Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks about a school voucher plan during a 2023 rally at Cypress Christian School in Houston.Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle/Getty

On the last one a day before early voting began, Kristian Carranza, a 34-year-old Democratic candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, and David Hogg, a gun control activist from Parkland, Fla., were discussing the lessons they had learned about hitting the doors. as they went door to door in a neighborhood of big trucks and single-family homes on the south side of San Antonio.

Dogs that escape are mostly harmless. “No solicitation” signs should not be ignored. And hammering itself is a delicate science. (The city’s mayor, with whom Carranza had recently campaigned, swore the optimal wait time was exactly 7 seconds between knocks.) In neighborhoods like this, people often kept their doors open but their screen doors closed.

“On the north side, there are so many Ring rooms,” Carranza said. “We’ve never had as many Ring conversations knocking on doors as we’ve had this year.” Sometimes he would have an entire conversation without anyone ever answering the door.

When the doors open, Carranza leads with a simple stride.

“I’m running to put more money (into) funding our public schools,” she told a middle-aged man a few houses down from where we started. “So many of our schools are closing. We’ve had some schools closed in the Southside (Independent School District) as well, and we have to do everything we can to keep our little ones in school.”

Carranza’s pledge to protect education funding wasn’t a bit futile. Her campaign in State House District 118 is a small race with potentially huge stakes: The battle for votes here could help spur Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to create a taxpayer-funded voucher program that would allow parents to create “savings of education”. accounts” to finance private school tuition or homeschooling. The proposal, which has been a priority for many conservatives in the state for decades, was defeated in two consecutive special sessions — thanks in part to opposition from rural Republicans who feared it would lead to closures and consolidation in small school districts. . But during the Republican primaries last spring, Abbott and allies spent over 10 million dollars to remove opponents of the bill. He believes now has votes— unless Democrats can knock out enough voucher supporters this fall. To do that, he must defeat Carranza’s opponent, Republican state Rep. John Lujan. Carranza expects the race to come down to just a few hundred votes.

Four years ago, Democrats talked about flipping enough seats to win control of the state House of Representatives. Instead, they picked up only one. This time, their ambitions are more modest. Monique Alcala, executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, told me the party needs to flip three seats — the number I think should stop a voucher bill from passing. The 118th, which forms a half-eaten U along the lower edges of Bexar County and straddles the Southside’s historically Mexican-American and Democratic neighborhoods, is one of their most winnable targets on paper. But the precinct Carranza and Hogg surveyed, like much of the district, has shifted significantly Republican during the Trump era. It was the only district in the state to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, Beto O’Rourke for governor in 2022 and a Republican in the legislature in the same year — Lujan, a former San Antonio firefighter and sheriff’s deputy who is finishing his first full term .

The high stakes have made the district a magnet for outside spending. Hogg’s group, Leaders We Deserve, which bills itself as EMILY’s List for young people, has poured more than $1 million into the race, hoping to pick up a progressive millennial and in the process send a message to Abbott, who has refused to accept. supports gun control legislation in the wake of the 2022 mass shooting at a Uvalde school.

“There is a way to hold the line against private school vouchers, and the way goes through House District 118,” Carranza told me, sipping a Coke behind an ice cream shop near her campaign office. She said she believed Abbott’s reforms were a “scam”. They “would be devastating to the public education system in Texas,” she said, pointing to a similar program in Arizona — where a “school choice” law largely benefited wealthy families who had already left the public system — as evidence. of education. , while subsidizing religious institutions and, in one infamous case, acquisition dune buggy.

Carranza’s political platform is rooted in her experience as a community organizer. She went door-to-door in those same neighborhoods to encourage residents to apply for health coverage under the federal Affordable Care Act.

“This is a very low-income, working-class, middle-class neighborhood; these are not the kind of communities that will benefit from a voucher program,” Carranza said. “The $8,000 voucher is not going to be enough to get a child into private schools, to be able to afford tuition and uniforms and travel to get to schools – because it doesn’t provide travel and all the little things that I think we have them don’t always think about what schools offer.”

As she sees it, Abbott’s bill would only exacerbate an existing crisis by siphoning money and students out of the system. In the Harlandale Independent School District, she said, referring to the district where she lived and grew up, “we had four elementary schools closed just last spring. The fight against private school vouchers is a lived reality for the people who live in this district, and when we talk about closing schools, it’s not just about the schools, because for families in these communities, we don’t just look to our public schools for quality . education.” Close public schools, and close after-school activities and free lunch programs. It was an attack on a deeper social safety net.

Lujan, for his part, argued that while he supports vouchers, he does not support defunding public education and emphasized the need for oversight of private schools that receive public funds. Although he has voted for Abbott’s measures in the past, he said at a recent debate that he would pass a school choice bill next session only if it included new standards for evaluating how well private schools are doing. But Abbott, for one, doesn’t seem bothered by where the Republican stands; the governor came to the district last week to hammer him.

The voucher fight may be the most immediate challenge in the legislature, but Carranza’s campaign has been shaped by Texas Republicans’ decades-long efforts to roll back abortion rights. She traced her decision to work in politics to state Sen. Wendy Davis Filibusters for 13 hours of the state’s 2013 sonogram law, which Carranza watched on the floor of her mother’s house, glued to a YouTube stream on her laptop. Since then, the restrictions in Texas have become more severe. Carranza is running hard against the state postDobbs the abortion ban, which makes abortion illegal except to protect the life of the mother. (In practice, the restrictions have done the opposite; NBC News reported last month that the maternal mortality rate has risen 56 percent in state from 2019 to 2022.) Lujan took a much different stance.

“If it was my daughter, I don’t have a daughter, but if I had a daughter and it was, you know, it was rape, I think we, like… personally, I would say, ‘No, we’re going to she had the baby,” Lujan said during a local radio interview in September.

That comment wasn’t just insensitive, Carranza said. He missed a key piece of context. “I think we have to be very clear about this: In the state of Texas, not the woman is allowed to have an abortion if she is a rape victim,” Carranza said. “And I think that must be clear, because he says he would force his daughter — his hypothetical daughter — to bear the child of a rapist. It’s not even a choice we have. And it’s very upsetting that he thinks he can make that choice for people in his family.” In other words, the state is already forcing women to do exactly what Lujan talked about. She cited a study published in Journal of the American Medical Association who estimated that 26,000 Texas women became pregnant due to rape within 16 months of the ban taking effect.

Lujan later clarified that he would have encouraged his hypothetical daughter to have the child and was simply articulating his personal values. He said he would work add exceptions for rape and incest in state law if he is re-elected, although the legislature took no action during his first term.

With school vouchers hanging in the balance and a chance to send a message about abortion rights — and reverse the recent erosion of Democratic support — the race has taken on huge significance both inside and outside the state. Carranza recently campaigned with Democratic U.S. Reps. Greg Casar and Joaquin Castro. Inside the cramped campaign office, where a single “Swifties for Kamala” sign was taped above a door frame, dozens of volunteers from the Texas Organizing Project, a PAC that mobilizes voters in predominantly black and Hispanic communities, waited for instructions canvassing. Hogg, who interrupted his brief address to volunteers to check with Carranza that the Lujan quote about abortion was in fact real, boasted that the district has been the focus of his organization’s efforts in the state. His seven-figure investment went, in part, toward saturating the airwaves with TV ads. Some of Carranza’s spots warned of the consequences of a statewide voucher program. One ad simply played Lujan’s abortion comments in 15-second bursts.

Texas Democrats’ efforts have suffered at times due to a bogus summit issue. The big breakthrough seems so close. But adding a few million votes in a massive and ever-evolving state is hard, and the party has been burned by high expectations more than once. While there’s cautious optimism about the post-Biden prospects for Democrats this year, no one I spoke to was getting over their skis. Hogg told me they expect their investment of time and money to pay off “even if the state doesn’t change this cycle.”

“We’re on the ground, so one day Kristian could be at the forefront of that change,” he said.

Carranza said the goal now is to flip the statehouse by the end of the current redistricting cycle — in 2030. “They understand that we have to act now before it gets worse, and even if it’s going to take a year, two years. , three years, five years,” she said of conversations with voters at the door. Recovering the Southside is just the first step.