The Texas Republican Asking His Party to Just Stop

Will Hurd is the kind of politician who loves to find the middle ground. He spent six years as a Republican congressman from one of the most competitive districts in the country, a sprawling expanse that traces the southwest border of Texas along the Rio Grande. He’s got the jocular manner of a student-body president—which he was, at Texas A&M—and styles himself as a wonkish policy guy. “You said the magic word,” he told me cheerfully when I called him up recently. “I love complicated. I love nuance.”

Middle ground is hard to find in the Republican Party these days, though. Before he left Congress following the 2020 election, Hurd was the only Black GOP member of the House. (Two Black men are part of this year’s freshman Republican class.)He was consistently as a relatively bipartisan member of Congress. Many of his former constituents are Latino voters, whom the Republican Party is focused on . Theoretically, Hurd is exactly the kind of politician Republicans should want in office. And yet he spent quite a bit of time over the past four years pushing back against the leaders of . During his last two years in office, with Donald Trump. The most prominent young figures in the GOP are not moderates like Hurd, but vocal firebrands such as freshman Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and freshman Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. “We have some serious, generationally defining challenges that we have to address, and these politics are getting in the way of having real discourse,” Hurd said. “That’s where I get frustrated.”