Meet The Candidates: Diana Luna For Texas House District 71
Abilene deserves better than Jodey Arrington's old staffer.
This series is called Meet The Candidates. Over the next four months, I’ll spotlight a handful of Democratic races each month, mainly in the Legislature and in Congress. These aren’t endorsements. They’re introductions, a way to understand who’s running, the districts they hope to represent, and what’s at stake for people across Texas.
Who is Diana Luna?
Diana Luna is Abilene-born and raised. When she and her family finally had enough saved to buy a house, she picked one inside AISD boundaries on purpose. She’s a product of these public schools, and she wanted her kids to be too.
She’s spent almost twenty years working in nonprofits, running programs, supervising them, auditing them, a lot of it funded by the same government dollars Austin loves to threaten and claw back. She’s seen up close what bad policy does to people. She’s been organizing locally for years, Liberal Moms of Abilene, the Taylor County Democratic Party, wherever there was work to do.
The district.
Okay, HD71 is basically just Abilene, and then a bunch of ranch lands around it. This is an older district. Almost 16% of the people here are over the age of 65, higher than the state’s average. This means there are a lot of people who have spent their lives paying into Social Security and are watching Austin figure out how to make that money stretch less every year. Over 30% of households here draw Social Security income, also well above the state average.
It’s whiter than the state, 61% Anglo compared to 39% statewide, but the Hispanic population is real and growing, a quarter of the district. Almost 38% of the voting-age population is non-Anglo.
Money is tight here. Per capita income is $7,000 lower than the state average. Nearly 15% of the district lives in poverty. Bachelor’s degree attainment sits at 25.8%, well under the state’s 33.8%. This is a working district. Retail trade, healthcare, education, and social assistance are the biggest employers, accounting for almost 28% of the workforce. Government jobs employ 16.3% of the district, above the state average, which tells you something about how many people here depend on the check Austin decides whether or not to send.
Now we have to be straight about the numbers. In 2024, Trump took HD71 with 77.1% of the vote. Harris got 21.9%. Cruz beat Allred 74.2% to 23.6%. And in the actual State House race, the one that matters most for this conversation, Republican Stan Lambert won 81% to 19% against the Democrat, who pulled just 13,678 votes district-wide.
Turnout was 62.4% in a presidential year.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you HD71 flips this cycle, because it won’t, and if I told you otherwise I’d be lying.
This is roughly a R+55 district on presidential numbers. A wave election in Texas this year might move margins five, eight, maybe ten points in the best Democratic environments we’ve seen this century. That is not a bridge from 19% to 50%. We usually don’t flip a district by 30 points in one cycle, wave or no wave, and anybody who tells a first-time candidate otherwise is setting her up to get her heart broken in November.
Here’s what a serious HD71 campaign actually does this cycle. Registering the roughly 40% of eligible non-Anglo voters who may not currently be on the rolls, because SSVR in this district is under 16% of registered voters against a Hispanic population share of 25%. That gap is the campaign. That gap is bigger than any single election.
It means running up the number from 13,678. Diana Luna doesn’t need to beat Republicans this year. She needs to double or triple the Democratic vote total from the last cycle, prove there’s a bench of volunteers and donors and infrastructure in Abilene that didn’t exist before, and make the next Democrat who runs here start from a real number.
It means talking directly to the 30% of households living on Social Security about what happens when Republicans in Austin keep starving public services those households rely on.
And it means being honest with the base you’re building that this might be a multi-cycle project.
The Republican.
Stan Lambert, the incumbent, is retiring. The Republican who has been nominated to run in his place is Jay Hardaway. And, woooo, he is really out there.
Hardaway is Jodey Arrington’s previous district director, and he’s an ultra-religious, fundamentalist nutjob. He wants to prioritize, in the Legislature, shoving his religion down our throats and forcing women to have lots of babies.
In Diana Luna’s own words.
Below are some questions I asked Luna, based on previous reader polls, along with her answers.
Q: Should higher education in Texas be free or debt-free at public institutions?
Yes, in my lifetime, higher education has gone up in cost almost 30%, while it hasn’t gotten better, and more graduates are leaving school underemployed or unemployed, if they can afford to graduate at all.
Q: Should Texas guarantee free school meals to all K–12 students, regardless of income?
Yes, I was a free lunch kid, and I know firsthand what going to school hungry feels like.
Q: Should Texas end tax breaks and regulatory loopholes for oil and gas companies, including exemptions from emissions reporting and waste disposal standards?
Yes, no billion-dollar industry should require the taxpayer to bail them out.
Q: Do you support closing or downsizing state prisons and redirecting that funding to community-based alternatives like mental health care, housing, and youth programs?
I fully support moving non-violent crime to mental health, job readiness, and youth programs. In many cases, it’s the state and community that have failed people. I believe there is a solution where the thousands of staff that currently work with these inmates don’t lose their jobs but can be retrained and skilled.
Q: Should local police be barred from enforcing federal immigration law?
Yes. I have worked in refugee resettlement, and one of the most eye-opening parts of that job was how little law enforcement knew about immigration and enforcement.
Bonus Question: How do you plan to engage and energize young and working-class voters?
I am out in my community. There’s an old saying that goes, “Why do you rob a bank? Because that’s where the money is.” So how do you engage people? You go where the people are and engage with them.
So that’s Diana Luna.
A free lunch kid who grew up to audit the programs that used to feed kids like her. A nonprofit lifer who knows exactly what happens when Austin decides a line item isn’t worth funding anymore. A woman who said no to running for office more than once before she finally said yes.
And on the other side, Jay Hardaway. A former congressional staffer turned fundamentalist true believer, running to make sure the state has more say over women’s bodies and less say over what oil and gas companies dump in the water.
Elections are about who shows up, who gets registered, who decides their vote actually means something for the first time. Every vote Luna pulls above 13,678 is a brick in a wall somebody else gets to build on. Every door she knocks on is a household that now knows a Democrat cared enough to show up in a district the party wrote off years ago.
Diana Luna isn’t asking Abilene for a miracle. She’s asking for a real number, and the dignity of being taken seriously in a district nobody bothers to visit.
That’s worth paying attention to, wave or no wave.
You can find out more about Diana Luna on her website, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
106 days until the November election!
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There’s no bottom for republicans.
She is a gem!