Like droves of other northerners in recent decades, her family moved to the Dallas area when she was a teenager, for the warmer weather. V an Duyne is in some ways a quintessential Texan, in that she’s not originally from there. Trump may be gone, but Trump ism is very much alive. ![]() Van Duyne’s victory suggests that her 2015 strategy of stoking fears of foreigners didn’t make her unelectable in a diverse, growing suburb-and may have even aided her. The outcome complicates the narrative about Texas that liberals like to tell: that the state is slowly but surely “turning blue” that one day soon Texans will wake up, come to their senses, and become Democrats. The contest was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “ most bitter loss,” as one Texas Republican strategist told Fox News. Democrats weren’t just beaten they were beaten by the exact kind of candidate they thought voters were done with. Van Duyne outperformed Trump, winning her district even as the then-president lost it to Joe Biden-one of the nine House Republicans to manage that feat. Democrats enrolled Van Duyne’s opponent, Candace Valenzuela, in the “Red to Blue” program, which aims to help Democratic candidates win Republican districts.īut Republicans, including Van Duyne, won all the Texas seats Democrats had targeted, and the GOP maintained control of the state legislature. Van Duyne’s district-where the Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke beat Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2018 while losing statewide-looked like one of their best opportunities. Last year, President Donald Trump’s popularity among Texans was flagging, and Democrats in the state, who hoped to take control of the Texas House and win several congressional seats, thought diverse suburbs such as Irving would be reluctant to elect Trumplike Republicans. Her victory was a surprise-at least to some. As for Van Duyne: This past November, she was elected to the United States Congress. In the end, Mohamed was never charged, and he and his family moved to Qatar. Within days, the news had reached the BlackBerry of President Barack Obama, who tweeted, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Yet another public official backed the police response. Yet another brown kid in a red state was being overpoliced. The controversy dragged obscure Irving into the national conversation. “We’ve heard more from the media than the child ever released to the police when we were asking him questions,” she said calmly. She defended Mohamed’s arrest on Facebook, then went on The Glenn Beck Program to repeat the “ hoax bomb” lie and complain that the child hadn’t given police enough information. The other Texan was Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, a blond 44-year-old with Disney-princess bone structure. ![]() His English teacher decided it might be a bomb, and the school called the police, who arrested Mohamed for bringing in a “ hoax bomb.” Because Mohamed’s family was part of Irving’s large Muslim minority, many liberals saw this as a baseless case of Islamophobia. One was 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a precocious kid in a NASA T-shirt who had built a clock out of spare parts and brought it to school in a pencil case. I n 2015, in the Dallas suburb of Irving, the fates of two very different Texans collided.
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