EXCLUSIVE — Former Republican Rep. Mayra Flores, who announced her bid to unseat Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) earlier this year, is returning to her original district and mounting her third comeback campaign against Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX).
Flores announced in April that she was running to challenge Cuellar in the 28th District after losing twice over the last few cycles to Gonzalez in the 34th District, where she briefly served as congresswoman. But Flores has changed her plans after Texas redrew its congressional maps, adding five GOP congressional seats and widening Republican margins in existing districts.
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Now, internal polling shows Flores would overperform the declared GOP candidates running to unseat Gonzalez in the 34th District, and because of this, she will no longer challenge Cuellar.
“After redistricting, [the 34th] District is a lot more leaning Republican, and we believe that the best decision is for us to continue the work that we started back in 2021,” Flores said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
Flores, the first Mexico-born female member of Congress, served in the House as the 34th District’s congresswoman from late June 2022 to early January 2023. She won a special election to replace former Democratic Rep. Filemon Vela Jr., who had resigned, and flipped the district red for the first time in over a decade.
Her 2026 bid will be her third attempt to beat Gonzalez in the 34th District. She’s lost twice already: once in the election for a full term to the district in 2022 and again in the 2024 elections.
Last November, she came within 3 points of Gonzalez, stoking speculation that she would launch another bid for the 34th District in 2026. Instead, she chose to challenge Cuellar.
However, thanks to redistricting, which boosts her odds, Flores thinks she can best her GOP primary competitors — particularly as she is the only one to have received an endorsement from President Donald Trump. She said her commitment to bring more Hispanic voters into the Republican Party helped the GOP secure victories in 2024 despite her own loss.
In 2020, only 35% of Latino voters supported Trump. But in 2024, Hispanic support for Trump rose to 43%.
“I spoke at [Trump’s] rallies, traveled with him in swing states, and did Hispanic round tables, making sure that he got the Hispanic support. Why? Because it was important to me to get President Trump the win, but with Hispanic support, and we did that by giving him the most Hispanic support any president has ever gotten,” Flores said.
“Now, with the new redrawn districts that are more of a representation of what Texas looks like, I believe that we’re going to win South Texas and make sure it’s a Republican district,” the former congresswoman said.
Because the filing deadline is not until September, Flores can easily shift her bid from Cuellar’s district back to Gonzalez’s. The primary will be in early 2026.
Gonzalez and Cuellar, considered two of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, are prime targets for House Republicans heading into the 2026 midterm elections. Democrats only need a net gain of three seats to regain the House majority after two cycles, following historical trends that the lower chamber flips to the party opposite the White House in the midterm elections.
The latest redistricting war has pitted Republicans and Democrats against each other, as California Democrats seek to redraw their maps in an attempt to offset any GOP wins in the Lone Star State. Other red and blue states are now considering gerrymandering, spurring nationwide calls to prohibit redistricting until the next census in 2030.
According to Texas’s new maps, the districts represented by Cuellar and Gonzalez, which are overwhelmingly Hispanic, will become slightly more favorable to the GOP. In 2024, Trump received 53% in Cuellar’s district and 52% in Gonzalez’s. With the new proposed lines, the president would have gotten almost 55% of the vote.
An internal poll conducted by 1892 Polling and shared with the Washington Examiner found that Flores leads her GOP primary opponents in the 34th District, while her competitors reach 5% or lower.
In a survey of 400 likely primary voters in the newly redrawn 34th District, Flores received 38%, with a margin of error of 4.9%. In Nueces County, which was newly added to the 34th District lines under the new maps, 26% of primary voters said they would back Flores, compared to the other GOP candidates, who received single-digits.
The former congresswoman’s closest competition is Eric Flores, an Army veteran and attorney whose candidacy excited Texas Republicans due to his law enforcement and military background. The two Floreses are not related. In the poll, he received 5%.
Mayra Flores said no one else in the race for the 34th District has the name ID or experience that she has, and she is confident she would be the best chance to flip the seat red.
“We are the clear winner for this primary,” Mayra Flores said. “I want to make sure that this 2026, midterms, we elect strong Republicans and not RINOs,” or Republicans In Name Only.
“We do not need nobody going into Congress that is going to go against our very own values and go out there and vote like a moderate, like no, we need someone that is a strong Republican, strong conservative, and that will not bend over and that will do the right thing for the people that they represent.”
Gonzalez suggested in July that Mayra Flores could return to challenge him in a statement to the Texas Tribune on Eric Flores’s campaign launch.
“If Mayra comes back, she will be mopping the floor with him and every other Republican primary candidate,” Gonzalez said. “So [Eric] needs to get in line before he gets to the general election. If our district doesn’t move too much, we’ll kick his or anyone else’s ass, just as we have the 19 candidates before.”
Gonzalez acknowledged that the maps could make his district more GOP, stating that the “only way Republicans can beat me is by cheating and changing the district maps.”
Mayra Flores said that Republicans will need to match Democratic spending to win in the 34th District. In 2024, the rematch between Gonzalez and Mayra Flores was one of the most expensive in Texas.
She said Gonzalez’s voting record and bills have put him against the wishes of the Hispanic community and the 34th District. She pointed to a bill introduced in July to require immigration enforcement officers to clearly display themselves while enforcing the law. The bill comes as Democrats have blasted Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for wearing masks while they execute Trump’s mass deportation and illegal immigration agenda.
Mayra Flores also blasted Gonzalez for his 2021 vote for the Equality Act, which protects transgender people from discrimination. That vote was a major target of the 2024 cycle, and Republicans spent millions on ads accusing him of supporting sex change surgeries for minors.
Earlier this year, Gonzalez and Cuellar were the only two Democrats to vote in favor of the GOP-led Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act that banned federal funds to schools allowing transgender people to participate in sports.
“Things like this, it’s what pushes our people in South Texas away from him,” Mayra Flores said. “These are the things that have turned Hispanics away from the Democrat Party, because the Democrat Party has gone so far left. They’ve abandoned our values. They’ve abandoned us.
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“And you would think that after the 2024 election, that they would wake up and make some changes,” she added. “And no, they didn’t. They said, ‘Let’s take it up a notch.’”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Cuellar and Gonzalez for comment.