Coming home to run

Another Washington Post story about 2018 Congressional candidates that spends a lot of time on a Texas race.

Laura Moser

Before Donald Trump was elected president, Laura Moser was a freelance writer delving into a project about alternative religions in America. In the months after, she became a leader of the resistance against the president, launching a text messaging platform that enabled hundreds of thousands of shellshocked Trump opponents to contact their representatives about a different issue each day.

The success of that effort spurred the 39-year-old Capitol Hill mother of two to think about what else she could do. In the middle of the Trump-red electoral map, she saw an opportunity: The 7th Congressional District in her home town of Houston went blue for the first time, tipping to Democrat Hillary Clinton by one point. Rep. John Abney Culberson was reelected, but Moser saw the conservative Republican losing touch with the fast-growing, increasingly diverse district in which she grew up.

First she started recruiting other people to run. But she said her conversations kept circling back to “What about you?”

So she packed up her rowhouse and moved her three cats, two young children and political consultant husband 1,400 miles away to vie for the Democratic nomination to challenge Culberson in 2018.

“I had to work up the courage to even imagine myself running for Congress,” she said. “But I eventually decided that our country had a moral problem in only letting white men — even the right-minded ones — have a seat at the table.”

[…]

“My grandfather arrived as a Nazi refugee to this district,” she told them.

“I have been trying to get my Yankee husband back there for many years. It took Donald Trump being president to make it happen.”

She talked about why it was worth investing in her campaign and the chance to turn the district blue. After she spoke, Ben Allen, one of the hosts, signaled to the guests to get out their checkbooks.

“If we can’t vote for you, we can support you in other ways,” he said.

Moser’s East Coast connections gave her a boost in the start to her campaign. Within the first five days, she raised about $100,000, more money than Culberson’s previous challenger, lawyer James Cargas, had amassed during his entire 2016 campaign.

But the primary is shaping up to be competitive, with seven Democrats so far contending for the nomination, including two other women.

Moser believes a woman has an advantage in the race. Women constituted many of the swing voters who crossed political lines to vote for Clinton, she said. And if the resistance to Trump has a face, Moser says, it’s clearly female.

See here for a previous example of this kind. Moser hasn’t put out a press release with her Q2 finance numbers yet – she clearly got off to a good start, but she also has some strong competition on that score. Given the size of that primary field it’s a little early to talk about the prospects of a female candidate. For what it’s worth, the woman in Texas who likely has the best shot at being our next female member of Congress is Veronica Escobar. But I sure won’t mind if she has some company.

Related Posts:

• October campaign finance reports: Congress
• January 2018 campaign finance reports: Congress
• July 2017 campaign finance reports – Congress