{"id":155473,"date":"2026-02-07T23:22:18","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T23:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/155473\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T23:22:18","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T23:22:18","slug":"matt-smith-campaigning-for-district-19-republican-nomination-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/155473\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Smith campaigning for District 19 Republican nomination"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"text | article-text\">LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) &#8211; Matt Smith is one of the seven men running in the Republican primary to represent District 19 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes Lubbock and Abilene. <\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">VOTING INFO: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kcbd.com\/2025\/12\/08\/deadline-approaching-lubbock-candidates-filing-public-office\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.kcbd.com\/2025\/12\/08\/deadline-approaching-lubbock-candidates-filing-public-office\/\" target=\"_blank\">List of candidates, voting information for March 3rd Joint Primary<\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Smith is an Abilene native, the owner of \u201cFat Matt Roofing\u201d and also a pastor.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">He is campaigning to bring what he calls biblical wisdom, accountability and strong West Texas values to America\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Smith also calls himself an outsider. He says he believes he can bring a fresh perspective, reflective of our area, to a Congress filled with career politicians. <\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">&#8220;We keep sending people to D.C. or to Austin that are kind of raised up through the traditional political model,&#8221; Smith said. \u201cIt\u2019s time that we send outsiders that realize we can\u2019t keep doing the same things. That\u2019s insane. <\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">\u201cLet\u2019s send people that are willing to make the hard cuts and hard decisions and say no, we can\u2019t keep spending our kids\u2019 future.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Also running in the Republican primary are James Barbee, Jason Corley, Abraham Enriquez, Donald May, Tom Sell and Ryan Zink. <\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Kyle Rable is unopposed in the Democratic primary. He will face the winner of the Republican contest in November.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Early voting begins Feb. 17, and the primary election is March 3.<\/p>\n<p class=\"copyright |\">Copyright 2026 KCBD. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) &#8211; Matt Smith is one of the seven men running in the Republican primary to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[6040,2671,64038,409,168,170,169,64037,37621],"class_list":["post-155473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lubbock","tag-abilene","tag-congress","tag-district-19","tag-election","tag-lubbock","tag-lubbock-headlines","tag-lubbock-news","tag-matt-smith","tag-republican-primary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}