THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Summer 2018 55 TheCoastalBend.com What do you plan to do to give yourself a chance to reverse the 22% loss to Rep. Cloud in the special election and win in November? My votes doubled from the runoff to the special [election]. We’re doing a very aggressive Get Out the Vote plan. Cloud won it because the other two Democrats were on the ballot, but more Democrats voted in Nueces County than Re- publicans. We know that Cloud is not for the working people. In Nueces County, Cloud won 8,004 votes in the spe- cial election, with 7,787 for Holguin. Combined with 748 votes for fellow Republican Bech Bruun, total GOP votes amounted to 8,752. A total of four Democrats were on the ballot, garnering 9,394 votes, 642 more than Re- publicans. However, in Victoria County, the second most populous in the district, Cloud beat Holguin by 3,370, and the remaining 11 counties are rural, favoring Cloud. We know that it’s an uphill battle, but I’ve been used to uphill battles my whole life, so it’s not anything that I’m intimidated by. Are there Democrats out there whom you can moti- vate to the polls, who wouldn’t normally vote in the midterms? The special was the third election this year. The silver lining with the special is that we get a do- over in November. Most people, they lose their election and they have no opportunity to make that up. Who do you think is out there for you who may not even be registered to vote yet? We are doing a big push with Hispanic and young voters. Young voters could be the people who can change this. The Millen- nial generation, which I am part of, is now the largest generation, but they have the lowest voter turnout. It’s about translating what’s going on in the country with something that motivates them. My voters who came out on June 30th were young, they were progressive, they’re newly engaged. What is motivating them this year? What’s going on at the national level, what’s go- ing on socially. Some of the biggest civil rights move- ments are being done by young people. If you’re 21 and in college, Social Security is not going to be the hottest topic that you want to care about, but to see moms sep- arated from their kids at the border tugs at the heart- strings and they see that this is not right. Would the one-word answer be Trump? He would be part of it. He is leading young people to get out to vote because of what he’s doing. It seems that Donald Trump is the first president of either party to motivate such large protests. For some reason, no one wants to talk about the president and I’m trying to figure that out. It’s not that we don’t want to talk about the president, I’m not afraid to denounce him, but running an anti- Trump campaign is sort of the underbelly as to what are the issues that will combat Trump. I’m not running against Donald Trump. I’m running against what he stands for, and that’s what Michael Cloud stands for. Young people have a very different perspective of what they’re up against compared to 35- to 45-year-olds. College kids and early 20’s are not keeping up with the ACA and tax reform and all that. They see what’s hap- pening on social media, and most of what they’re see- ing is about Trump. President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a news conference during their July 16 summit in Finland, in which Trump accepted as equal U.S. intel- ligence assessments that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, and Putin’s denials. President Trump’s comment, “I don’t know why it would be,” re- ferring to the prospect of Russian meddling, drew such criticism that the White House retracted it the next day, claiming that the president mis-spoke. Do you think that Putin has something on Trump that is motivating his behavior? It would seem so. I’m not a huge conspiracy theorist, but something’s going on that doesn’t add up. One of the local issues mentioned on your website concerns the privatization of federal jobs at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi and at the Corpus Christi Army Depot (the region’s largest employer). Please explain. I support keeping those jobs federal. Last year or the year before, Farenthold voted against keeping those jobs federal. BRACC [Base Realignment and Clo- sure Commission] is coming up within the next few years and I’m concerned that our base is vulnerable… we need to make sure that we have a strong congress- man in there to make sure it stays open.