Wearing jeans and cowboy boots, Bobby Pulido insisted he was feeling a little rusty at a skeet shooting competition this month in the border city of Weslaco, Texas. But when the clay pigeon thrower hurled the targets into the air, he steeled his nerves, pointed his shotgun and blasted six out of six.
“It’s precision and calculation,” Mr. Pulido, a Tejano singer and Latin Grammy Award winner, said, explaining how he anticipates where the target is headed before pulling the trigger.
A household name in the Rio Grande Valley and beyond with a career in show business spanning three decades, Mr. Pulido, 52, knows that he will need that level of precision to translate his celebrity into a political career. He is trying to take back Texas’ 15th congressional district from a Republican who flipped it in 2022 after 118 years of Democratic control.
The wider Rio Grande Valley moved sharply toward President Trump in 2024, sending shock waves to the nation as the Democrats lost their grip on the Hispanic vote.
But in the early days of the 2026 midterm season, so much is uncertain. The district, a narrow strip that loosely stretches from the border with Mexico to an area east of San Antonio, was redrawn by the Republican-controlled State Legislature over the summer to be more G.O.P.-friendly, only to have a lower court throw the maps out as illegal. Then on Friday, the Supreme Court temporarily reinstated the new boundaries, with a longer-term decision possible within a few days.
Hispanic voters will dominate the district, regardless of where its borders wind up. Republicans in Austin drew their new maps on the assumption that their party’s gains with Latinos would be durable, only to see recent polls move sharply the other way. Democratic victories earlier this month in New Jersey and Virginia were powered in part by Hispanic voters returning to the Democrats.
Then there is Mr. Pulido, a father of four and a generational Texas Latino with two Latin Grammy Awards and a Grammy Award nomination for Best Mexican Music Album under his wide leather belt. He’s counting on his image as a rugged cowboy-hat-wearing Spanish-language performer with rural sensibilities to secure that Hispanic vote deep in the heart of Texas.
“This is not a costume,” he said. “This my life.”
He could be knocking on an open door, as the economic anxieties that pushed Hispanics toward Mr. Trump linger and the president’s aggressive immigration crackdown pushes them away from him. A poll released on Monday by the Pew Research Center found that 70 percent of Latino adults nationally disapprove of the way the president is handling his job, 65 percent disapproved of his administration’s approach to immigration, and 61 percent said Mr. Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse.
After years of voting for Democrats, Betty Treviño, 47, shifted in 2024 to supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican who holds the seat now, Monica De La Cruz, a Trump ally. Ms. Treviño said she was castigated by family members at the time for voting for Republicans. Now she’s kicking herself.
“My vote came to bite me” in the rear end, she said.
The president has not done enough to lower the cost of living, she said. In fact, trips to the grocery store have only gotten more expensive.
Mr. Pulido is only at the beginning of this political journey. Before he can take on Ms. De La Cruz, he must first must defeat Ada Cuellar, a medical doctor and law student, in the Democratic primary in March.
“People have told me that my policies seem to be more progressive, but I don’t really label myself,” Dr. Cuellar said. “For me, the focus is really on making people’s lives better.”
If Mr. Pulido clears that hurdle, he will come up against an incumbent who will be well-funded and formidable.
“Congress isn’t a karaoke bar,” Ms. De La Cruz said about his candidacy. “This is a serious role. The last thing D.C. needs is another celebrity desperate for attention.”
She added, “We need real leadership to address the concerns of working families, and that’s what I’m focused on.”
Celebrity does not necessarily confer political clout. Ask Clay Aiken, the “American Idol” star who ran for the House in North Carolina in 2014 and lost by 18 percentage points, and then did even worse when he tried again in 2022, attracting just 6,529 votes in the Democratic primary and finishing a distant third.
Mr. Pulido said he is moving away from some of the more liberal causes that are associated with entertainers and that alienated voters in 2024, like defunding the police. Instead, he is focusing on issues that Hispanic people and rural ranchers care about, like affordable health care, the rising cost of living and border security. At the same time, he said, many area residents have been troubled by recent immigration raids that have spread fear and separated families in a part of the country where it is common for families to include both U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants.
“I’m not for open borders,” he said. “But I don’t like people living in fear.”
At a campaign stop in Alice, Texas, a Hispanic-majority town known for its cattle ranches and its ties to the oil and gas industries, residents wanted to know what Mr. Pulido would do to defend Medicare and Medicaid, lower retail prices and increase employment in the region.
”I would be your voice,” he responded. “That I can promise you.”
Democratic leaders are not ready to endorse anyone in the race until after the primary, but some said they had confidence that Mr. Pulido’s more socially conservative stance could bring back voters from the Republican camp.
The Democratic Party is not a monolith, said Richard Gonzales, the party chairman in Hidalgo County.
“We are conservative in nature, very family based, culture based,” Mr. Gonzales said of South Texas Democrats. “We’re pro-Second Amendment, pro-oil and gas, but we still have Democratic values at our core.”
A winning formula in South Texas, he advised, would be “treating everyone like a human being and talking about inflation and the cost of living.”
Mr. Pulido, son of a farmworker-turned-Tejano singer, Roberto Pulido Sr., was 21 and a year away from finishing college, majoring in political science and human resources at a university in San Antonio, when his father persuaded convinced him to record a duet together. The song, “Contigo” (“With You”), took off, and offers of record deals came pouring in.
“Everybody was surprised, because I was so shy,” the younger Mr. Pulido said in an interview from his native Edinburg, Texas. “I was a broke college student.”
His first solo single, “Desvelado” (“Wide Awake”), became an instant hit, and over the next 30 years, Mr. Pulido released 18 albums and, toured the United States and Mexico. Mr. Pulido, who described himself as a lifelong Democrat who voted for George W. Bush, said he largely stayed out of politics until he saw Ms. De La Cruz flip the historically Democratic district in 2022. He said he looked at his wife and told her, “I can beat her.”
The idea lingered until Mr. Trump won in November and Mr. Pulido felt that the country was divided and demoralized, he said. Today, he is on the last leg of a farewell music tour, which is scheduled to end in February. Then he plans to campaign full time.
On the stump, he talks up his own experiences, saying that as a musician, he does not have a full health insurance plan, and has gone to Mexico for medical care because it’s cheaper there. Concerning jobs and the cost of living, he says that Democrats and Republicans need to meet halfway.
Still, it is his celebrity, not his policy pronouncements, that has distinguished him in the race so far. When he made a stop at a Mexican restaurant in Edinburg recently, Mr. Pulido found himself surrounded by the mostly female workers, posing for photos and obliging one of them, Lorena Jasso, with a kiss on the cheek.
“I have not voted in my life, but he’s making me want to get more politically engaged,” said Fabiola De León, 24, whose parents own the restaurant, El Caporal 2.
In the northern part of the district under either map, Democrats are vastly outnumbered, but even so, a crowd met Mr. Pulido outside a historic building in Goliad, Texas. Danny Garcia, 64, the sole Democratic commissioner in neighboring Victoria County, welcomed him with a hopeful comparison.
“This is our Obama,” Mr. Garcia said, to the smiles of people around him. “He is our hope. The Democrats have not had many chances in the past. We are Democrats, not progressives. He represents that.”
After Mr. Pulido sang “Desvelado,” he took questions from members of the audience, who expressed worry about immigration raids, the economy and the rising cost of health care.
“We have more in common that you can imagine,” he said, to applause.
Sitting in the back of the crowd, Mark Tisdale, 63, said that while he was not ready to turn his back on Mr. Trump, whom he had voted for in three elections, he was inclined to support Mr. Pulido in the House race. He liked what he heard about keeping the border secured, and Mr. Pulido’s support of health care changes.
“I’m not that familiar with his music, but he seems honest and truthful, and that’s what people need,” Mr. Tisdale said. “There is so much that needs to be taken care of.”
Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio.
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