Who Is Will Hurd Actually For?

The Republican field grew again Thursday, as former Texas Congressman Will Hurd entered the 2024 fray on a promise to restore “common sense leadership” to his party. The GOP hasn’t had much of that since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, which is presumably why Hurd kicked off his bid with an explicit call for the party to move on from the former president. “Republicans deserve better,” Hurd said in a launch video Thursday. “America deserves better.”

The questions facing Hurd: Does his entry give Republicans an actual moderate alternative to Trump? Or does it merely serve to further crowd a GOP field where candidates are already fighting for air as the former president uses up almost all of the oxygen on the right?

In theory, Hurd is just the guy the Never Trump right has been looking for: indisputably conservative but with an independent streak and little inclination to fight the culture wars Trump and Ron DeSantis so relish. He’s an ex-CIA officer in a party that has grown increasingly hostile toward federal law enforcement amid Trump’s worsening legal troubles. He’s a Black Republican from a diverse district, who stands apart from the congressional hardliners who have openly embraced racism and white supremacy. And he’s been perhaps the most consistent Trump critic of any of the Republicans currently in the 2024 field. Indeed, where Chris Christie has only recently fashioned himself as one such detractor, Hurd took high-profile stands against the former president all throughout his term—beginning with his call for Trump to drop out of the 2016 race following the Access Hollywood tape. “You can’t be afraid of Donald Trump,” Hurd told CBS Mornings Thursday. “Too many candidates in this race are afraid of Donald Trump.”

But Hurd’s record on Trump is more complicated than his moderate branding makes it seem: He aligned with the former president on 80 percent of votes, voted against his first impeachment in 2019, and said that year that he would support Trump over fellow Texan and then-presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke—with whom he embarked on a bipartisan cross-country road trip in 2017, briefly scratching a national itch for political civility—in the 2020 election. Even in leveling the kind of harsh criticism against Trump Thursday that his fellow candidates have rarely been able to muster, he ultimately framed attack in electoral terms: “If we nominate a lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump, who lost the House, the Senate, and the White House, we know Joe Biden will win again,” Hurd said in his campaign video, chastising Biden and the Democrats for doing “nothing” to solve America’s problems. The ex-lawmaker may be the most reasonable of all the Republican hopefuls—but that’s a low bar to hurdle in today’s GOP. Is he trying to build a Republican Party that “talks about the future, not the past,” as he told CBS? Or would he simply bring the party back to the days when it pushed its hardline policies with a smile rather than a sneer?