When we decided to win back the House after the 2024 election, we went to Texas.
That’s where Welcome and Blue Dog Action spent three days with Bobby Pulido for the fourth episode of Battleground, Welcome’s series on the races that will decide the majority. Pulido is a Tejano music legend, a Latin Grammy winner, and he’s running for Congress in Texas’s 15th District, one of the hardest seats on the map for a Democrat.
The District Democrats Were Told to Give Up On
Texas’s 15th District stretches from the Rio Grande Valley up toward San Antonio. After decades as a Democratic stronghold, Monica De La Cruz flipped it in 2022, and in 2024 Donald Trump carried it by 18 points. Republicans redrew the lines in 2025 and made it even redder.
Many wrote off South Texas and Latino voters. Pulido never bought that. He knew that an authentic conservative Democrat could win the seat back, even while his primary opponent Dr. Ada Cuellar tried running to his left in the primary. In a district overwhelmingly Hispanic, Pulido is committed to common sense and kitchen table issues. As Michael Baharaeen wrote for the Long View last week, Hispanic voters swung right in 2024, and they’ve been swinging back left stronger than any other group since then. Race raters including the Cook Political Report now call this seat a toss-up.
Why Pulido Fits This District
Pulido isn’t running as a national Democrat. He’s running as the kind of Democrat South Texas used to vote for: conservative on social issues and focused on working families, the price of groceries, and an immigration system that works without tearing families apart.
Pulido is unique: Democrats can’t run a Latin Grammy winner in every district. But that wasn’t always an asset. On primary night, De La Cruz scoffed that this election wasn’t about “who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera.” Pulido turned it into a movement. He asked families to invite him, and he got a thousand requests in a day. He told us the count is now about 5,000 requests to participate in family quinceañeras.
As he put it when he launched: “You can gerrymander the district, but you can’t gerrymander Tejano culture.”
“With all due respect to my campaign manager and my campaign teams, the biggest political move made in this campaign has been made by my opponent, because we would have never thought about that had she not tried to insult me.”
— Bobby Pulido, The Singer Who Can Turn Texas Blue
What We Saw
The episode follows Pulido through three days on the trail. He tells his story from the beginning: how a song he recorded as a favor to his father turned into a record deal, how South Texas voters think about immigration, and how he makes the case that South Texas’s immigration fight is an affordability fight too: you can’t build the houses that bring prices down without the workforce to build them. And he closes a campaign event the only way Bobby Pulido could, singing with his father.
At the Democratic gala “Noche Azul,” Pulido is unapologetic about his position in relation to the perceived national Democratic Party:
“I watched Congresswoman Monica la Cruz win in 2022, and I knew that it was going to be very difficult for a Republican to actually represent this area. And I think one thing that unites us all as Democrats is we have heart. We don’t just care about ourselves. We care about other people. That’s why I’m a Democrat.
“Now, I’m going to be honest with you. Are we the party of inclusivity? Are we? We should be. We should be the party of inclusivity. That also means the party of inclusivity of thoughts. Not all Democrats think the same, but we do have common things that unite us. I don’t care if you’re a Democratic socialist or if you’re if you’re a Progressive or like a Blue Dog Democrat like myself. I care about other people, but I’m a conservative Democrat .
“And it bothers me: They told me ‘South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley is red.’ Bullshit. They gerrymandered this district. And boy, were they ever so wrong because we’re going to flip this seat.”
His reason for running is the simplest one in politics. “Either I was going to be the guy that sat there on the couch really angry about what I was seeing,” he told us, “or I was going to do something about it.”
Today, in this district Trump won by 18 points, a new poll released October 21st — commissioned by the San Antonio Express-News, El Pais and the nonprofit Puente News Collaborative — found that likely voters favor Pulido 51% to 44% over Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz.
Watch, share, and help
Election Day is November 3. Early voting in Texas is already underway, and this race could come down to a few thousand votes.
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