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HARLINGEN — Texas Democrats hope to retake a state House seat in the Rio Grande Valley by attacking the incumbent Republican — a first-term legislator — over her support for a private school voucher system.

Jonathan Gracia, an attorney and former Cameron County justice of the peace, is running to reclaim state House District 37, which is currently held by state Rep. Janie Lopez, a San Benito Republican, by positioning himself staunchly against school vouchers.

Both parties have named the seat a priority. Texas Democratic Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said the race will be close, but believes Gracia will win the seat back.

“We should do well,” Hinojosa said.

The race puts Republicans — who have a wide majority in the House — on the defense. The seat was one of the party’s pickups in 2022. Lopez won the seat by about 4 points, becoming one of the few Republican representatives for the Rio Grande Valley including state Rep. Ryan Guillen, R-Rio Grande City. Guillen was a Democrat for years, before joining the Republican Party in 2021.

While control of the House is not in doubt, a handful of races, including this one, could determine whether Republican leaders will have enough votes to pass the highly contentious voucher legislation.

[After decades of lobbying by Christian conservative donors, school voucher legislation may finally have the votes]

District 37, which includes parts of Cameron and Willacy counties, is a rare competitive seat in Texas, after the Legislature redrew maps in 2021. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, carried the district by 11 percentage points in 2022. That same year U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat, defeated Mayra Flores, the Republican incumbent, by 8.5 percentage points there.

Both state House candidates, Lopez and Gracia, see themselves as educational advocates, agreeing that Texas public education is underfunded. Lopez is a school counselor and previously served on the school board of her local district. Gracia is married to a public school educator.

Gracia — seizing on one of the state’s hottest political debates — says Republicans in the Texas House are taking the wrong approach in their attempts to approve Abbott’s voucher program that would allow parents to use tax dollars to send their children to religious or private schools.

Abbott named the voucher program a priority during the 2023 regular legislative session. He lobbied state lawmakers for months over multiple special sessions, to no avail. In November, 21 Republicans joined with Democrats to spike the voucher legislation, but Lopez was not one of them.

After several failed attempts to sway GOP lawmakers who were hesitant about the voucher proposal, Abbott successfully campaigned to remove many of his fellow Republicans who voted against the voucher program. Lopez, who supported the program, accepted Abbott's endorsement in December. The governor attended a fundraiser for Lopez here last month.

Abbott has said the House now has enough votes to pass a voucher program, though the margin remains tight, with a narrow pro-voucher majority that can withstand few losses in November. Voucher opponents view the general election as perhaps their last chance to stop the policy, and the Gracia-Lopez contest is one of several at the center of the battlefield.

Gracia questioned Lopez's support for school vouchers given her background in education.

"You would think that that person would understand the struggle," Gracia said. "And maybe they do, but they don't care, and that's just not good enough for South Texas."

Gracia and other voucher opponents argue that the program diverts money away from public education, which they say is already struggling from lack of resources.

"They have this money and they simply don't want to use it in the correct fashion," Gracia said. "We need to make sure that what we have currently is working before we start thinking about trying to expand who's going to take public education dollars. And that's the real travesty of this all."

According to a campaign finance report filed in July, Gracia has received support from a pro-charter schools political action committee, Charter Schools Now. The group received donations from Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, a major Democratic donor and advocate for charter schools, as well as from GOP donors such as Walmart heir Jim Walton.

While Abbott pushed for a voucher program that would be open to all students, Lopez supported a limited voucher program debated in the House because it prioritized students from low-income families and those with disabilities.

That proposal, an attempt to compromise between different factions of Republicans, would have created “education savings accounts,” for up to 40,000 students. Families who exited the state’s public education system would have received $10,500 annually for private school expenses or up to $1,000 for homeschooling.

The impasse cost public schools an additional $7.6 billion that was included in the failed compromise.

"It's unfortunate that we didn't get this additional funding, and I promise to fight for more funding," Lopez said.

Candidates diverge on other issues

The candidates contrast on several other issues of state policy, especially health care.

Gracia, the Democrat, favors expansion of the Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act, which would allow more than a million additional Texans to qualify for health insurance. Texas is one of 10 states to refuse to fully expand the program since the initial rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

"We're talking about the underprivileged community that's going to be able to benefit from Medicaid expansion," Gracia said. "What an easy vote."

Lopez, the Republican, would not commit to voting for or against Medicaid expansion, stating that she would be in favor of a program that would benefit her region.

"I will be voting for anything that's going to help the Valley," Lopez said. She added that the state had already poured millions into mental health services for adults and children. She noted a psychiatric facility in Harlingen will be expanded thanks to the $1.5 billion approved by lawmakers last year to improve or build new health care facilities.

On the issue of abortion, Gracia said he favored abortion access as was allowed under Roe v. Wade.

"Right now we're not even having this conversation because, well, the Legislature doesn't want to take up the topic," he said.

Lopez declined to say whether she supported any exceptions to the state’s current abortion ban but said the state needs to focus on supporting women having children.

"If Texas is a ‘pro-life’ state, then we need to support women who are having babies," she said, adding that women were getting Medicaid coverage for an entire year after childbirth.

Lopez is backed by the Texas Alliance for Life PAC, an anti-abortion group, according to her campaign finance report.

Though they deviate on some key issues, both candidates lean more to the moderate side of their respective parties.

Both favor strong border security with Lopez supporting more technology and manpower at the border. Lopez helped author House Bill 7 which would have created a new division of the Texas Rangers called the Texas Border Force to conduct border enforcement measures. Like Senate Bill 4, which passed the legislature but is not being enforced while it is being challenged in courts, the house bill would have made it a state crime to unlawfully enter the state anywhere but a port of entry.

Gracia said the state needed to act so their federal partners understood the issues on the ground.

"That means being able to pass legislation at the Texas Legislature that's going to be able to show our federal partners that if they're not engaging in this problem, they're passing it on," he said.

In their most recent campaign finance report from July, Gracia received $122,375 including $50,000 from himself. He reported spending $11,823 and maintaining $95,486.

Lopez reported she received $142,402 in all contributions and spent $37,318. She maintained $103,032.

Among the donations to her campaign were a $10,000 contribution from the Border Health PAC, a Valley-based group that has backed Democratic candidates but often supports Republicans as well, and a donation of more than $25,600 from Coalition Por For Texas PAC, a group that backs Republican Hispanics in an effort to flip Democratic seats.

Gracia hopes his reputation in office as a justice of the peace — presiding over small claims court and officiating marriages — and as an attorney will convince voters of his engagement in the community.

“It's a different type of politics, and that's one of engagement, showing that you care, not through words, but through actions,” Gracia said.

If elected to a second term, Lopez said she would work to bring more funding for infrastructure, decrease or eliminate school district taxes and address issues at the border.

During her first term, Lopez introduced bills that would have increased funding through the Texas Water Development Board for projects in economically distressed areas.

Funding for water projects continue to be a top concern for many farmers and ranchers in the area who have been cut off from water due to drought conditions affecting water reservoirs.

“We need to find solutions here in Texas just like we did for the border issues,” Lopez said.

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/17/jonathan-gracia-janie-lopez-private-school-vouchers-texas-elections/.

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