FORT WORTH — On the heated upstairs patio of a downtown bar on a latest Friday evening, dozens of Republican voters drank beers, snacked on nachos
FORT WORTH — On the heated upstairs patio of a downtown bar on a latest Friday evening, dozens of Republican voters drank beers, snacked on nachos and cheered and sang alongside to the refrain of a disparaging ode to a liberal RINO — Republican in identify solely — from the swamp, who, in response to the lyrics, had declared: “I’m By no means Trump — you’ll by no means construct that wall.”
The topic of their derision was their longtime congresswoman, Consultant Kay Granger, and the person who had introduced them there was Chris Putnam, who was working to oust her. In a major race that displays the inner struggles of the Republican Occasion underneath President Trump, Mr. Putnam is attacking Ms. Granger as not conservative sufficient for Texas’s 12th Congressional District and insufficiently supportive of the president.
By no means thoughts that Ms. Granger, a 23-year veteran of Congress and probably the most senior Republican girl within the Home, has been endorsed by Mr. Trump himself. Since 1997, when she turned the primary — and, to this point, solely — Republican girl to characterize Texas within the Home, she has climbed the ranks of her male-dominated convention. She is the highest Republican on the Appropriations Committee, negotiating funding for a wall on the southwestern border — though lower than Mr. Trump has demanded — and steering navy tasks to her district.
But with hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from outdoors Texas flooding into Mr. Putnam’s marketing campaign to unseat her, she is now in the costliest and difficult re-election marketing campaign of her profession, compelled to defend each her conservative credentials and her place in a celebration that has shifted considerably since she was first elected. The more and more nasty contest is testing the diploma to which Mr. Trump has reshaped the Republican Occasion, making unwavering loyalty a prerequisite and rendering suspect any trace of an urge for food for compromise.
On condition that the deeply conservative bent of her district is prone to decide the end result of the final election, Ms. Granger’s race can be the most recent case wherein Republicans look like jeopardizing their very own determined push to recruit and elect extra girls.
“I’ve by no means been in a race like this one,” Ms. Granger conceded final month at a marketing campaign occasion on the highest flooring of a North Richland Hills recreation heart, talking to former training colleagues and college students from her days as a trainer and native officers who’ve come to depend on her help in Congress. “It’s been very, very ugly in case you watched a few of the adverts.”
The risk to Ms. Granger is actual. Mr. Putnam, a former know-how government, has pilloried her particularly for 2 previous statements. In 2016, weeks earlier than Election Day, she called for Mr. Trump to end his presidential campaign after audio circulated of him making lewd remarks about girls in a section for “Entry Hollywood.” 9 years earlier, she had described herself as “a pro-choice Republican” in a television interview. (She now says she identifies as an anti-abortion conservative.)
However it’s her document on the highly effective Appropriations Committee that has invited probably the most nationwide consideration, after Membership for Progress Motion, the political arm of the fiscally conservative group, selected to endorse Mr. Putnam, spurning an incumbent for the primary time in years. The group has spent greater than $1 million on tv adverts in opposition to Ms. Granger, slamming her help for spending packages that included pay raises for lawmakers, funding for provisions within the Inexpensive Care Act and different will increase.
The choice by some conservative teams to focus on one in every of solely 11 Republican girls searching for to return to Congress has perplexed Ms. Granger and her allies, given the broad acknowledgment amongst leaders that Republicans have fallen badly behind on recruiting and retaining girls to serve, an effort seen as essential to the celebration’s survival.
“We’re making an attempt so as to add girls to the ranks, not deplete ranks,” mentioned Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Successful For Girls Motion Fund, which is devoted to electing conservative girls and has thrown its help and cash behind Ms. Granger. “We’re searching for girls who’re the most effective match for his or her districts, and that’s her.”
David M. McIntosh, the president of Membership for Progress Motion, mentioned his group was searching for to defeat Ms. Granger as a part of a broader effort to punish lawmakers who’ve supported extreme federal spending.
“We didn’t goal her as a result of she’s a lady — it’s based mostly on her document,” Mr. McIntosh mentioned. “If what we had been saying didn’t matter to Texas voters, it wouldn’t make a distinction.”
With Ms. Granger’s base predominately in Fort Value, the place she served as the town’s first feminine mayor, Mr. Putnam has focused the district’s rural outskirts, hoping to evoke voters who will not be as incessantly wooed by politicians working for federal workplace.
“It’s gotten very poisonous,” mentioned Carlos Turcios, 18, a highschool senior who has turn into an avid supporter of Ms….