Can a Progressive Win in a Republican Texas District?
Julie Oliver is ready for a rematch in Texas’s 25th Congressional District. Oliver, 48, ran her first-ever campaign against incumbent Rep. Roger Williams in the 2018 midterms, prodded into action by the Republican Party’s near repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017. She lost by nearly 27,000 votes, but one recent poll shows that she’s closed most of that gap this time around.
“In 2017, I looked at my husband and said, ‘Gosh, I have a crazy idea. And I need you to talk me out of it,’” Oliver says in an interview with the Prospect. “It was born out of a sense that, ‘my son’s going to lose his coverage and I don’t know what’s going to happen.’”
Oliver’s son has a cardiac condition and immune deficiency, and the Affordable Care Act keeps her son from losing private health coverage because of those pre-existing conditions. Oliver, a mother of four, says the care her son has received would have put her family in medical bankruptcy without the ACA. So she took the streets, running a grassroots campaign of door-knocking and community meetings in the sprawling 25th district.
Texas-25 starts with a section of the city of Austin and continues north for about 200 miles until it reaches almost to Dallas.
Read more: https://prospect.org/politics/can-a-progressive-win-in-a-republican-texas-district/
(American Prospect)
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