Medicare for All Is on the Ballot in Suburban Texas

The suburban Austin district Julie Oliver is hoping to flip blue on Tuesday was once a Democratic stronghold. But after a contentious Republican-led redistricting process in 2011, Roger Williams won it in 2013 and has won reelection handily ever since.

Oliver, an attorney with two decades of experience in health care finance, mounted a challenge against Williams in 2018 but came up 8.7 points short. But Donald Trump had won the district in 2016 by 14.8 points, so Oliver saw the glass half full, especially as suburbs generally have been trending in Democrats’ favor.

Oliver virtually never stopped campaigning after that election and is hoping that sustained dedicated effort can put her over the edge. She has been campaigning on some of her formative personal experiences, like losing her health insurance at 18, just two months after her daughter was born. Her son also has preexisting conditions, and when Williams voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, Oliver said she felt she had to jump in the race.

Oliver is running on a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and an end to mass incarceration. She beat a DSA-backed candidate running to her left in the primary, and today is backed by progressive leaders like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and groups like the Sunrise Movement, the Working Families Party, and Indivisible. The DCCC also added Oliver’s race onto its “red-to-blue” list at the end of the summer, based on promising internal poll numbers and Oliver’s impressive fundraising. In August, despite not accepting any PAC money, Oliver raised more than $250,000 and outraised Williams by 235 percent in the second quarter of the year.

Williams, however, is still a well-funded candidate. He owns a car dealership, and was the ninth-richest member of the House in 2018. Williams serves on the powerful House Financial Services Committee and has aligned himself closely with Trump, voting with the president over 94 percent of the time. When Trump declared a state of emergency to seize funding for his border wall last year, Williams defended the move, insisting in a statement that Trump had “no option” but to do so.

Texas has the fastest-growing population in the United States, and the influx of new residents is rapidly changing the state’s demographics. In 2018, for example, for every one white person who moved to Texas, nearly nine Hispanics arrived. Voting patterns are also changing: Beto O’Rourke’s near-successful challenge to GOP Sen. Ted Cruz was the closest Senate race in the state in four decades. This cycle, O’Rourke has been working to mobilize his massive campaign list to help elect other Democrats.

In addition to demographic trends that bode well for Oliver, Texas Monthly reported that three of the four Texas counties that added the most new voters since 2018 fall partially within Texas’s 25th Congressional District. Oliver is also banking on momentum from Joe Biden’s run and broader Democratic organizing throughout the state. Biden endorsed her last month, saying, “She’s overcome poverty, homelessness and raised a son with a preexisting condition. She’s a champion for her community, fighting for affordable health care, housing, education, and good jobs in the clean economy. I’m proud to endorse Julie because we need leaders like her fighting for working families in Congress.”

Still, Oliver is running against an incumbent in a gerrymandered district, and turnout will likely be higher for Republicans than it was during the midterms. In 2016, Williams beat his Democratic challenger by 21 percentage points. The Cook Political Report projects the race as “likely Republican,” although an internal DCCC poll from July found Oliver behind by just 2 points — 45 percent to 43 percent.