Democratic voters in North Texas’ 24th Congressional District next month will select the candidate — retired Air Force Col. Kim Olson or former school board member Candace Valenzuela — they want to challenge Republican Beth Van Duyne in one of the fall’s most highly anticipated congressional contests.
The decision between Olson and Valenzuela is punishing for many Democrats who see both women as capable of beating Van Duyne, the former Irving mayor endorsed by President Donald Trump. The ultimate goal, Democrats sandwiched between Dallas and Fort Worth have said all year, is flipping the seat that has been occupied by Rep. Kenny Marchant for eight terms.
Marchant is one of several Texas Republicans retiring from Congress this year as the state becomes more competitive for Democrats. Marchant easily won his seat 16 years ago but beat his Democratic opponent in 2018 by just three percentage points. Local and national Democrats see the seat as theirs for the taking and a key component of keeping their majority in the U.S. House.
“We all feel like we’ve been in a holding pattern and we’re waiting for the choice to be made,” said Angie Hetisimer, a Tarrant County precinct chair and member of Indivisible Grapevine, which works to help elect progressive candidates. “I think for me and most of the people I talk to, we just want 24 to flip. Luckily we have two fantastic candidates.”
Given there is little light between Olson and Valenzuela on policy — both fluctuate between moderate and progressive on different questions but would be reliable votes for the Democratic agenda in Washington — the election is largely framed as a decision between Olson’s extensive résumé and Valenzuela’s biography. Olson was one of America’s first female military pilots. If elected, Valenzuela would be the first Afro-Latina member of Congress.
The district, which includes Grapevine, Irving and Southlake, has become increasingly diverse during the last decade, putting the question of who best represents the district’s population at the center of the debate.
Early voting in Texas’ runoff election begins Monday. The election was rescheduled for July 14 after the coronavirus pandemic took hold of Texas and the nation, throwing every aspect of life into question. That includes campaigning: Both candidates have been forced to pivot their campaigns to nearly entirely digital. Rubber-chicken dinners are out. Thematic town halls dissecting public health policy are in.
As the election date draws near, the tone of the race has become more pointed. Outside groups supporting Valenzuela have launched hundreds of thousands of dollars in attacks at Olson over her tenure at the Dallas Independent School District. Meanwhile, both Valenzuela and Republicans have taken aim at Olson over comments she made supporting the riots that ran parallel to massive protests in downtown Dallas over police brutality.
Campaigning in the age of the coronavirus
On a recent Saturday, Olson marched among dozens of masked volunteers gathered at an Irving Park to help put together “Vote-Safe Kits.” Each included a disposable mask, gloves and hand sanitizer — as well as a postcard with Olson’s face and talking points.
The kits, which Olson’s campaign purchased from a local startup, are one of several ways the campaign has pivoted due to the coronavirus outbreak.
“I asked myself, ‘If I were the congresswoman today, what would I do?’” Olson said.
Her campaign coordinated wellness checks, established an advisory council and translated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines into seven languages. The campaign also invested in 10,000 vote-by-mail ballot applications — a familiar tactic in Texas politics, but one with new urgency. About 85% of Tarrant County voters returned the application, while 65% of Dallas County voters did the same, Olson said.
“This is about voters feeling safe going to the polls,” Olson said.
Valenzuela’s team also changed tactics.
The campaign had planned a massive after-primary door-knocking campaign, which was squashed. Instead, they turned to phone calls and text messages to engage voters. According to the campaign, volunteers and staff have made 65,000 phone calls since March — 28,500 in June alone — and have sent 60,000 text messages.
“I knew after March 3 my life would be transformed,” Valenzuela said with a chuckle. “This was not what I had in mind.”
Both Olson and Valenzuela took their whistle-stops to Zoom and Facebook — each held more than a dozen digital town halls, most of them themed and featuring guest speakers.
Valenzuela also held a specific series of virtual meetings with teachers focused on how to juggle children, their education and working from home.
“You start running for office because you want to help people,” Valenzuela said. “But the process is so long you feel like you can’t help anyone. But this just makes me want to help more.”
Despite the lack of in-person campaigning, fundraising has not slowed down. On Friday, Olson’s team announced its largest fundraising haul to date. The campaign said it had raised $390,000 since April from 8,000 individual contributions, with an average gift of $43.
Valenzuela’s team did not release fundraising totals as of Friday. But the campaign said it had recorded 8,684 new donors since the primary, with an average donation of $36.15.
Where Valenzuela lacks in money, she makes up for in high-profile endorsements. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren endorsed her before the primary. Since then, she has picked up the endorsements of U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, U.S. Rep. John Lewis and former Housing Secretary Julián Castro.
Olson’s and Valenzuela’s campaigns are being supplemented by outside groups that have pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV ads between now and the election.
Both candidates acknowledged in recent interviews that their priorities would need to shift in light of the coronavirus and calls for police reform.
Valenzuela said she would help deliver “meaningful” financial relief to working families that would allow them to stay home. Olson suggested she would be in favor of withholding federal funding from police departments that do not meet minimum federal standards around use of force, such as a ban on chokeholds.
Clash over résumé, identity
For a recent digital fundraiser, Valenzuela sat at her kitchen table in front of a green screen. Her computer was propped up by a tub of Play-Doh used by her two children. The crowd gathered on her computer screen were members of the Dallas gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. They were celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court decision establishing federal protections for LGBT people in the workplace.
Valenzuela promised that if elected, she’d help codify those protections and expand them. Then she summed up the premise of her campaign.
“There is a disconnect between those in power and those closest to the pain,” she said.
Valenzuela grew up poor and was homeless for a time. She lived off food stamps and public education. She was the first to go to college in her family. As an adult, she has spent most of her life in education, including as a member of the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school board. That lived experience is what is missing in Washington, she says.
Olson, meanwhile, has said that her long résumé spanning from the military to work as a school district administrator has prepared her for Washington and that she wouldn’t “crack” on Capitol Hill. Her military experience is the cornerstone of her television commercials.
“I’m a woman with combat experience. I’m a woman with a breadth and depth of moving and changing and pushing policies and fundamentally changing large bureaucracies for the better,” she said. “There is a crisis in leadership, and what voters want and deserve is someone who is going to maneuver us and get us out of this perfect storm — health care, social unrest and economic downturn.”
Valenzuela and her allies of late have taken aim at some of Olson’s experiences, especially her time at the Dallas ISD. Olson was appointed director of human resources in 2007. A year later, the district was facing a huge budget shortfall and was forced to lay off hundreds of teachers.
Both Valenzuela and an outside political group that is supporting her have attempted to paint Olson, who says on her campaign website that she “oversaw a $1 billion dollar budget,” as the lone person responsible for the mismanaged budget and the resulting layoffs. The attack is featured both in Valenzuela’s TV advertisement and a direct mail advertisement.
In reality, the shortfall was years in the making before Olson arrived and she had little, if any, say over how the district balanced the budget after the shortfall was identified. Setting the budget is largely the work of the district’s superintendent and school board. In most school districts the budget is largely used to pay teachers and administrators, meaning it’s usually the only way a district can close a multimillion-dollar gap.
Olson, in an interview, said her only regret from her time at the Dallas school district was that she didn’t stay longer to help fix the problems.
“I would have stayed one more year,” she said.
Late controversies
Olson has also drawn criticism for recent comments regarding the protests in downtown Dallas. During a digital town hall, Olson was deftly explaining what the slogan “defund the police” meant when, as an aside about looting, she said: “Burn it to the ground, you know, if that’s what it’s gonna take to fix our nation.”
The comment quickly ricocheted through conservative media. Van Duyne highlighted the comments in a fundraising appeal: “Allowing this kind of destructive leadership to take hold in North Texas would be disastrous for us all.”
Olson’s campaign said her comments were taken out of context and then called for a “color-blind public safety institution.”
Valenzuela in a statement said Olson “missed the mark” and that calling for colorblind policies “ignores 400 years of our country’s history and is exactly the kind of ignorance we need to call out.”
Olson, in an interview, said she didn’t mean that race shouldn’t be taken into account, but that more has to be done to ensure law enforcers don’t disproportionally cause harm to Black people.
“It can’t be that police judge you because of your color, and courts can’t judge you for your color,” she said.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify that Kim Olson was among the first female military pilots.
