Two top Democratic leaders in Washington are directing donors to contribute to the campaign fund of Gina Ortiz Jones, who is challenging U.S. Representative Will Hurd in Texas’ 23rd congressional district.
Hurd, the incumbent, is the “most vulnerable Republican in Texas,” according to Senator Elizabeth Warren, who wrote today to supporters of Ortiz Jones urging them to contribute to the candidate. “Gina was born into an immigrant family and is a military veteran, openly gay, and dedicated to public service,” she added in her endorsement.
Hurd’s district stretches along the Mexico-U.S. border from El Paso to suburbs of San Antonio, though it does not include El Paso itself. He won the district from a Democratic incumbent in the 2014 midterm election.
The Republican currently holds an advantage over Ortiz Jones when measured by total campaign fundraising to-date, though the two candidates both have approximately the same amount of cash on hand, $2 million, and Ortiz Jones in the most recent quarter raised $1.2 million, a staggering acceleration following her win in a primary runoff in May.
By far the largest donor to Ortiz Jones’ campaign is the Serve America Victory Fund, a fund with unknown political backers but based in Warren’s home state of Massachusetts. Data available from the Federal Election Commission shows that Ortiz Jones has raised more from the state of Massachusetts than from Texas. Overall, 2,000 individual contributions came from Massachusetts.
PAC for a Level Playing field, Warren’s political action committee, has not donated to Ortiz Jones directly but it gave $10,000 to Emily’s List, which is financially backing Ortiz Jones, and $10,000 to the Texas Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, donated $4,000 directly to Ortiz Jones from her own campaign fund, while PAC to the Future, whose treasurer is Pelosi’s husband Paul, donated $10,000.
Expense reports filed by Ortiz Jones with the federal election commission show that her campaign has had a continuous presence in Pelosi’s home district of San Francisco since November last year, recording travel expenses on ride-hailing app Lyft almost daily and Airbnb expenses in November, December, January, February, and April, which indicates that either Ortiz Jones herself or a member of her team spent time in the area for fundraising purposes.
According to a recent announcement by Emily’s List, a group that backs Democratic women for political office, Ortiz Jones plans to attend a donor luncheon in her honor in San Francisco in August.
Significant individual contributors to Ortiz Jones include filmmaker Cornelia Duryee, real estate agent Jon Stryker, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, Human Rights Campaign, and LPAC, a lesbian political action committee.
For his part, Hurd’s largest individual donors include three top executives of Oracle Corporation, including the company chairman, and the chairman of Charles Schwab. His corporate donors include Home Depot, Chevron, Deloitte, AT&T, Aflac, and the American Hospital Association, among many others.
Ortiz Jones has been spending some of her haul on a television advertisement touting her experience serving with the U.S. military in Iraq and helping her mother battle cancer. “I don’t need a party or anyone to do what’s right for Texas. I’ll just do it,” she says in the video.
Ortiz Jones’ platform includes immigration reform that creates “welcoming immigration policies,” a single-payer healthcare system, improving access to college scholarships, and protecting programs for senior citizens including Social Security and Medicare. She has criticized her opponent Hurd for voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, supporting the recent GOP tax bill, and failing to oppose the expiry of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
