A 2020 Texas Congressional Race To Watch

We've seen a boatload of videos introducing first-time candidates to the voting public, but we've rarely seen one as good as this:





Walking and talking on camera ain't that easy, but Kim Olson pulls it off with skill and aplomb. Plus the biography she's sketching -- with the help of killer graphics -- is pretty impressive, especially in Texas where she's running to unseat a Republican congressman occupying a previously safe Republican seat.

District 24 includes parts of Tarrant, Dallas, and all of Denton counties north of the Dallas metropolitan agglomeration. It's suburbia, you bet, and includes thousands of students at North Texas State University.

(Won't pause now to sketch Kim Olson's biography, except to say she was in the first generation of female Air Force pilots. You can read a stripped-down biography here and also see a stunning photograph of her during her USAF heyday.)

Olson's no stranger to candidacy for public office. She ran in 2018 for Texas Secretary of Agriculture and got 3,822,137 votes, over 46% of the total, but lost to the Republican candidate. Statewide races in Texas -- especially for Democrats -- ain't no picnic, but she made a name for herself as a rising talent.

Republican Incumbent Congressman Kenny Marchant

Kenny Marchant

First elected to Congress in 2004, Marchant has mainly coasted to reelection every year since, except in 2018 when another Democratic woman came within 8,000 votes, or 47.5% of the total votes cast, of beating him. Suddenly, Kenny Marchant, a good ole Texas boy possibly past his prime, looks vulnerable. The beef against him in 2017, heading into that 2018 election, was that he was hiding from his constituents. An Indivisible group with a sizable Facebook presence was stalking him, and he didn't like it a little bit.

He's been a member of the Tea Party Caucus and calls himself a "stanch conservative." He voted repeatedly to abolish the Affordable Care Act, part of the reason the Indivisible group wants to chat.