Inside a South Texas adult day care center, Democrats are betting that a familiar song can become a familiar ballot. Latin Grammy winner Bobby Pulido campaigned in the Pharr area, arriving as Tejano music played over a speaker and then fading as he took a microphone to urge voters to turn out—telling the room in Spanish that “it is important to make a change” in difficult times.
The race Pulido is pursuing is the 15th Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, the only House Republican from Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, is running for re-election after winning the seat by 14 percentage points in 2024. National Democrats see the primary and the likely general election as a test of whether the party can overcome political headwinds in a region they describe as central to the fight for House control this fall, when Texas Republicans redrew district lines at President Donald Trump’s request.
Democrats have also framed Pulido’s candidacy as an attempt to reach Hispanic voters whose support for Democrats has shifted toward Republicans in the Trump era. The AP described the party’s deteriorating standing among Hispanics as a core problem that Democratic leaders hope Pulido’s celebrity and cultural visibility can help address.
Pulido is a political newcomer who still has stops left on a farewell music tour, including a date this weekend in Mexico. In the Democratic primary, he faces Ada Cuellar, a doctor and law school graduate who is running from the left and emphasizing her experience in health care policy and the trenches of the health care system rather than the performative credentials of a musician.
Cuellar’s campaign positions the contest as a challenge to what she calls establishment advantages. She told voters that Pulido “doesn’t really understand the issues or have the solutions that I have,” and she also said she is not primarily competing with Pulido’s fame but with establishment pressure locally and in Washington—she said officials had pushed her to drop out of the race, though she did not name them.
The district Pulido hopes to represent stretches from the Mexican border 300 miles north through ranches and small towns. AP reported that it is 81% Hispanic and poorer than the state and nation as a whole, and that it is overwhelmingly Catholic, with the area encompassing what the outlet described as a shift of working-class Hispanic voters toward Republicans. In recent presidential elections, Democrats’ support in the newly constituted district fell from 55% for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 41% for Kamala Harris in 2024, a decline that Democrats are trying to reverse with candidates who can appeal to cultural conservatism.
Pulido, AP reported, has staked out moderate positions that can draw criticism from the left. On abortion, for example, he said he opposes abortion but supports letting women decide for themselves, explaining that even if he personally would not be OK with it, he believes other people should be able to make their own decisions and that the community has to accept that.
Beyond policy, the campaign conversation includes scrutiny of Pulido’s past online posts. AP said he has faced questions for years about bawdy social media posts, including crude and sexist jokes and links to pornographic websites, and that he once posted a video purporting to show him urinating on Trump’s star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame before later saying it was a prank with a water bottle. Pulido said his sense of humor on social media, largely in Spanish and aimed at fans in Mexico, sometimes does not translate, and he said he was embarrassed by some of his old posts.
Cuellar’s campaign, meanwhile, is also being amplified by high-profile Democrats who have entered the congressional contest from statewide races. AP reported that state Rep. James Talarico campaigned with Pulido, while U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett campaigned with Cuellar, underscoring a competitive primary environment that reflects broader party dynamics.
In the general election landscape, Democrats face an incumbent they describe as politically entrenched and a map Republicans rewrote to strengthen their party’s position. AP said Democrats in recent presidential elections already lagged in the district, and it said redistricting was part of the reason the seat was considered difficult: Democrats see the newly created district as engineered to protect De La Cruz, while De La Cruz’s performance in 2024 was already well ahead of her margin before additional Republicans tweaks to the boundaries.
At the end of the day care stop, Pulido said celebrity can help but does not decide the election for him. He said, “I’m not going to lie, it opens the door. It doesn’t seal the deal,” and added that people do not vote for a candidate because they are famous—they listen first, and then decide. He framed his music career as an advantage, suggesting his cultural roots and history in Tejano give him credibility with the people in the region, even as Democrats and rivals argue over whether that credibility can translate into a win against De La Cruz.