WASHINGTON - The road to a potential Democratic takeover of the U.S. House passed through St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Montrose earlier this month, when primary rivals Laura Moser and Lizzie Pannill Fletcher squared off ahead of Tuesday’s runoff election.

To Jay Aiyer, a Texas Southern University political scientist who moderated the forum, it seemed there was not much to disagree on. “They could finish each other’s sentences,” he said.

But Houston Democrats still have a stark choice in the contest to challenge incumbent Republican John Culberson in November. Long a Republican-leaning district in the heart of Harris County, it fell to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, putting it on the national political map as a pick-up opportunity for a certain type of Democrat.

The question on Tuesday will be: What type of Democrat?

One is Laura Moser, an activist out of the populist Bernie Sanders mold who promises to be a “loud voice” for grassroots Democratic values who would vote to impeach President Donald Trump on “Day One.”

The other is Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, the favorite of party’s Washington establishment, who said she’s seen enough of Trump to be “concerned,” but who would like to see the results of the ongoing special counsel probe first.

In the context of the church forum on May 2 - by one count their 80th primary encounter - the impeachment question was merely hypothetical. Some members of Congress, notably Houston Democrat Al Green, have made it their cause of late. But Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders have made it clear that impeachment proceedings are not on their agenda for the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats need to pick up 23 seats to win back the majority.

To many voters - both in the May 22 primary runoff and the Nov. 6 general election - Trump will be the defining issue of the 2018 election, one way or the other. For the two Democrats vying in Houston’s 7th Congressional District race, arguably one of the most competitive in the nation, impeachment is a symbolic marker.

“In some ways, the Trump impeachment question is probably a pretty good prism to look at how they will approach everything,” said Aiyer, who has remained neutral in the runoff.

The showdown between Moser and Fletcher became a national story shortly before the March 6 primary when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the election arm of the House Democrats, decided Moser was unelectable and took aim at her in a public “opposition research” dump.

DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujan said it was not an attack on Moser’s “progressive” values, but rather on her electability. He cited her lengthy journalism career that includes satirical pieces he thought could be offensive to minorities, disabled people, and the entire state of Texas.

Moser has apologized for some of her youthful writings. But as a Houston native -she and Fletcher attended the same high school - she maintains she intended no disrespect to the city when she wrote in 2014 that she’d rather have her teeth pulled “without anesthesia” than live in her grandparents’ place in Paris, Tex.

The DCCC, though technically neutral, also faulted Moser for spending much of the past decade in Washington, where her husband, Arun Chaudhary, worked as a videographer in the Obama White House. He also worked for the Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.

Moser, now in her first run for office, says she backed Clinton in the general election. After Trump won, she dedicated herself to the “resistance” by founding Daily Action, a digital platform for political activism.

Fletcher, a lawyer, has pursued a more conventional path to her first run for office, though no less politically active. She has been involved with Planned Parenthood much of her adult life, earning her an endorsement from Emily’s List, an Democrat-aligned group that promotes women candidates who support abortion rights.

The liberal opposition dossier on Fletcher consists mainly in her law firm’s record of having won a case against a national union that wanted to represent Texas janitorial workers, many of them immigrants. Fletcher has said she took no part in that case, but it has caused the local AFL-CIO to side with Moser in the runoff.

Despite the contretemps between Moser and the party leadership in Washington, Fletcher rejects the “establishment” label. “I will put my progressive record up next to anyone,” she said at the St. Stephen’s debate. “I’m not afraid to talk about my progressive values.”

In fact, on most Democratic touchstones like gun safety, jobs and the economy, Fletcher and Moser are nearly indistinguishable. But the race has been cast as a battle between the insurgent and establishment wings of the Democratic Party, a divide that favored the more liberal candidates in a series of primary contests on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Idaho.

For many Houston Democrats, the difference between Moser and Fletcher may have less to do with their progressive values than how they talk about them. In Aiyer’s view, Moser comes across as more “direct” and outspoken; Fletcher is more “contemplative” and analytical.

Impeachment?

Their differing approaches came into their sharpest contrast when Aiyer brought up the question of impeachment.

“The lawyer in me is coming out when I say I’ve got to see the charges,” Fletcher said. “I would need to see the evidence. I’ve certainly seen enough to make me very concerned that impeachment is a very real possibility.”

Moser’s response: “Day One, baby,” she said to cheers. “Sign me up.”

With Democrats hoping to take back the House in November, another important marker for candidates across the nation has been whether they would return the speaker’s gavel to Pelosi. Conor Lamb, a centrist Democrat who won a special election in a pro-Trump district in Pennsylvania in March, said he would vote against Pelosi for speakership, a sign of potential intra-party division.

Moser, while praising Pelosi’s leadership, said the decision was made for her when the DCCC attacked her in February. “I think it’s time for young blood and a new generation of leaders with new ideas” she said.

Fletcher also praised Pelosi, but demurred on whether she would support her as speaker. “I’m focused on getting there (to Congress) first,” she said.

Moser and Fletcher’s most substantive point of divergence might be on health care, even though the difference may invisible to the naked eye. Moser is running on a “single payer” platform that envisions a national health care system. But, as an interim measure, she also supports a “Medicare for Everyone” model that would set up a public health insurance option alongside the private insurance marketplace.

Fletcher also has campaigned on adding a public option as part of former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which set up regulated exchanges of private insurance plans. But at a minimum, she wants to protect the current system from ongoing GOP efforts to weaken it, such as the Republican tax cut bill’s repeal of the individual mandate.

“We need to start with the Affordable Care Act,” Fletcher said. “We need to build on it.”

Moser called for less “incrementalism” and a “more radical, forward-looking system” than Obamacare 2.0. “I don’t think we can fix the Affordable Care Act as it currently stands,” she said. “We really need to start over with a better, more expansive plan that gets more Americans on the road to single payer.”

While the distinctions in their health care positions are nuanced, their visions of how to flip the Seventh Congressional District are a study in contrasts - reflecting a national purity-versus-practicality debate within the Democratic Party.

While Democrats were inspired by Clinton’s narrow 1.5-point margin over Trump in a district that is becoming more diverse every year, they also recognize that it’s still a heavily Republican district - and has been since George H.W. Bush represented it in Congress in the 1960s. In the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney won the district by 20 points.

Fletcher talks about overcoming the GOP advantage by building a “broad coalition” of left, right and center. “What we need to do is talk to every single voter in this district,” she said. She often emphasizes her life-long “relationship” to the district - a point that is clearly intended as a contrast to Moser’s years in Washington.

‘Take it to him’

Moser doesn’t buy into the centrist argument.

“People in this district, including many Republicans, want someone who will pop it to John Culberson,” she said, adopting a more combative stance. “(Someone) who will take it to him from Day One.”

Moser’s strategy depends on attracting new Democratic voters, rather than catering to what she calls “the mythical crossover voter.” Her plan relies on riding the “blue wave” of enthusiasm that she says can only be energized by a more assertive progressivism - a grassroots fervor, not incidentally, that was fueled by the February attack on her by the DCCC.

“There are more of us than there are of them,” Moser said of the district’s GOP leanings. “But we’re not showing up.”

The counter-narrative to Moser’s view is that 2016 showed that at least some anti-Trump Republicans also voted to re-elect Culberson to a ninth term, confirming the existence of some ticket-splitting.

Fletcher, accordingly, seeks to cast a wider net. “I disagree with Laura on the idea that it’s an ‘us and them’ situation,” she said. “We need someone who’s going to represent the entire community.”

Campaign finance reports show that both have proven adept at raising campaign cash - an important criterion in a race that is likely to draw outside spending from national groups on both sides. Fletcher had raised more than $1.4 million through the end of April, slightly better than the $1.2 million hauled in by Moser.

But the likelihood of a low-turnout runoff election - usually dominated by political activists - could provide an edge to candidate like Moser, who has cast herself as an outsider mining the party’s more militant wing. An unscientific online poll appearing on the Facebook page of the Bayou Blue Democrats, the group that sponsored the May 2 debate along with Meyerland Area Democrats, favored Moser 67 percent to 33 percent.

On another level, though, their differing paths to victory may not be that far apart. The Seventh is an affluent district that extends from the city’s west side into suburban Harris County. If it gives Democrats hope, it’s because it’s chock full of the kinds of voters polls show they can win over in 2018: Urban and suburban college-educated women put off by the brassy side of Trump.

“What you’re seeing in places like the Seventh and suburban districts across the country is the realignment of college-educated voters, particularly college-educated women, away from the Republican Party and towards the Democratic Party,” Aiyer said. “What Fletcher is calling a cross-over voter, Moser is essentially arguing is a new Democrat. They’re talking about the same group of voters in two different ways.”

With little to distinguish the two women ideologically, Moser-versus-Fletcher has in many ways become a contest of personality and presentation - though that doesn’t make it any less important.

“Voter preferences are not always driven by ideological differences,” Aiyer said. “They tend to be driven by likeability, style, and how we perceive a candidate.”

Kevin.Diaz@Chron.com