McCaul vote on Postal Service points to tight race

WASHINGTON — Is U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, running scared?

McCaul, a reliable GOP vote on domestic issues, bucked his party leaders and voted with Democrats this month on a high-profile bill that would protect the U.S. Postal Service from cost-cutting and projected slowdowns in voting by mail.

Democrats pressed the issue amid questions over plans to overhaul the Postal Service by a new postmaster general appointed by President Donald Trump and an expected deluge of mail-in ballots this fall.

“It tells me he’s nervous,” said Democratic consultant Matt Angle, director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic political action committee, of the Aug. 22 vote.

A Republican operative who has worked for McCaul in the past and spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, said of his reelection bid: “I think he’s in trouble. ... This is a real race.”

The election is a rematch of 2018 when McCaul won by 4.3% against Democrat Mike Siegel, then an attorney for the city of Austin, who quit his job and has been campaigning full time since early last year.

McCaul was one of 26 GOP members who joined all Democrats — the only other Texas Republican who voted in favor was retiring U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes — on a bill that GOP leaders “whipped,” meaning that they were not only counting the votes, they were putting pressure on Republicans to stick together and vote against it.

Asked about his vote, McCaul told the American-Statesman: “Back in May I sent a letter with my colleagues to congressional leadership and (Treasury) Secretary (Steven) Mnuchin in support of funding for the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS provides an essential service to my constituents, especially those in rural parts of my district. In fact, I received many phone calls from concerned seniors asking that I vote in favor of this piece of legislation.” Mnuchin has been a Trump administration leader on funding for government programs.

Saying the Postal Service has been neglected, McCaul said, “This pandemic has highlighted the importance of mail when so many individuals are unable or feel unsafe leaving their homes.”

McCaul was first elected in 2004 in the 10th Congressional District, which is anchored in Democratic Travis County at the northwest end and increasingly purple suburban Harris County at the southeast end, with rural Republican counties in between.

“This is the first election where McCaul has had to campaign like his job depended on it,” said Mark Jones, political science professor at Rice University.

“It is in McCaul’s best interest to distance himself somewhat from Trump and some of Trump’s more unpopular positions, such as his attacks on the USPS,” Jones said.

According to FiveThirtyEight, an independent website of opinion poll analysis and politics, McCaul has voted with Trump 95.5% of the time.

“The attack on the post office cuts through regional boundaries and ideological differences,” Angle said. “Rural Texans like their Postal Service and count on it for medications, for supplies, to stock their small businesses. Mike McCaul is already in trouble in the Travis and Harris, if he gets in trouble in the rural counties, he could go down, and he knows it.”

For his part, Siegel held a rally Aug. 18 with postal workers and Bill Moody, Branch 181 president of the National Association of Letter Carriers at Austin’s Northcross Post Office in support of the Postal Service.

Siegel told the Statesman he considers McCaul’s Postal Service vote to be tactical since the Republican-controlled Senate isn’t expected to take it up before the election.

As the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, McCaul likes to tout his bipartisan bona fides on foreign policy, working with the panel’s chairman, Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., often saying that “partisanship ends at the water’s edge.”

“Foreign policy might be McCaul’s saving grace,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, political science professor at the University of Houston. “Bipartisanship is easier to find on international issues than domestic issues, so he can pivot with authority to issues popular with his base and less polarizing for the opposition.”