After Pelosi left and the crowd thinned out, Cuellar and I walked upstairs and sat down at a folding table. Supporters kept interrupting to hug “Papacito” and thank him. One of them even hugged me.

I did not expect him to talk much—he hasn’t given many interviews during the campaign. But he was eager to blast Cisneros and Justice Democrats, who have criticized him for his coziness with corporate PACs.

“Justice Socialist Democrats are a PAC also, but I guess their PAC is okay,” he said. “They try to say they’re so pure, but when you start looking at it, everything they do, they misinform in so many ways.”

He paused, and then went more explicitly after Cisneros. “She graduated; she went to New York, took the state bar in New York … Think about it. If you’re an attorney, you get your license where you want to practice. Her plan was to practice in New York,” he said, emphasizing the last two words in a high-pitched voice. (Taking the bar in New York doesn’t prevent Cisneros from practicing in Texas or most other states.)

Cuellar’s moderate views have made him a pariah to lots of Democrats, but he doubled down on them when we spoke. “Democrats in Texas, when I started, it was safe, legal, rare abortion,” he said, pausing between all three points and counting them out on his fingers. “I have an issue with extreme positions, like minors getting abortions without parental consent.”

I asked him whether he considers Trump a personal friend. There’s a pause.

“No,” he said. Then he had to leave.

Matthew Busch / Bloomberg / Getty

Cuellar’s centrist views on issues like health care and climate change have led Cisneros to believe she has a chance. She’s painted him as a do-nothing congressman who doesn’t really get the district. “He has been leaning into these stereotypes that South Texas is conservative and that we like things the way they are,” she told me when we talked in November. (Cisneros didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment in recent weeks.) “It’s very interesting to see that once he found out he was going to get primaried, all of a sudden he makes time for these people,” she said then. “But the community knows better. They know it’s because now he has to work for his job.”

Although her campaign has gotten a wave of national attention, and high-profile endorsements from groups like Emily’s List and the Texas AFL-CIO, it’s a different story in Laredo. Although she outraised him in the first six weeks of 2020, relatively few of her donations have come from within the district.

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Cisneros’s embrace of a full suite of left-wing dreams probably isn’t helping her campaign: Championing a Green New Deal is a tough sell in an area where the oil and gas industry is responsible for many well-paying jobs.

“Just because you can critique Cuellar for being more conservative than the average primary voter doesn’t mean they’re going to tilt further to the left and vote for Cisneros,” says Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University.