Courtesy of Julie Oliver for Congress
Oliver’s campaign has geared up, with hundreds of active volunteers who are phone banking and doing literature drops to every dorm room at UT-Austin.
Julie Oliver is ready for a rematch in Texas’s 25th Congressional District. Oliver, 48, ran her first-ever campaign against incumbent Rep. Roger Williams in the 2018 midterms, prodded into action by the Republican Party’s near repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017. She lost by nearly 27,000 votes, but one recent poll shows that she’s closed most of that gap this time around.
“In 2017, I looked at my husband and said, ‘Gosh, I have a crazy idea. And I need you to talk me out of it,’” Oliver says in an interview with the Prospect. “It was born out of a sense that, ‘my son’s going to lose his coverage and I don’t know what’s going to happen.’”
Oliver’s son has a cardiac condition and immune deficiency, and the Affordable Care Act keeps her son from losing private health coverage because of those pre-existing conditions. Oliver, a mother of four, says the care her son has received would have put her family in medical bankruptcy without the ACA. So she took the streets, running a grassroots campaign of door-knocking and community meetings in the sprawling 25th district.
Texas-25 starts with a section of the city of Austin and continues north for about 200 miles until it reaches almost to Dallas.
When Oliver conceded in 2018, the campaign didn’t end. Instead, she continued organizing and preparing for this November. She now has the backing of progressive heavyweights across the country, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Sunrise Movement, and the Working Families Party. Oliver’s campaign has also benefited from the data amassed by Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign.
Oliver believes she can overcome the obstacles that her gerrymandered district poses.
O’Rourke’s voter data are helping Oliver run a more closely targeted campaign this time around, Oliver explains. As the coronavirus has halted rallies and traditional door knocking, good data is especially useful.
Williams isn’t the only obstacle Oliver has to confront; so is the gerrymandered district she’s trying to win. Before the Republican-controlled redistricting in 2011, Austin’s metro area was represented by Democrat Lloyd Doggett in one congressional district. After redistricting, it was split into five districts (six if you broaden the definition of the greater Austin area).
Texas-25 now includes fragments of the former 6th, 10th, 11th, 17th, 21st and 31st Congressional Districts, according to Ballotpedia. The GOP’s map design was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court and since redistricting, Williams has won every race in the district by comfortable margins.
“It makes for very few competitive districts,” says Patrick Flavin, a professor at Baylor University. “The 25th by various measures probably leans Republican by about 10 percent. So any Democratic challenger is going to face a huge uphill battle. When [Oliver] ran in 2018—which was kind of the best election climate for Democrats you could imagine with the midterm election, and an unpopular incumbent president, she came in nine points behind. That might be the high water mark for a Democrat in that district.” Today, the Cook Partisan Index describes TX-25 as leaning Republican by 11 points.
The way Austin was split up is the textbook definition of “cracking,” says Justin Levitt, professor of law at Loyola Marymount University. The reliably Democratic parts of Austin were cracked into pieces to be connected to different parts of the state with the purpose of diluting the power of Democratic voters in these congressional races. The result not only empowered Republicans, but also made it difficult for Austin to hold its elected officials accountable.
Nonetheless, the DCCC added the Oliver’s race to its target list at the end of August. In addition to the impressive internal polling numbers, Oliver’s campaign has also greatly outraised Williams. Though Oliver is not accepting any PAC money and all donations come from individual donors, she raised more than $250,000 in August and outraised her opponent by 235 percent in the second quarter of this year. Joe Biden’s strong polling statewide has also ignited excitement for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in the Lone Star State.
Oliver believes she can overcome the obstacles that her gerrymandered district poses. She was born and raised in Dallas and has lived in Austin since attending law school at UT-Austin. Despite the state’s decades-long conservative tilt, she’s unapologetically progressive.
“You hear the arguments like, ‘Oh, that’s socialism,’ or ‘Oh, that’s welfare,’” Oliver says. “I’ve heard them my entire life, so you start to anticipate them and before they can even get the words out, why not nip them in the bud?”
When it comes to healthcare, one of her key concerns, she draws on her experience working for St. David’s HealthCare in Austin, an affiliate hospital network of the largest for-profit hospital system in the country, Healthcare Corporation of America. For 15 years, Oliver was tasked to use her legal expertise to analyze hospital documents and eventually started asking questions about how healthcare was paid for in Austin.
In investigating the balance sheets and the different ways care could be paid for—by private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, or by an emergency fund for the uninsured—she couldn’t believe more people weren’t calling for universal healthcare, especially Republicans.
Oliver often flips Republican arguments or talking points on their head when making her case to voters.
“Why don’t Republicans, if they’re fiscally responsible, get onto the universal health care bandwagon? You want people to seek preventive care before they end up in an emergency room, right? I couldn’t connect the dots,” Oliver says. “You can’t get any more fiscally responsible than universal healthcare; Medicare for All is the best because you don’t have profit in it. And these insurance executives are making ungodly amounts of money.”
Oliver often flips Republican arguments or talking points on their head when making her case to voters. When someone asks, “How we’re going to pay for universal healthcare?” Oliver explains how universal healthcare would not only cut down hospitals’ uninsured patient population, but also cut down on costs by giving people the options for preventive care for diseases that need regular management, like high blood pressure or diabetes.
On climate change, Oliver adopts some of the language from the Green New Deal, making an economic argument as well as a scientific one. Texas’s identity is deeply interwoven with its energy sector operations, which still mostly rely on fossil fuels but increasingly includes solar and wind energy, too. Oliver recognizes the importance of Texas oil to employment levels, but she also demonstrates how the industry requires governmental assistance to compete in the free market that Republicans often talk about.
“There’s a reason that gas is the same price now as it was when I was in high school, 30 years ago,” she says. “Thirty years ago, it was $2 a gallon, now it’s still $2 a gallon. If there were truly a free market with respect to gas, we’d probably have $10, $15, $20 a gallon gas prices. So let’s take those fossil-fuel subsidies and move them, let’s put them in the green energy space.” These higher prices, Oliver says, factor in not just the subsidies the industry receives, but also the externalities that fossil fuels inflict, such as the cost of pollution and its toll on public health.
Oliver also see ways to make just transitions for skilled workers in the energy sector, who could, for example, switch from laying pipelines to building and maintaining windmills on Texas’s coastline. Oliver wants to push for Texas energy to mean more than fossil fuels, and eventually become a landmark provider of clean energy.
Oliver also does not shy away from the immigration debate, and condemns President Trump’s border wall and immigration policies. “I pray to God that when I get into Congress, we can end family separation once and for all. I hate what we’ve done to people seeking asylum in our country.” She supports decriminalizing illegal border crossing and wants to create a pathway to citizenship for recipients of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and TPS (Temporary Protective Status).
Not surprisingly, Oliver’s positions are the polar opposite of Williams’s. The 12th richest person in Congress supported repealing the Affordable Care Act, supported drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic and the Pacific; and when President Trump declared a state of emergency to seize funding for his border wall, Williams said the president had “no option but” to do so.
Despite being a multimillionaire, Williams also applied for and accepted federal coronavirus assistance for his car dealership businesses during the coronavirus. The Paycheck Protection Program loans may be forgiven by the federal government in the future. Williams admits he accepted the loan, but it is unclear how much it was for. He did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment on the PPP loan or on whether he will debate Oliver.
Williams may not feel compelled to debate or answer questions about his loan because his district has always been securely Republican. A recent internal DCCC poll, however, showed Williams’s lead down to 2 points. Oliver’s campaign has geared up, with six full-time employees, 11 part-timers, and hundreds of active volunteers who are phone banking and doing literature drops on her behalf—including to every dorm room at UT-Austin.
In Texas-25, Levitt says the race will depend on how well Oliver can beat back the gerrymandered disadvantage and whether she can convince enough people to consider more than her political party marker. “The fact that the district might be heavily Republican,” he says, “does not make the election forgone conclusion, but it means a lot of extra work.”
