TX-10: Mike Siegel on why Texas is ready for progressive politics
Congressional Democratic candidate Mike Siegel, a former educator and attorney for the city of Austin, is confident bold ideas and corporate-free campaigning can flip a Republican district held since 2005.
Siegel was dangerously close to proving his theory for change during his first run for Congress in 2018 when he came within a margin of four percentage points from unseating incumbent Rep. Michael McCaul.
The result stunned political observers who had labeled the race as either safely or solidly Republican that year. And in their defense, it was hard for even the most fine-tuned crystal balls to predict Siegel would buck the district’s historical trend so aggressively. The previous Democrat to run in the district in 2016 lost to McCaul by 19 percentage points. There was little reason to suspect Siegel, who was outraised by a torrent of finance and oil cash entering his opponent’s coffers, would fare any differently.
“It surprised a lot of people who told me on the phone, ‘Mike you seem like a nice guy but I can’t give you money because you don’t have a chance in heck of winning,’” Siegel told the Signal in a recent interview. “And so the way I see it, it turned out that flipping this seat is something that couldn’t be done in one cycle, but it’s a two-cycle process.”
https://texassignal.com/mike-siegel-on-why-texas-is-ready-for-progressive-politics/