Sanchez
“That’s a bold-faced lie,” former Democratic congressional candidate Dan Sanchez said Monday evening in response to questions over whether he had flipped his political support in favor of his former opponent, Republican Rep. Mayra Flores.
Sanchez was referring to a flurry of questions he received from Cameron County voters on Monday wondering why he had switched his allegiance from Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, the Democratic candidate in the hotly contested race for District 34.
“My phone started blowing up with text messages and phone calls saying, ‘Hey, you turned on Vicente? Hey, why did you turn? Why aren’t you supporting Vicente anymore?’” Sanchez said.
“I started getting screenshots of these text messages. I said, absolutely not. I’m hundred percent behind Vicente. These are lies from the Mayra camp,” he added.
The campaign messages purporting to be from Sanchez began flooding voters’ phones on the eve before Election Day.
Gonzalez, who currently serves as the congressman for District 15, is facing off against the firebrand Republican freshman for the District 34 seat after the 2020 Census led to the redrawing of district maps.
District 34 currently encompasses all of Cameron, Willacy, Kenedy, Kleberg, Jim Wells, De Witt, Bee and Goliad counties. It also encompasses portions of Hidalgo, Gonzales and San Patricio counties.
During a June special election, Flores became the first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress when she defeated Sanchez to fill the unexpired term created after former U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela stepped down in March.
She also became the first Republican candidate to win a Congressional seat in a region that has remained staunchly blue for more than a century.
According to polling from the political analysis website, fivethirtyeight, Gonzalez and Flores are in a dead heat for the redrawn District 34 seat.
The website puts Flores in a 52-in-100 chance of prevailing in the race, while estimating Gonzalez’s chances at 48-in-100.
Flores narrowly defeated Sanchez with just 51% of the vote in the June special election.
Nonetheless, Sanchez wants voters to know he has not flipped on Democrats.
“They’ve been making it look like I’m a turncoat and that even though I have been supporting Vicente, that all of a sudden I’m supporting Mayra in this last-minute text blast that they’re sending to voters tonight,” Sanchez said.
“It’s ridiculous.”
Meanwhile, Flores’ current opponent said the false text message campaign is just par for the course in a race that has seen a lot of misinformation and a lot more spending.
“It’s really just disgraceful, right? And the misinformation that has occurred in this campaign has been just massive at every level,” Gonzalez said via phone Monday.
“I think they spent something like $6- or $7 million in spewing malicious lies and misinformation on TV and the radio and even at the mailbox,” he added a moment later.
Gonzalez lambasted Flores’ campaign for bringing Beltway politics to the Rio Grande Valley in an attempt to misinform voters who are more shrewd than Washington, D.C. politicos may realize.
“This is a Washington D.C. game that’s been played down here, and I think that they’ve underestimated us. And I think that we’re gonna see that tomorrow at the ballot box,” Gonzalez said.
The Monitor reached out to the Mayra Flores campaign for comment and was directed to send inquiries via email. The campaign did not respond as of press time Monday.
The paper also attempted to call some of the phone numbers associated with the false text messages, all of which had a San Antonio area code. Each of the calls immediately went to an automated message saying the line was busy.
