Arrington retains Texas’ 19th congressional district seat by a landslide

Originally published Nov. 7, 2024, on KACU 89.5 FM, Abilene’s NPR Station.

Script:

HOST INTRO

Jodey Arrington retains the seat for Texas’ 19th congressional district—Since he was first elected in 2016, Arrington has won by at least 75 percent. KACU’s Baylie Simon reports…

[BS: 80-percent of Taylor County voters helped re-elect the four-term Republican. Arrington’s only challengers: Independent Nathan Lewis and Libertarian candidate Bernard Johnson collected a fraction of the county’s votes.

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Linda Goolsbee, Democratic challenger for House District 71, explained that Congressional District 19 was gerrymandered years ago to bring in more of Lubbock, which is a bigger, Republican-dominated area with a lot of oil money backing Republican candidates.

Despite the challenges of running as a Democrat in rural West Texas, Goolsbee says that when there are a lot of Democrats together in a smaller location, money can be raised and spent in those areas to get good results. 

(Goolsbee1: “My experience in life is that everything takes longer than you think it’s going to, and everything seems impossible until all of a sudden it is not. So I’m waiting for the all of a sudden.”)

West Texas is still deeply red, but local Democrats hold out hope that that could change in the future.

I’m Baylie Simon, in Abilene. 

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