Longtime Bexar County Sheriff’s Deputy Johnny Garcia beat out Trump-backed Republican Carlos De La Cruz in a new San Antonio-area congressional seat Democrats were never supposed to win.
The new 35th Congressional District was the crown jewel of Republicans’ mid-cycle redistricting effort — aimed at shoring up a narrow U.S. House majority by creating new seats that maximize President Donald Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters just two years ago.
Under its new boundaries, the majority-Hispanic district would have supported Trump by more than 10 percentage points in 2024 — yet this year, voters swung back hard to support Garcia and other Democrats on Tuesday night.
Republicans expected to net as many as five seats with the new Texas maps.
But in the face of a deeply unpopular White House, they were left playing as much defense as offense in those races, with poll after poll showing Latino voters rejecting the White House’s economic policies and aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.
“You can redraw the maps, but you cannot silence the gente, the people,” Garcia said as he declared victory around 11 p.m. from his watch party at La Gloria on the South Side. “Tonight, the people had the final say.”
Last month, Trump came through San Antonio to help a candidate he’d boosted from obscurity in the GOP primary, and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) also campaigned repeatedly for De La Cruz in recent weeks, deeming his district the “whole enchilada” in the GOP’s risky midterm gambit.
When the race was called Tuesday night, Democrats appear poised to pick up more than enough seats needed to flip control of the U.S. House.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) even added the race to his own campaign schedule in the final stretch, as race-ranking agencies added the seat to a rapidly expanding Democratic map.
De La Cruz and Garcia each raised about $2 million for the race — but more than $27 million was spent by PACs and outside groups throughout the primary and general election, according to Open Secrets.
A redistricting backfire
So-called midterm elections are often seen as referendums on the party controlling the White House, causing its members to lose seats.
In an effort to avoid that, Trump convinced state GOP leaders to redraw Texas’ congressional maps outside of the census cycle, breaking up blue strongholds like Austin and San Antonio and leaving them with just a single Democratic representative each for the first time in decades.
But the GOP’s effort appeared fraught almost from the start.
Texas Republican leaders were always more skeptical about replicating Trump’s 2024 success — a high-water mark for their party’s GOP presidential nominees — without the president on the ballot.
Against that backdrop, the Republican-led Legislature drew the new 35th Congressional District around a popular centrist state lawmaker who had experience courting the political middle, state Rep. John Lujan (R-San Antonio).
Months later they watched in anguish as Trump and other D.C. leaders swooped in to endorse De La Cruz the day before early voting in the primary — part of the president’s broader efforts to further remake the party in his own image.
De La Cruz’s older sister, U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz (D-Edinburg), gave up part of her district to create the new 35th, and faced her own tough reelection in new territory.
She also lost her reelection race on Tuesday night, to Tejano singer and Democratic nominee Bobby Pulido.
Carlos De La Cruz was relatively unknown in local political circles, and the siblings’ shared campaign consultants worked hard to keep an unpolished candidate out of the spotlight — offering few public events or interviews and only a single debate in his race against Garcia.
On Tuesday night, a crowd of just a few dozen supporters watched the results roll in at his watch party at Retama Park. As early votes came in the mood dampened and only continued to sour.
Some guests headed out, pizza in hand, before 9 p.m. as political consultants started frantically taking phone calls.
De La Cruz mingled for about an hour before going backstage to thank supporters and later telling press that the party was ending before final votes were counted.
“I just don’t want you guys to have to sit around and watch paint dry,” De La Cruz said.
Garcia said several hours later that De La Cruz called him to concede.
South Side at the center of the political universe
Democrats were initially skeptical about their chances in the new district. Roughly 70% of its voters live in Bexar County, but it also stretches into Guadalupe, Wilson and Karnes counties, which Trump carried easily in 2024.
The party spent months fighting the new congressional maps in court, and when they’d lost, a county full of Democratic officials didn’t field a high-profile candidate to run in the new district.
After taking a pass on the race himself, Sheriff Javier Salazar — one of Bexar County’s most popular politicians — stepped in to suggest his right-hand man.
He and Garcia spent the last several years working closely as Salazar’s profile rose, and Garcia worked as his public information officer.
“We have been known to play pranks on each other,” Salazar told the San Antonio Report last month. “ I don’t think he could tell if I was serious about it or not.”
Garcia wound up providing exactly what Democrats needed.
The cowboy-hat wearing Bexar County sheriff’s deputy defeated an outspoken progressive in the primary, and weathered millions of dollars worth of attack ads trying to tie him to his party’s most liberal voices.
He became a favorite recruit of national Democratic leaders, and in a recent visit to San Antonio, Jeffries gave him the credit for putting a tough race into play.
“One of the most important reasons why we’re here — in terms of the failed effort by Texas Republicans and Donald Trump and MAGA extremists across the country to rig the midterm elections by gerrymandering the congressional map— is that we’ve had great civic leaders like Johnny Garcia make the decision to step forward and run,” Jeffries said on a recent visit to San Antonio.
“He’s making an incredibly strong case that things are broken in Washington D.C.”
In a nod to Garcia’s advantages, Republicans tried to make fun of his deputy uniform and reframe his experience as “the PR guy for one of the most liberal sheriffs in the country.”
“They recruit these far-left extremists, put a big old cowboy hat on them like it’s Halloween, and they tell them, ‘You know what? Tell the public you’re a moderate,’” De La Cruz said at an Oct. 7 Trump rally at San Antonio’s Freeman Coliseum.
Changing face of the Democratic Party
Jokes aside, Garcia is indeed part of a national Democratic effort to promote leaders that look and sound more like the middle-class voters they’ve been losing in past elections.
He grew up on San Antonio’s far West Side, and after attending notoriously marginalized Edgewood ISD schools, took construction jobs while attending community college.
“Upon graduating from high school, construction and plumbing were the only jobs I could get,” Garcia told the crowd at a League of Women Voters Democratic primary forum in May. “So I took them, digging trenches by hand, installing fiber optic cable.”
He joined the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office at age 21, where his first assignment was working inside the county jail.
He worked with programs designed to help incarcerated people prepare for life after their release — giving him something in common with Jeffries, who spent much time on a bipartisan prison reform bill several years ago.
Both men quoted scripture on the subject at Cavalry Baptist Church, with Garcia pointing to Leviticus 19:33: ”‘And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.”
“The word ‘vex’ means to mistreat or oppress, and that scripture reminds us of something important,” Garcia said. “Having the authority to enforce the law does not give anyone the right to mistreat another human being.”
On the campaign trail, however, Garcia has also talked tough about law and order.
He’s criticized Democrats’ failure to secure the U.S. border under the Biden Administration, as well as progressives’ efforts to hold up police funding in the wake of officer-involved violence.
Speaking to the congregation at Cavalry Baptist, Garcia said leaders need to learn how to be both compassionate and realistic when it comes to public safety, or risk the political consequences.
“I still believe that our nation can get back to having safe streets and still protect our constitutional rights,” he told the congregation. “I still have faith that we can secure our border and remain a nation that treats people with dignity and respect.”
Turning his attention to the national political environment, Garcia also urged Congress to reclaim some of its authority over an executive branch that’s rapidly assumed new powers while seeking legal immunity for the president and his allies.
“As a sheriff’s deputy who spent nearly two decades protecting this community, I believe in one simple principle: Nobody is above the law,” Garcia said.
In one of the more candid moments of his campaign, Garcia said that this election had been one of the most challenging experiences of his life.
Attack ads blanketed the airwaves in recent weeks, using AI to depict him shaking his head in frustration at a difficult job, while another highlighted a 2020 suspension from the force when his gun went missing and was declared stolen.
“This run for Congress has worn me down. It’s humbled me time and time again … and Lord knows it’s tested my faith,” Garcia told the congregation.
“ … [But] it’s in those difficult moments that I’m reminded of something greater than myself. That no matter how tough the road gets, there are people in our communities facing struggles far greater than my own … and those are the people we cannot give up on.”
Amber Esparza contributed to this report.
This story first appeared in the San Antonio Report.