With another special election for an open Democratic seat in San Antonio came another loss for Democrats. In the runoff for the 118th Texas House district, Republican John Lujan eked out an upset win against Democrat Frank Ramirez by just 286 votes.
While a single Texas House seat isn’t incredibly significant on its own, the loss of a seat in a strong Democratic and predominantly Latino district after the GOP spent the better part of a year ramming through extreme legislation is just the latest demoralizing blow for the state’s embattled minority party. A good candidate, plenty of money and resources, and an uptick in turnout still weren’t enough for Democrats to fend off Republicans’ aggressive push on their home turf. That’s a potentially ominous sign of trouble ahead for a party that is trying to hold the line in the 2022 midterms against a GOP down-ballot offensive with freshly gerrymandered maps.
The battle for the seat on the South Side of San Antonio turned into a high-stakes affair the moment that incumbent Rep. Leo Pacheco resigned in August. Republicans sought to flip the seat to show that the inroads their party made in 2020 with Latino voters in the blue strongholds of South Texas weren’t just a Trump-fueled fluke, and that they’d make further gains in the midterms.
