Will Hurd Bets GOP Presidential Voters Want Anti-Trump Texan

Photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Perhaps it’s a reaction to front-runner Donald Trump’s accumulating legal peril. Maybe it’s a reflection of perceptions that top Trump rival Ron DeSantis is struggling a bit. Or it could be that Republicans simply think 2024 will be a good year for them and they shouldn’t miss out on an opportunity to go for the gold. But for whatever reason, the GOP presidential field keeps on expanding even as it grows harder to meet requirements to make the stage in the impending debates. The latest entrant – the 14th, if you are keeping count — is former three-term Texas congressman Will Hurd from the politically competitive Rio Grande Valley region of that state.

A lot of the interesting things about Hurd don’t necessarily stand out in the big 2024 presidential field. He’s the third Black Republican candidate in the race (along with Tim Scott and Larry Elder). He’s the sixth person of color in the field (along with Indian Americans Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy and Cuban American Francis Suarez). At 45, he’s the fourth candidate under 50 (Ramaswamy is 37; DeSantis is 44; and Suarez is 45). And he’s by my count the third candidate (along with Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie) trying to occupy a narrow anti-Trump lane in the contest.

Hurd is unique in being a former covert operative (i.e., a spy) in the CIA. And he may be the only trilingual candidate; he’s fluent in Spanish (his House district was heavily Hispanic) and Urdu (which he apparently learned in connection with duties in and about Pakistan). He is also arguably the most authentically moderate Republican in the field, as the Texas Tribune observes:

He voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, and he supported universal background checks for gun purchases and protections against LGBTQ discrimination.

Hurd also worked across the aisle within the Texas delegation, going on a road trip with then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, in 2017 that they broadcast live online.

Hurd is a veteran Trump basher, dating back to the 2016 campaign. He’s even criticized Trump’s border wall as an ineffective way to go about enforcing immigration laws. But he also voted against the one Trump impeachment resolution that came to the floor, before he voluntarily gave up fighting for his battleground House district and retired at the end of 2020. And Roll Call notes that a Congressional Quarterly analysis of Hurd’s House voting record showed him supporting Trump’s position “97 percent of the time in 2017 and 93 percent of the time in 2018.”

Hurd’s announcement video offers standard-brand Republican criticisms of Joe Biden on issues including inflation, immigration, and national security, while going after Trump as unelectable.

But his constant appeals to “common sense” and bipartisanship also make you wonder if he’s got participation in a No Labels independent general-election ticket in the back of his mind.

In any event, Hurd is going to have to get things rolling quickly if he wants to meet the criteria for the first GOP debate on August 23 in Milwaukee (40,000 unique donors from 20 states and one percent in some combination of large-sample national and early-state surveys). Conversely, if most of the declared candidates do meet the criteria, we could wind up with a secondary “kids’ table” debate like Republicans held in 2016. Being consigned to such an event would be especially unfortunate for candidates like Hurd (and Christie and Hutchinson) hoping for a direct and successful confrontation with Trump. For now, though, Will Hurd will be just another 2024 presidential aspirant provoking the question: “What could they be thinking?”