Houston City Councilwoman Amanda Edwards isn’t afraid of a competitive race. In 2015, she finished first in an eight-way race for At-Large Position 4, then cruised to victory in a runoff. And that’s good, because the municipal finance attorney could face two similarly competitive contests in 2020.

Edwards on Thursday announced that she is seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican John Cornyn, a powerful and well-funded incumbent who has yet to draw a serious challenger in the GOP primary.

But Edwards will first have to survive a crowded primary. The Democratic field already includes former Houston congressman Chris Bell, Air Force combat veteran MJ Hegar, and activist Sema Hernandez. State Sen. Royce West of Dallas is expected to formally declare his own bid for the Senate on Monday. And there are other Democrats known to be eyeing the Senate race — or being eyed, perhaps, by wistful Democrats who see them as potentially strong candidates.

Beto O’Rourke has so far stuck by his decision to launch a long-shot bid for president rather than for the Senate, following his impressive campaign last year against Texas’ other GOP senator, Ted Cruz..

The sheer number of plausible Democratic candidates for Senate in 2010 is telling. The last time Cornyn was on the ballot, in 2014, Texas was such a safe red state that Democrats struggled to muster credible candidates, much less competitive ones, for statewide races. The real contest, in that cycle, was in the Republican primary, which Cornyn won with 60 percent of the vote before cruising to a 26-point general election win.

But Cornyn himself has been among the Republicans sounding the alarm in the wake of the 2018 midterms that, this time, Democrats truly do pose a real threat.

“We are, I think, no longer the reliably red state we have been,” he told the Texas Tribune’s Abby Livingston last month.

And Edwards, a graduate of Eisenhower High School in Aldine ISD who went on to earn a Harvard University law degree, agrees. On Thursday, at her campaign kickoff at DeLuxe Theater in Houston’s Fifth Ward, she told supporters that she expects the real fight to be in the Democratic primary.

“Does anybody read Malcolm Gladwell?” Edwards asked Thursday evening, referring to the author of “David and Goliath” and other books.

She explained that she would, as the Democratic nominee, be seen as David vs. the Republican Goliath, but that she would highlight the advantages that the former had in his battle against the giant.

“We misread battles between underdogs and giants,” Gladwell wrote, arguing that David’s victory was less of an upset than it might have seemed.

“What you come to realize is that David wasn’t as weak and tiny as he may have seemed,” Edwards said. “He was a sharpshooter. He was able to hit any mark he wanted — he was very precise, very skilled.”

It’s not a bad point. Cornyn was first elected statewide in 1998, at which point Texas was still a purple state; in fact, that year he became the first Republican elected attorney general of the state since Reconstruction. But while Cornyn isn’t a complete neophyte, when it comes to competing against Democrats, it’s possible that his skills have atrophied.

“Councilwoman Edwards is a true progressive with a record that would make Elizabeth Warren jealous,” his campaign manager, John Jackson, said in a July 18 statement after Edwards announced her campaign with a launch video.

“If Texans want an Elizabeth Warren clone with a long record of radical positions, look no further than Royce West," Jackson said in another statement, a day later, after it was reported that West had filed as a candidate with the Federal Election Commission.

This is a strange bit of messaging on Cornyn’s part. Warren is a U.S. senator from Massachusetts and an avowedly progressive candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But she is more popular with Texas voters than the state’s Republican leaders would like to admit — or, at least, not as unpopular as President Donald Trump. And it’s easy to distinguish a Democrat such as Warren from the Democrats running for Senate in Texas.

West, who has served as a state senator since 1992, has described himself as a Democrat who can build bridges to Republicans — which he has had to do in order to get anything done, for most of his years in the Texas Senate.

Edwards, an African-American millennial who was elected to the Houston City Council in 2015, is campaigning as a solutions-oriented servant leader who is, like most Americans, sick of politics.

“This is not about politics. This is about people, and what matters most to us,” Edwards says in her launch video, which was released Thursday morning; she made the same point that evening, at the DeLuxe.

Her candidacy comes at a time when many Republicans are increasingly dismissive of the concerns raised by people of color about the importance of representation at all levels of government

Although it’s too early to predict what will happen in the 2020 Texas Senate primary, I’d tip Edwards as the candidate to watch. In addition to her compelling personal story and impressive professional resume, she has a reputation for working tirelessly as a member of the Houston City Council; that’s an attribute that’ll serve her well in a statewide campaign. And Edwards seems to know what she’s getting into — and that David can only beat Goliath with skill, precision, and preparation, rather than counting on a lucky shot.

erica.grieder@chron.com