Marty Schladen

USA Today Network Austin Bureau

SAN ANTONIO – Early voting is smashing previous records and Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump continues to make news in ways that experts say aren’t likely to attract women and minorities to his banner.

Those two factors – and historic trends — give the Democrat a bit of an advantage in Texas’ only competitive congressional district, observers said late last week.

With less than two weeks left before Election Day and with voters already streaming to the polls, GOP U.S. Rep. Will Hurd and Democratic challenger Pete Gallego were making a frenzied final push in a congressional district that sprawls all the way from the western suburbs of San Antonio to El Paso’s Lower Valley.

The 23rd Congressional District is so close that it has flipped between parties in each election since 2010, with Hurd ousting Gallego in 2014.

Presidential years, with their greater turnout, have been favorable to Democrats in this district, which encompasses 800 miles of the Mexican border and where 72 percent of residents are Latino. Trump’s talk of a border wall and his anti-immigrant rhetoric have national Democrats targeting the district to bolster their numbers in the House.

“This is one of the top races in the country, one of the most competitive in the country and one of the top pickup opportunities for us this cycle,” Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Friday.

As a sign of the emphasis the party is placing on the race, Lujan, of New Mexico, and five other congressional Democrats were in San Antonio Friday to stump for Gallego.

Hurd and the GOP are taking the election just as seriously. The former CIA agent has substantially outraised Gallego in a race in which spending is expected to top $10 million.

Trump and his divisive rhetoric have put the Republican freshman in a difficult spot throughout the race, however.

Hurd for most of the race withheld his endorsement, waiting for Trump to show he deserved it. Then, when a videotape in which Trump bragged about groping women went public Oct. 8, Hurd got off the fence and called on Trump to abandon his campaign.

The move likely bolstered Hurd’s standing among some independents and moderate Republicans, but it could hurt him with parts of a Republican base he can ill afford to lose, experts said.

That has Gallego trying to nationalize the race and tie Hurd as tightly to Trump as he can, while Hurd mostly wants to keep the focus on local issues, said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones.

“If this is a referendum on Donald Trump, Will Hurd will lose,” Jones said. “If it’s a contest between two individuals, Hurd’s on much stronger ground.”

There are just under 750,000 people in the congressional district and about half of them live either in Bexar County on its eastern edge or El Paso County in its far-western corner, said Walter Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

About 250,000 live in western Bexar County neighborhoods that range from low-income Latino enclaves to relatively diverse middle-class areas, Wilson said. Roughly 100,000 more of the district’s voters live in El Paso County’s Lower Valley, which is overwhelmingly Latino.

Early voting has set records in Bexar County as well as in El Paso County, where a big wave of new voters has gone to the polls.

Intense interest in the election might seem to advantage Democrats by getting Hispanics who hadn’t voted in the past to participate, but that’s not certain.

Both parties’ get-out-the-vote operations have for several cycles emphasized early voting and some of the high participation can be attributed to behaviors that were already changing, Jones said.

And there are signs of enthusiasm in both parties.

Bexar and El Paso counties dominate the 28-county district in terms of population, but there are three others that are home to about 50,000 each.

One, Maverick County, runs along the border and in 2012 went for Gallego over GOP Rep. Francisco “Quico” Canseco by a margin of 80 percent to 17 percent. On Thursday, Adriana Flores in the county elections office there said early voting “is making history.”

At the same time, Medina County just west of San Antonio in 2012 went for Canseco by a 63-32 margin. Patricia Barton, the election administrator there, on Thursday said early voters there also were smashing records.

More people might be voting simply because Trump’s presence in the race has attracted their attention. But, Jones said, that might not be good for Hurd.

“You have to give Gallego a slight advantage simply because of the down-ballot damage inflicted by Donald trump across the country,” Jones said.

And even without that, there’s the presidential-year effect that’s seemed to advantage Democrats in recent CD23 elections, Wilson said.

“I think it will be Gallego,” he said.

Marty Schladen can be reached at 512-479-6606;mschladen@gannett.com; @martyschladen on Twitter.