Garcia: In battleground races, it’s coming down to police funding vs. pre-existing conditions

Six weeks ago, Austin television station KXAN did a news report on the hot-button issue of defunding police departments.

KXAN took the issue to the candidates in U.S. District 21, a congressional district which includes parts of Austin, San Antonio and the Hill Country.

Democratic nominee Wendy Davis made it clear, as she often has over the course of her campaign, that while she supports police reform, she doesn’t advocate the defunding of police departments.

She challenged the premise that elected officials must choose between unconditionally backing the blue and dismantling our law enforcement agencies.

“I don’t think we have to divide our support in either of these directions in order to accomplish the goals that we want to see,” Davis said. “We need to make sure that we ban choke-holds, that we end qualified immunity, so that officials can be held responsible when they’ve violated someone’s civil rights.”

There was much in this nuanced answer that should have been agreeable to people across the political divide.

When the Club for Growth got its mitts on Davis’s KXAN interview, however, the conservative Super PAC concluded, in a campaign mailer, that Davis had “joined the far-left assault on law enforcement and “put our community directly in the path of the far-left’s destruction.”

In one mail piece after another, the Club for Growth quoted Davis as saying, in reference to the concept of defunding the police, “I wouldn’t second guess it.”

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The issue holds particular relevance in Austin, where the City Council recently voted to make cuts to its police budget, largely by separating services (a 911 call center, forensic lab, etc.) from the police budget and shifting some resources from law enforcement to mental health and other social services.

Regardless of the merits of Austin’s move, Davis did not say what the Club for Growth claimed she said. The Super PAC simply took a line from the KXAN report, which noted that Davis chose not to weigh in on the Austin City Council’s decision.

This episode tells us two things: the Club for Growth really doesn’t care what words they put in someone’s mouth; and the “defund the police” warning is the mantra of the moment for Republicans fighting for their political lives in Texas swing districts.

There are three big congressional and legislative battleground races involving San Antonio right now: U.S. District 21, U.S. District 23 and Texas House District 121. All three are currently held by Republicans, but all of them look wide open in this highly charged election cycle.

If you closely followed the rhetoric in those races, you would easily come away convinced that there are only two issues in American politics this year.

The Republican candidates — Chip Roy in U.S. District 21, Tony Gonzales in U.S. District 23 and Steve Allison in Texas House District 121 —relentlessly push the notion that their Democratic rivals want to defund the police, although none of those Democrats actually support the concept.

The Democratic candidates in those races — Davis, Gina Ortiz Jones and Celina Montoya — are driving home the idea that their Republican opponents want to strip away health-insurance protection from people with pre-existing conditions.

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None of the Republicans in these races say they want to remove protections for pre-existing conditions. Roy and Gonzales, however, have often spoken about their desire to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 federal law which guaranteed those protections.

An Allison mailer proclaims that “while radical socialists attempt to make law enforcement officers the enemy, Steve Allison stands up for our local police officers and first responders.”

The mailer adds that Montoya “is supported by radical organizations that want to defund the police.”

In an Aug. 28 campaign video, Gonzales tried to link Jones to what he called the “radical left ideas” of progressive rock star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York.

“Rest assured, Gina Jones supports this 100 percent,” Gonzales said. “Radical ideas just like defunding the police.”

In the two televised District 23 debates, Jones repeatedly argued that Gonzales would leave vulnerable residents without health care in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last week, during a debate on El Paso TV station KVIA, Jones pushed back against Gonzales’s contention that her virtual campaigning approach during the pandemic has been disrespectful to District 23 voters.

“I’m not going to take any campaign pointers,” Jones said, “from somebody who’s literally trying to kick-start their political career by taking away people’s health care.”

In these tight races, at this tense moment in our history, it all comes down to fear. One side is working the fear of a society without law enforcement. The other side is working the fear of a pandemic-ravaged society without health-insurance protections.

Nerves are getting frayed, facts are getting stretched and voters are left to make sense of it all.

Gilbert Garcia is a columnist covering the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Gilbert, become a subscriber. ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470