No one had announced that he would show up at the Friday night high school football game in South Texas.
But as he ascended the bleachers, a line quickly formed of fans old and young. Two retirees posed for photos with him, while shy-looking teenagers rehearsed what they would say on their turn.
Most U.S. House candidates do not receive such an enthusiastic reception. But for Bobby Pulido, a Tejano singer running as a Democrat, it is commonplace.
Mr. Pulido — a standard-bearer of the Tejano genre, which fuses the traditional Tex-Mex music of accordion and bajo sexto with modern country or pop — is running in a district anchored in the Rio Grande Valley, where entire families grew up listening to his music. Many voters know him, or at least feel as if they do.
That feeling was summed up by the mother of a high school dance coach: “We know him personally,” Yolanda Ozuna, 69, said of Mr. Pulido, before correcting herself. “We’ve not known the family personally — but the family’s been around him.”
At 53, with two Latin Grammy Awards under his belt, Mr. Pulido is bringing the glam and allure of pop music to a new kind of performance: a high-stakes political campaign. Like other entertainers turned politicians before him — including a certain reality TV star who became president — he is wielding his celebrity and keen sense of spectacle on another stage where attention is a crucial currency.
His prominence and his moderate platform have created an unusual challenge for his Republican opponent, Representative Monica De La Cruz. Even though President Trump won the district by 18 percentage points in 2024, limited polling of the race points to a tight contest that Ms. De La Cruz admits is “very competitive.”
Mr. Pulido has tried to expand his popularity by performing for free at more than 70 quinceañeras, weddings and other events in his district, a tactic he adopted in response to a dig from his opponent. (“This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera,” Ms. De La Cruz had said in March.)
At each party, his campaign team collects attendees’ contact info, helping to build a database of potential voters. He sings for 10 minutes, then gives a simple pitch in English or Spanish. Before he leaves, he hands the birthday girl a “Make Quinceañeras Great Again” baseball cap and accommodates guests’ requests for photos.
Ms. De La Cruz and her allies have sought to undercut Mr. Pulido’s family-friendly image. She has attacked him for his ties to Frankie Caballero, a former bandmate who is a registered sex offender, and for past offensive comments denigrating the bodies of postpartum women.
“I have been a leader that has brought results home to this community,” Ms. De La Cruz said in an interview at a park in Edinburg, where she and Mr. Pulido both live, “while my opponent has brought scandals to this community.”
Mr. Pulido maintains that voters have “never” asked him about Mr. Caballero or his past controversial comments, and that they are “distractions” from voters’ concerns about affordability and health care.
Mr. Pulido has mostly managed to dodge Republican attacks on policy. Running as a conservative Democrat, he has avoided partisan positions on transgender athletes, immigration and gun control that are unpopular in the district while embracing Democratic calls for government-funded health care and safety net programs.
Mr. Pulido has given his party newfound hope of reversing Republican gains in the predominantly Hispanic congressional district, Texas’ 15th, at a time when polls show that Latino voters are turning on Mr. Trump.
But he still faces an uphill battle.
“Our greatest challenge since we started has been overcoming the stigma of, ‘He’s just a singer and doesn’t know about politics,’” Mr. Pulido said in an interview at a coffee shop in McAllen, adding an expletive.
“Are we overcompensating?” he mused, going over the many podcasts, interviews and events he fills his schedule with. “Maybe.”
‘Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done’
Mr. Pulido’s family has deep roots in South Texas’ political and music scene. One uncle was the Hidalgo County district attorney, another the county’s top elected official.
His father was a farmworker before finding success as a pioneer of Tejano music.
Mr. Pulido spoke publicly about aspirations of running for office as early as 2003, when he told the Mexican newspaper El Norte that he wanted to fight for immigrants’ human rights.
Mr. Pulido’s grueling campaign schedule seems designed to counter Ms. De La Cruz’s claims that he is a dilettante and a “corrupt liberal celebrity.”
One Saturday for Mr. Pulido started with a 7 a.m. Spanish-language radio interview, followed by a three-hour drive to Goliad, a ruby-red town best known as the site of a massacre during the Texas Revolution. After hours under the Texas sun at a farmers’ market, he spoke at a local Democratic Party luncheon, trekked back to the Rio Grande Valley, changed clothes at a convenience store and sang at a Sweet 16 before making his final campaign stop of the day at a quinceañera, or 15th birthday party.
Teenage girls squealed and parents recorded on their phones as he descended a staircase, singing one of his hits.
He has been running this way since last fall. The campaign is “the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said in the interview.
Mr. Pulido pitches himself as a conservative “Blue Dog” Democrat who supports a secure border, owns guns and loves God. He says he supports creating pathways to citizenship for immigrants who are working and paying taxes, and deporting violent criminals.
Mr. Pulido has also said he opposes transgender girls participating in girls’ sports. But he doesn’t talk about that on the trail. Instead, he says he would expand health care access, push back against tariffs and curb billionaires’ influence in politics.
Democrats “got really fixated on social justice for a long time, but we have to have an economic message,” he said in the interview.
‘Not Strong Enough’
While Mr. Pulido has leaned into unscripted encounters with voters who could disagree with him, Ms. De La Cruz, 51, a former insurance agent seeking her third term, has taken a more cautious tack.
She stayed near her home in Edinburg on the same day this month that Mr. Pulido went to Goliad. She dropped by a park to thank canvassers, then sat for interviews with two reporters in a pavilion. As the volunteers went house-to-house in the blazing heat, she headed downtown for a fund-raiser and meet-and-greet.
Mr. Trump’s mid-decade redistricting push has complicated her run. Last year, when Texas Republicans gerrymandered the state’s House map to make five Democratic-held seats significantly redder, they carved out roughly 60 percent of Ms. De La Cruz’s constituency. Ms. De La Cruz is now pitching herself to many voters who are less familiar with her — and facing a challenger with sky-high name recognition.
At the same time, she has been weighed down by Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and the high cost of gas and groceries, all of which have hit voters and businesses hard in her low-income district.
She has sought to distance herself from Mr. Trump’s policies, saying in an interview that she supports “common-sense enforcement that focuses on the cartels and the criminals.” Her campaign aired an ad featuring a testimonial from a woman whose husband, who is part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, was detained by ICE while on his way to deliver breast milk to their baby in a neonatal intensive care unit.
“We need to secure our borders to keep our family safe, but this immigration system is broken,” the woman, Stephanie Villareal, says in the ad, adding, “I voted Democrat before, but Monica puts people over politics.”
Ms. De La Cruz’s record on border security could also be a strength in a conservative district.
Mayra Cantu, 46, whose husband is a Border Patrol agent, said she had knocked on thousands of doors for Ms. De La Cruz since 2020. Ms. Cantu’s husband struggled to handle the mental and emotional toll of the influx of migrants during the Biden administration, she said.
“As a Border Patrol family, we know what we see and exactly what happens when we fall off track,” Ms. Cantu said, warning that a “wishy-washy politician” would not be “strong enough for the task.”
The Race Gets Personal
As Election Day approaches, the race has become increasingly ugly.
At Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas, Ms. De La Cruz accused Mr. Pulido of “bringing a convicted child sex predator around our families,” referring to a 2018 middle school benefit concert where Mr. Pulido played alongside Mr. Caballero. She has also slammed him over past sexually explicit social media posts; in one from June 2016, he made a crude remark about women’s genitals after childbirth. In another, from 2014, he asks a fan for a nude photograph.
Super PACs backing Ms. De La Cruz have echoed her attacks with ominous TV spots. One showed a little girl’s silhouette in the dark, then Mr. Caballero’s face.
Mr. Pulido, who has apologized for the explicit posts, has said that he was unaware of Mr. Caballero’s sex-offender status. His campaign said he permanently cut ties with Mr. Caballero in 2021.
Mr. Pulido’s campaign manager, Abel Prado, said the singer “will not be lectured by Monica De La Cruz — a person who has spent her political career cheerleading a president who has publicly attacked women’s appearances.”
Recently, Mr. Pulido and his allies have gone on offense, running ads that point to allegations that Ms. De La Cruz abused her former stepdaughter. Ms. De La Cruz has vigorously denied the claim, which her ex-husband made during their divorce in 2022, and her campaign emphasized that her ex-husband was found guilty of assaulting a police officer that year.
“South Texans have already rejected these smears twice,” said James Shook, Ms. De La Cruz’s campaign manager.
In interviews, voters across the district seemed largely unfazed by the attacks against Mr. Pulido.
Many Democrats dismissed them as irrelevant given Mr. Trump’s past scandals. Republicans were focused on Mr. Pulido’s policy views; one said he was more concerned about the fact that the candidate had previously said he lived part-time in Mexico.
In an era when congressional campaigns largely reach voters through paid television and social media ads, Mr. Pulido is betting that face-to-face encounters can accomplish more.
At a wedding Mr. Pulido stopped by, the bride agreed and said she was thrilled about his performance.
“People want to know who they’re voting for,” the bride, Keilah Patterson, 25, said as she lit a cigarette by the pool. “Now everyone at this party will say, ‘I saw him!’”
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