Grumet: Hauling trash, fixing pipes all part of long-shot campaign for U.S. House District 21

KERRVILLE — Claudia Zapata kept getting incredulous looks from residents along Barnett Street. But really, she explained, there was no catch.

Zapata, a Democrat waging a long-shot bid to unseat Austin-area U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, wasn’t asking for votes. She rarely mentioned she was running for Congress. Instead, Zapata went door-to-door in some of the poorest Hill Country neighborhoods in House District 21 and asked: What do you need? How can I help?

“Todo es gratis,” Zapata told a woman who recently had breast cancer, who couldn’t afford dental work, who had packing tape holding one of her window panes in place. “Everything is free, no cost to you.”

For months leading up to the election Tuesday, Zapata ran a community service operation unlike anything I’ve ever seen from a political campaign. Her staff provided rides to doctors’ appointments. They connected people to nonprofits that provide dental care or wheelchair ramps. One of Zapata’s field reps went into a crawl space to help repair a leaky pipe.

They cleaned out sheds and hauled away tons — literally 5 tons — of trash and yard debris from a bunch of homes. They brought in contractors willing to donate their time. And they started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for people who needed a new refrigerator or central heating.

“Policy and legislation are great for solving long-term problems. But people need help now,” Zapata said last week, as she and her staff cleaned out a backyard shed packed with tattered clothes and housewares. They hauled two truckloads totaling nearly a ton to the landfill.

“I don’t have to wait until I’m in office to help people,” she said.

Targeting overlooked areas

The mission is personal to Zapata, 28, a community activist and budget analyst who split her time growing up between East Austin and the Rio Grande Valley. She sees her family in the faces of the working poor who can’t afford home repairs. She thinks of border colonias when she visits Hill Country barrios where some residents, right now, lack running water.

Zapata also has her eye on the long game. Democrats need to connect with marginalized voters if they ever hope to flip this district, which clips parts of Austin and San Antonio and stretches west past Fredericksburg.

Zapata ran an energetic and optimistic campaign, but her $118,000 account was no match for Roy’s $2.2 million war chest, especially in this fiercely gerrymandered turf. Last year, Texas lawmakers redrew House District 21 from one that favored Donald Trump by only 2.7 percentage points in 2020 to one that would have backed him by nearly 20 percentage points.

For Zapata, victory means narrowing that gap one election cycle at a time. Her campaign focused on building trust in low income, low voter turnout neighborhoods in Comfort, Bandera, Boerne, Fredericksburg and Kerrville — places where people and those in power seem to have given up on each other.

Roy’s campaign didn’t respond to my inquiry about his outreach efforts. On social media, the Republican firebrand focuses on curbing illegal immigration, defending fossil fuels and (still) griping about pandemic-era restrictions. Clearly there is a constituency for that.

But those issues don’t register with the residents I met as Zapata’s outreach team went door to door in Kerrville’s Doyle neighborhood, a historically Black and Hispanic community.

Denisha Vargas, 52, was worried about cars speeding through the neighborhood and the critter living in her walls. She can’t afford an exterminator.

Virginia Castillo, 75, lives in a home without central heat. She huddles by a space heater and avoids using the rest of the house when it gets bitter cold.

Estella Ramirez, 56, who is Castillo’s daughter and lives down the street from her mom, hasn’t had hot water or use of her stove in four years. She can’t afford to find or fix the gas leak at her house, so the gas line has been turned off. She uses an electric skillet and hot plates to fix meals and warm up pots of water for bathing.

None of these women knew who represented them in Congress. In fact, no politician had taken an interest in their community, they said, until Zapata and her team arrived.

“She’s putting actions behind her words,” said Ramirez, who also owned the junk-filled shed that Zapata and her team cleaned out last week. “That’s what really counts for people like myself.”

Keep the assistance apolitical

I spoke with a couple of campaign finance experts who said they’ve never heard of this kind of outreach by a campaign.

“That’s actually quite creative,” said Michael Toner, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who now works as an attorney on election issues.

They saw no problem with campaign staff offering their labor to clean up a person’s property, or creating a GoFundMe that raises money for neighbors in need, or providing referrals to nonprofits or contractors donating their skills — as long as the help is not provided in exchange for a vote.

The experts did caution, however, against using campaign funds to benefit an individual.

“If I wrote a check to a voter, ‘Here’s $50 so you can pay your plumber and go vote for me,’ that would be a problem,” said Bradley A. Smith, a former Federal Election Commission member who now teaches at Capital University Law School in Ohio.

Zapata’s campaign told me they’ve spent about $600 in campaign funds on these outreach projects for things like cleaning supplies, truck rentals and landfill disposal fees. Pricier needs, such as hiring a plumber to inspect Ramirez’s gas line, would fall to the GoFundMe account.

Zapata has made the assistance as apolitical as possible. She mentions she’s a candidate only if someone asks.

“I tell people: ‘You don’t have to agree with me. You don’t have to like me. I want to help you, regardless,’” Zapata said.

By the end of the campaign, Zapata’s team handed out flyers offering assistance to 9,767 homes. Hundreds took them up on some form of aid, from referrals to cleanup projects, making their lives a little better.

Which is more than any politician, elected or not, has delivered for these residents in a long time.

Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or via Twitter at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/news/columns.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Grumet: Hauling trash, fixing pipes - part of plan to unseat Chip Roy