for the people. And Alex is, I guess, talking about her resume. She has worked in the patch before, from the banking side, correct, Bill? Right, yeah. Yeah, she has an extensive background. And she's extremely intelligent, she'd be a good congressman, but again, most people are not deciding this thing on these kind of merits. They're deciding on which team they are and the fact that people are just furious with Trump particularly. So in a lot of these races, we're talking about the county, all you really gotta do is stand up and say orange man bad and get their vote. All right, still ahead, three term Governor Greg Abbott. Locked in the toughest fight of his political career, can he fend off Democrat Gina Hinojosa's stretch run charge?