Tejano star Bobby Pulido launches South Texas congressional run

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WASHINGTON — Tejano musician Bobby Pulido is running for Texas’ 15th Congressional District, he announced Wednesday, giving Democrats their best — and potentially only — opportunity to flip a Republican-held seat in 2026.

Pulido, a singer and Edinburg native who has been making Tejano music for three decades, is running to take on Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, in a district that stretches from McAllen to Central Texas. It will be an uphill climb for any Democrat — the district voted for President Donald Trump by an 18% margin last year — but his musical popularity and South Texas bona fides have Democrats enthused about his prospects.

“I’ve spent decades using my voice to bring people together,” Pulido said in his launch video. “Now, I’ll use it to fight for the place we call home, because this is the only stage that really matters — and it’s worth fighting for.”

Known for hit songs from the 1990s like “Desvelado” and “Se Murió de Amor”, Pulido is a five-time Latin Grammy nominee and 22-time Tejano Music Award nominee, having won eight times early in his career.

The 15th Congressional District has been Republicans’ greatest success story with Texas Latino voters. After flipping the district in 2022, De La Cruz improved her margins last year, winning by 14 percentage points despite investment from Democrats in challenger Michelle Vallejo. The district has been on Democrats’ target list for the past two cycles, but De La Cruz has continued to win comfortably.

To meet De La Cruz in a general election, Pulido will first face a primary against Ada Cuellar, a Harlingen emergency physician unrelated to South Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo.

In a statement, De La Cruz said she was focused on legislating rather than next year's midterms.

"There will be plenty of time for politics next year," she said. "Right now, I’m delivering on what South Texans just elected me to do: securing millions of dollars to grow our local economy, strengthening our police and border security, saving our farms, and protecting Social Security and Medicare. These are my priorities, and I’m proud of the results we’ve achieved for our community through common-sense leadership."

In his launch video, Pulido lamented rising costs, corporate greed and immigration policy that rips families apart and has endangered the South Texas economy. He also downplayed partisanship, saying he was neither “Team Red or Team Blue.”

In an interview, Pulido said issues vary by community, from water rights to the cost of health care. But he said he’s heard a lot about immigration — including from an economic perspective — and wants to make a push for comprehensive immigration reform, coupled with removing criminals in the country illegally, a focus of his campaign. He cited decreased tourism from Mexico and an increased culture of fear in immigrant communities as slowing the South Texas economy.

“Lots of farmers that I know, and people in the construction industry, because of the lack of immigration reform, are very frustrated right now because they don't have people to work,” Pulido said. “They offer people more money, they do everything they can. They still can't field a crew.”

The Texas Legislature’s mid-cycle redistricting changed the shape of the district somewhat. The 15th District now contains the southeastern part of Hidalgo County — including about half of McAllen and cities like Weslaco and Mercedes — instead of the southwestern portion. The redraw also took De La Cruz out of the San Antonio suburbs, instead adding smaller Central Texas counties and areas closer to the Gulf including San Patricio County and parts of Refugio County.

The district’s partisanship is similar — Trump’s vote share increased by 1% — but Democrats believe its heavily-Latino makeup and weightedness towards South Texas could give the right Democrat a chance. De La Cruz lost the counties that she performed best in — Guadalupe, Karnes and Wilson — and added the portion of Hidalgo County where McAllen Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a neighboring Democrat, did best last year.

To offset those areas, the rural Central Texas counties that the 15th Congressional District now includes routinely vote for Republicans by enormous margins.

In an interview, Pulido said he had spent the summer, since forming an exploratory committee, traveling throughout the district, including to nine of its 11 counties. He said he found people in Central Texas to be more open to his message than he expected, and that their shared values outweighed partisan differences — including in small communities like Yorktown, in DeWitt County, where his great-grandmother is from and where 83% of voters chose Trump in 2024.

“You can gerrymander the district or the people, but you can't gerrymander Tejano culture,” Pulido said. “Tejano culture is where my district really is, and I feel like I have a lot in common with the people.”

A poll of the district, conducted by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling for the Democratic super PAC House Majority PAC and shared with The Texas Tribune, found De La Cruz leading Pulido by 3 percentage points, with 21% of voters undecided. Conducted last week, the poll’s sample of 533 voters was made up of 42% Republicans, 32% Democrats and 26% independents.

Gonzalez, a friend of Pulido, said he believes Hispanic voters — who make up 75% of the district’s citizen voting age population — across the district will be attracted to the Democrat.

“[De La Cruz] always loses the Valley,” Gonzalez said. “He’s gonna win big…and then all those rural counties that are like Tejano, Latino — but more country, more conservative — are going to love him. He’s one of those candidates that you get once every 50 years.”

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