SAN ANTONIO — Inside a crowded Denny’s along a busy commercial strip, Democratic activists listened intently as Katy Padilla Stout mapped out her plan to flip a sprawling Texas district that has shaded bright red in recent elections. 

Padilla Stout, a teacher turned child welfare lawyer, is making her first run for elective office. She was initially considered a steep underdog, given that Donald Trump would have carried the newly redrawn majority-Latino 23rd District by 15 points in 2024.

However, Democrats looking to wrest control of the House see a path to an unlikely upset in this under-the-radar race. A Republican nominee with a history of inflammatory social media posts, a deeply unpopular president and a restive Hispanic voter base could turn a once-safe GOP seat into a battleground if a blue wave builds.

Padilla Stout expressed confidence that she can beat the odds. “I am spending my time with the people,” she told her supporters here on a recent Friday, “not trying to convince other people from the outside that this is a competitive seat because I know this is a competitive seat.”

The race between Padilla Stout and Republican Brandon Herrera, a gun influencer and “Second Amendment absolutist,” is one of several open seats deep in Trump territory that have the potential to tighten in the waning weeks of the midterm campaign cycle.

In Kentucky’s 6th District, former federal prosecutor and Navy veteran Zach Dembo is aiming to thwart physician and former state Sen. Ralph Alvarado’s plan to succeed fellow Republican Andy Barr, who is running for Senate. Trump carried the Lexington-centered district by 15 points in 2024.

In Nevada’s 2nd District, which stretches across a large swath of the state’s northern high desert, former state Assembly Majority Leader Teresa Benitez-Thompson is battling Republican Air Force veteran David Flippo. Trump took the district by 14 points.

And in South Carolina’s 1st District, Democrat Nancy Lacore, a Navy veteran, is vying with Charleston County Councilmember Jenny Costa Honeycutt to succeed GOP Rep. Nancy Mace in a Lowcountry seat that Trump won by 13 points.

The Trump-backed Republicans in each of those races remain heavy favorites, and GOP strategists scoff at the notion that the seats are competitive, noting their red underpinnings and the party’s enormous fundraising advantage. 

“National Democrats can keep throwing darts at the map and calling wherever they land a battleground, but nobody is buying it,’’ Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement. 

He dismissed Democrats’ focus on expanding the House map as a “distraction.”

“House Republicans run laps around them on the real battlefield, in the money race, and on the issues that matter to voters,’’ Marinella said.

But Democrats insist they can win at least some of these long-shot races. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has included them in its “Districts in play” program, which provides additional support to competitive candidates, though only the Kentucky and South Carolina races have so far merited slots on the “Red to Blue” initiative for top recruits. (On Tuesday, the DCCC announced it was rolling out an ad campaign in 35 districts, including Kentucky’s 6th.)

“Democrats are on offense, Republicans are running scared — even in deep red territory — and our expansive map reflects it,’’ DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene of Washington said in an email. 

Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the races in Texas, Nevada, South Carolina and Kentucky as Likely Republican, a notch below Solid, reflecting their reach status for Democrats.

But the fact that they are in the conversation at all is a sign of the steep challenges facing the GOP this year, Gonzales said.

“Republicans may have all sorts of excuses about why those seats are competitive now, but the bottom line is that if the president were more popular, we wouldn’t be talking about any of them,” he said. 

An urge to run

Padilla Stout said she hadn’t intended to run for the seat. But when rumors surfaced last year that her congressman, Republican Tony Gonzales, had been involved in an inappropriate relationship with a staffer who later died by suicide, she reached out to friends in Democratic politics and urged them to recruit someone to take him on.

“They were like, ‘OK, we’ll get right on that.’ But this race was not on anybody’s list,’’ she said in an interview. “And I just kept feeling this urgency that somebody had to do something.”

That sense of urgency was heightened by presence on the ballot of Herrera, who came within 354 votes of beating Gonzales in a 2024 primary runoff and became the de facto nominee this year after the sex scandal forced the incumbent to drop out of the race and resign from Congress.

National Republicans were initially wary of Herrera, who is known as ”The AK Guy” on social media. His YouTube archive contained a trove of material denigrating women, shooting Nazi-era weapons and making crude jokes, as CNN’s KFile recently reported. 

But the party has since united behind him: Speaker Mike Johnson has traveled to the district to campaign alongside Herrera.

The 23rd District is the largest in Texas, running from San Antonio to El Paso as it brushes along the U.S.-Mexico border. It includes Uvalde, the site of a 2022 school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers, as well as Big Bend National Park, where the Trump administration has proposed a controversial border construction project.

Padilla Stout is hoping to harness bipartisan anger over the project, along with voters’ aversion to Herrera’s more incendiary remarks.

“When we talk to voters, especially female voters, they are just incredibly shocked,” Padilla Stout said. “And Latino men are very family-centered, and they revere women. … In our culture, we’re taught that the mother is the matriarch of that family.’’

Sara Aranda, 65, was among the group of Democratic loyalists who came to Denny’s to hear from Padilla Stout. After Gonzales’ scandal and Herrera’s online trail of offensive comments, Padilla Stout is “just so normal,’’ Aranda said. 

But Herrera’s supporters have taken a page from the Trump playbook and have sought to portray Padilla Stout, who recently held a rally with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, as a left-wing Democrat whose values are out-of-step with district voters.

“We are letting voters in the district know just how crazy Katy Padilla Stout actually is,’’ Allison Weisenberger, executive director of the Freedom Caucus Fund, said in a text message.

The group has spent close to $1 million so far in support of Herrera. And a super PAC funded by Trump’s MAGA Inc. is also spending on Herrera’s behalf. 

“Republicans have the candidates, the resources, and the momentum in Texas. While Democrats have nonsensical talking points, we have a plan to win,” NRCC spokesman Christian Martinez said in a text message.

Padilla Stout, whom Herrera outraised by more than 4-to-1 through June, said she’s undaunted by the GOP’s financial advantage.

“We just have so much money that has just flowed into politics,” she told the crowd at Denny’s. “The only thing that can combat that is relationships, outreach, and people organizing, because organized people over organized money wins every single time.”