Lupe Valdez, a former sheriff from Dallas, beat a small slate of Democratic candidates to get the party’s nomination for governor. She is the first gay gubernatorial candidate in Texas from a major party.
During her acceptance speech, Valdez thanked her “darling sweetheart Lindsay” Browning.
“Texas is changing,” she said. “Look around you. This is what Texas looks like: like all of us.”
She will face incumbent governor Greg Abbott in the general election in November.
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“Tonight Texans made history by making Lupe Valdez the first openly lesbian woman to win the gubernatorial nomination from a major political party – the latest in a series of groundbreaking wins for LGBTQ candidates in the state,” said former Houston mayor Annise Parker, who is currently the CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Fund.
Several LGBTQ candidates won congressional primaries in the Lone Star State yesterday. Former Air Force intelligence officer Gina Ortiz Jones won the Democratic primary in Texas’s 23rd District, beating her opponent 68 percent to 32.
Former congressional aide Eric Holguin won the Democratic primary in Texas’s 27th District, a district that Donald Trump won by 24 points in 2016.
And business owner Lorie Burch received 75% of the vote in the Democratic primary in Texas’s 3rd District, which includes parts of Dallas’s norther suburbs.
These candidates face uphill battles in the general election in the deep red state. Ortiz Jones’s district is perhaps the most purple of them all; in 2016, Republican Will Hurd won the U.S. House race in the 23rd District with 48% of the vote and his Democratic opponent got 47%.
