The US House of Representative’s only black Republican — US Representative Will Hurd — on Thursday became the latest Republican lawmaker to say that he would not seek re-election next year, jolting the party’s efforts to appeal to minority voters and wounding its already uphill chances of regaining control of the House.
Hurd, a moderate Texan who has clashed with US President Donald Trump over race and immigration, used an evening tweet to announce that he would not seek re-election next year.
That made him the ninth House Republican to say they would depart — the sixth in just more than a week — and gives Democrats a strong shot to capture a district that borders Mexico and has a majority Hispanic population.
Hurd’s exit put the Republican Party ahead of its pace when 34 of its members stepped aside before the last elections — the party’s biggest total since at least 1930.
It also underscored how Republicans are struggling to cope with life as the House minority party, today’s razor-sharp partisanship and Trump’s tantrums and tweets.
Republicans have said that they do not expect this election’s retirements to reach last year’s levels.
However, their more ominous problem is embodied by Hurd, one of several junior lawmakers to abruptly abandon vulnerable seats and a visible symbol of the party’s attempt to shed its image as a bastion for white men.
The recent spate of departures puts perhaps four Republican seats in play next year and suggests an underlying unease within the party about the hard realities of remaining in the US Congress.
“There’s a mood of tremendous frustration with the lack of accomplishment,” Representative Paul Mitchell said in an interview earlier this week, days after stunning colleagues when he said that he is leaving after just two House terms. “Why run around like a crazy man when the best you can hope is maybe you’ll see some change at the margins?”
Mitchell, 62, who said that he originally intended to serve longer, blamed leaders of both parties for using the nation’s problems “as a means to message for elections” instead of solving them.
He also expressed frustration with Trump’s tweets last month telling four Democratic congresswomen of color — including his Michigan colleague, Representative Rashida Tlaib — to “go back” to their home countries, even though all are American.
The tweet was “below the behavior of leadership that will lead this country to a better place,” Mitchell said.
In a statement, Hurd did not mention Trump, but pointedly said that he had held onto his seat “when the political environment was overwhelmingly against my party.”
The former CIA operative said that he was pursuing opportunities in technology and national security.
Hurd, 41, was a leader in a failed bipartisan effort last year, opposed by Trump, to help young immigrants taken into the US illegally to stay in the country.
He was also among just four Republicans to last month back a Democratic condemnation of Trump’s “go back” insult as racist.
Just a day earlier, Representative Michael Conaway also said that he would not seek re-election, which he attributed to his loss of a leadership role atop his beloved US House Committee on Agriculture.
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