Carter Retains 31st District Seat In Narrowly Defeating Hegar

ROUND ROCK, TEXAS — Longtime incumbent John Carter narrowly won the race to represent the Texas 31st District on Tuesday, besting Democratic challenger MJ Hegar by roughly 4,000 votes.

Hegar, a U.S. Air Force combat veteran who served in the Afghanistan war, proved a formidable rival in cming the closest any Democrat challenger has ever come to unseating the eight-term incumbent.

“I am so proud of the campaign we built," Hegar said in an emailed statement. "I am proud of the voters we registered who voted for the first time. I am proud of the way we rose above partisanship and inspired people from both sides of the aisle to find places we could agree. While things didn’t go as we hoped, we gave it our all and left nothing on the field. We ran a clean and honest campaign, and I have no regrets."

A Purple Heart combat veteran and recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross medal, Hegar captivated the nation for months while waging a formidable campaign to unseat an eight term GOP incumbent in a historically deep red district. Her political ad titled "Doors" — chronicling the many doors for which she's had to fight passage — became a viral sensation.

"The lesson I learned when I went to DC to open jobs for women in the military, was that there isn’t a finish line or end point," Hegar said. "The victory of this election is that we started at my kitchen table with a couple of friends and we are ending here, with tens of thousands of supporters from all backgrounds and walks of life."

In the final tally, Carter garnered 50.7 percent of the vote (143,330 ballots) to Hegar's 47.6 percent (134,675 votes). Libertarian candidate Jason Hope got 1.7 percent of the vote, or 4,936 votes.

From earlier:

ROUND ROCK, TEXAS — In her bid to represent the Texas 31st district, Democrat MJ Hegar produced one of the most memorable political ads in recent memory, a production titled "Doors" that made a viral splash while putting her in the national spotlight.

"This is a story about doors," she narrates. "A lot of them. And that's me, MJ Hegar, an Air Force combat veteran and a mom," she adds as the camera trains on her in a peek at her home life. The video recounts how she was on a rescue mission in Afghanistan as a combat search-and-rescue pilot when the aircraft came under gunfire, the door to the chopper shown to illustrate.

Other portals are referenced in the video: The glass door through which her abusive father threw her mom before the family matriarch left to raise her children alone; the door to the Air Force recruitment office where she launched her military career; the door to the legislative office of John Carter, the Republican she now seeks to unseat after she said he was not receptive to her pleas to allow women in ground combat.

"One of those closed doors was my congressman, Tea Party Republican John Carter," Hegar says in the video. "Apparently, being his constituent and a veteran wasn't enough to get a meeting. I guess I also needed to be a donor. So now, i'm running against him, taking on a system that cares more about camp donors and pol parties than protecting our country. Congressman Carter hasn't had a tough race his entire career. So we'll show him tough. Then, we'll show him the door," she vows as the video ends.

It's a poetically mesmerizing appeal to voters, a synopsis of a singular life distinguished by overcoming challenges while illustrating the highest ideals of a democracy. Like legions, creative wunderkind Lin Manuel Miranda became a Hegar fan by virtue of the memorable 3-minute video: “MJ, you made the best political ad anyone’s ever seen,” the playwright of the celebrated "Hamilton" play tweeted. “I should be asking YOU for help!”

Yet for all the video's effectiveness, her bid to unseat Carter is still an uphill climb given the staunchly conservative dynamics of the region she seeks to represent. The 31st Congressional District extends across two counties — all of suburban Williamson County and most of Bell County, a largely rural area encompassing cities along Interstate 35, farming communities and the Fort Hood military base. The population centers are in Temple, Killeen, and Austin's suburbs.

It's Republican country, environs from where the 77-year-old U.S. Rep. Carter hasn’t won a race by fewer than 20 points in a decade. In the general election on Nov. 8, 2016, Carter won his eighth term in Congress. With 166,060 votes cast, he vanquished Democratic challenger Mike Clark and Libertarian Scott Ballard, who got 34.5 percent and 5.2 percent of the votes, respectively.

But Carter's never faced a challenger like Hegar, who not only has a way with words but possesses a fundraising prowess to boot, all while refusing corporate PAC money.

Yet the door to the 31st congressional district may be the hardest one to swing ajar. The New York Times conducted a poll of voters, putting the margin at 53 percent to 38 percent in Carter's favor. But the self-touted, real time political polling the Times has been conducted has had limited outreach across the board, as many political pundits have observed.

While nifty, the Times' polls haven't successfully reached voters to discuss their preferences across the board — including this local contest: "We made 32,002 calls, and 490 people spoke to us," Times researchers write on the polling site.

That's hardly a representation among voters. So who knows? Maybe the door to district representation not as tightly shut as once believed.

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