This is Abel, Bobby’s campaign manager. I wanted you to hear this campaign update straight from me.
There are campaign events where everybody goes home feeling good, somebody posts a few flattering pictures, the finance team gets some names, and by Tuesday nobody remembers it happened.
Beeville was not one of those events.
On Saturday night, 2,750 people packed into the Grand Dancehall for Bobby Pulido, James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, Roberto Pulido, Lucky Joe, and Vanita Leo.
We shattered the venue’s attendance record. That number deserves some context.
Mike Madrid is calling Beeville the most important city in the midterms for America.
Two years ago, Donald Trump received 6,111 votes in Bee County. Kamala Harris received 2,606.
Read that again.
More people showed up Saturday night than voted for the Democratic nominee for President in the entire county in 2024.
Bee County isn’t some Democratic stronghold where we rented a hall, invited the usual suspects, and congratulated ourselves for filling it.
Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote here in 2024.
And on a Saturday night in August, 2,750 people came out.
There is a temptation in politics to immediately turn something like this into a statistic. How many attendees were registered? How many were persuadable? How many IDs did we collect? How many will actually vote?
Those are legitimate questions. But occasionally something happens on a campaign that you should allow yourself to look at before reducing it to a spreadsheet.
This was one of those moments.
What happened in Beeville was bigger than a crowd count. It was a demonstration of permission.
People who may not think of themselves as Democrats came. People who may have voted Republican came. Families came. Music fans came. People who wanted to see Bobby came. People curious about James and Gina came.
They walked into the same room.
That matters because one of the central theories of this campaign has always been that the hardest problem in South Texas isn’t necessarily persuading someone from one ideological position to another.
Sometimes the hardest problem is getting them to walk through the damn door. Bobby can do that.
We’ve seen versions of it at quinceañeras, backyard barbecues, restaurants, family parties, and community events. We’ve watched people who would never attend a Democratic club meeting stand in line to talk to Bobby about healthcare, grocery prices, immigration, their kids, and whatever else is happening in their lives.
Beeville was that phenomenon at scale.
And there was something else important about Saturday: Bobby wasn’t standing alone.
The Democratic nominee for United States Senate was there. The Democratic nominee for Governor was there. But culturally, the evening didn’t suddenly become a Democratic Party event dropped into rural South Texas. It still felt like South Texas. That’s an important distinction.
For months we’ve said internally that if this race becomes a conventional Democrat-versus-Republican contest, we’re in trouble. The partisan gravity of this district is simply too strong.
Our opportunity is to create something different: Community versus politics-as-usual. A campaign where people who don’t normally see themselves reflected in Democratic politics nevertheless feel perfectly comfortable showing up.
Saturday night gave us a glimpse of what that can look like.
And people outside the district noticed.
The images and attendance numbers traveled quickly online. Political observers who have never spent much time thinking about Beeville, Texas, suddenly found themselves looking at photographs of a packed rural dancehall and asking some version of the same question:
What the hell is happening down there?
That’s a useful question for them to be asking. But we should also resist getting high on our own supply. A concert crowd is not an electorate. Applause is not turnout.
A person screaming for Bobby on Saturday night does not automatically become a Bobby voter on November 3.
Our job over the next 2 months is to build the bridge between those two things.
That means identifying these people. Staying in contact with them. Understanding who among them doesn’t normally vote. Giving them a reason to believe this election matters personally. And then finding them again when voting begins.
Campaigns spend millions of dollars trying to manufacture enthusiasm like this.
Saturday night, in a county Donald Trump carried by almost forty points, we had more people in one building than the Democratic presidential nominee received votes countywide two years ago. We should not pretend that is normal. It isn’t. Something is happening. Now we have to turn it into votes.
If you’re with us in our work to win back TX-15, will you make a contribution to Bobby’s campaign?
Thank you,
Abel Prado
Campaign Manager | Bobby Pulido for Texas
Before you go!
After 30 years in music, two-time Latin GRAMMY-winning Tejano artist Bobby Pulido is retiring from the stage to fight for his community in Congress.
TX-15 could decide House control and two recent polls show Bobby ahead. But his Trump-backed opponent, propped up by far-right national Republicans, still has twice as much cash on hand.
Bobby is counting on grassroots support to close the gap.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.