With filing deadlines just two months away, contentious 2026 races are starting to heat up. Texas’ massive 23rd congressional district—which spans from the western edge of San Antonio to the eastern edge of El Paso and includes the Big Bend—is no exception. There’s still plenty of time for others to throw their hats in the ring, but for now there’s a good chance that voters could face a rematch between incumbent Tony Gonzales, a Republican, and Santos Limon, a Democrat with family ties to Marathon.
Launching a Democratic campaign in TX-23 is an uphill battle. The region hasn’t swung for a Democrat since electing Pete Gallego of Alpine in 2012, but Limon is determined to learn from the last election cycle and move forward. In 2024, Santos Limon took home 58.5% of the votes in the Democratic primary against Lee Bausinger. In the general election, he lost to Gonzales with 37.7% of the vote. “We learned a lot last year,” he told Big Bend Sentinel.
It was a tough race on the other side of the aisle, too—Gonzales faced off against far right YouTube personality Brandon Herrera twice, eking out a win in the run-off by just 354 votes, despite out-fundraising his opponent by a factor of four. In the end, Gonzales’ close ties to law enforcement on the border may have tipped the scales, thanks to late-cycle endorsements from the National Border Patrol Council and veterans’ organizations.
Despite the tough odds, Limon is proud to be a Democrat and considers his platform common-sense and centrist. He recently hit the campaign trail hard, making 23 town hall spots over the span of a single week—including stopping to meet with local officials in Valentine, Alpine and Presidio. “We’re still focused on the same issues that we pushed on last year,” he explained.
Those goals fall into three primary categories: promoting economic growth, advocating for transportation and infrastructure improvements, and defending entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Limon feels that these issues are especially important in a diverse district like TX-23, which has both urban and rural constituents, many of whom live below the poverty line. “I’ve never seen these services so at risk—it’s really scary,” he said.
Limon’s background is in civil engineering with a particular focus on rail infrastructure and trade with Latin America. While his short-term goals focus on ensuring that families in West Texas get the support from federal services they depend on, there are some outside-the-box ideas he’d like to pursue—like a high-speed rail network emulating Mexico’s, which connects some of the most remote corners of the country with the heart of Mexico City.
Campaigning in one of the nation’s largest congressional districts isn’t easy, particularly when that district straddles two cities, a handful of National Park Service units, ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border, military facilities, and industries as varied as oil and gas and cattle importation. Limon has structured his campaign around a series of “coalitions” grouping constituents together by their area of expertise, which has helped cut through some noise. “We’ve managed to capture the attention of outside entities that see what our district and what our country needs,” he said.
TX-23 was one of the congressional districts impacted by the headline-grabbing fight state Democrats led against a redistricting scheme imposed by the Trump administration. Fort Bliss in El Paso—now home to one of the country’s largest immigrant detention centers—was briefly taken out of Veronica Escobar’s TX-16 district and added to TX-23. “It doesn’t matter how many times they redistrict the area, we still end up being the poorest, being less educated,” Limon said. “No funding for roads, no funding for schools. What difference does it make? We still end up being left out.”
Limon felt that the fight over redistricting was indicative of larger-scale concerns he had about the Trump administration, which in his opinion has little regard for the law of the land. “I’ve never seen our Constitution trampled the way [the Trump administration] is doing right now,” he said.
The filing deadline for the 2026 congressional primaries in Texas is December 8. For more information, visit the Texas secretary of state’s website: sos.state.tx.us/elections/candidates/guide/2026/demorrep2026.shtml.