Former Rep. Will Hurd might launch a 2024 GOP presidential campaign. He's still waiting to see if his party agrees that 'we're better together.'

• Former GOP Rep. Will Hurd, a Trump critic, is considering running for president in 2024.
• He traveled to Iowa to speak to a group of evangelical voters alongside other GOP 2024 candidates.

CLIVE, Iowa — Mulling a 2024 presidential campaign based on appealing to the moderate middle, former Rep. Will Hurd spent Saturday speaking to a group of the Republican Party's most orthodox religious conservatives.

"It takes a village to win, right?" the former Texas congressman told Insider in an interview before his address to the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition's Annual Spring Kick-off. "I'm here to see if Iowa agrees that we're better together."

The annual gathering, long a magnet for Republican presidential candidates seeking to court the party's evangelical right, included appearances by several declared and potential candidates for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, including former President Donald Trump.

Hurd, in Iowa for the first time, spoke to the crowd near the beginning of the event between appearances by former Vice President Mike Pence and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

And in contrast to several of the other speakers, many of which spoke in ominous tones about transgender issues and critiques of the "woke" left, Hurd led with an upbeat message largely free of culture war touchpoints.

"If there's one thing you need to know about me," he told the crowd: "I think America is the greatest country on Earth, and we're better together."

Hurd, who served as an overseas CIA officer before he first ran for Congress in 2015, was known during his three terms representing a Texas border district for being a bipartisan deal-maker and a not-infrequent Trump critic.

He was also the only Black Republican serving in the House at the time, and on Saturday, he spoke about his unique identity before an almost entirely white audience.

"It was not in vogue to be an interracial couple in South Texas in 1971," he told attendees of his parents.

Since Hurd retired at the beginning of 2021, he's become an even harsher critic of his own party, and he released a book last year calling for a total overhaul of American politics.

But the structure of American politics has yet to fundamentally transform, and so Hurd — whose official line on whether or not he's running for president is that he wants to "evaluate potential opportunities" — found himself on Saturday working to appeal to the party's activist base by talking up the need for his party to win more elections.

"We've lost 7 of the last 8 popular elections," he told attendees. "We lost the House in 2018. We lost the Senate and the White House in 2020. We did not take the House back with a big enough margin as what we should have [in 2022]."

Sharing a stage with Iowa Attorney General Brenda Bird and State GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann, Hurd faced questions that hinted at cultural issues currently animating his party — even as he managed to avoid getting thrown off-message.

Asked about parents' role in education, a topic that typically elicits discussion about how American history deals with race, Hurd spoke about the benefits that charter schools could have for "Black and brown kids."

He was then asked about religious freedom, a topic that Pence had, moments before, tied to "radical gender ideology" and children undergoing gender transitions.

Hurd instead went on a tangent about his time as a CIA officer in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, where he said he saw people "fighting for that religious liberty that we have here in the United States." He also told attendees that he wanted churches and synagogues to take a larger role in combatting homelessness.

'An opportunity to capture the spirit of 1980'

In an interview with Insider and in his address to attendees in Clive, Hurd spoke about an array of issues that he argued have received insufficient attention from policymakers, such as competition with China and the decline of the use of the dollar in global currency exchanges.

"We have four years," he told Insider, "before we could potentially get surpassed by the Chinese government as a global superpower."

"This is a real, this is a real conflict," he continued. "And we have to be prepared for that."

On abortion, Hurd told Insider it "probably makes sense" to institute a nationwide ban after 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. But he also thinks conservatives need to be talking about the issue more holistically.

"We also need to be talking about maternal health, we need to be talking about neonatal health," he said.

Hurd says that he would not support Trump if he was the nominee in 2024, noting that he voted for Evan McMullin in 2016 and wrote in former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in 2020.

He also said that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who Hurd served alongside in the House, has been a "successful governor" but suggested that DeSantis could struggle to attract moderates and independents, as Hurd hopes to.

"I think that in 2024, we have an opportunity to capture the spirit of 1980," said Hurd, referring to the election in which Ronald Reagan all but a handful of states. "We're gonna need to have candidates that have the ability to appeal, and that talk about a message of 'we're better together.'"

As he's explored a potential presidential campaign, Hurd has hired — through his super PAC — a group of consultants including Sarah Matthews, the former deputy press secretary in the Trump White House who testified before the January 6 committee about the former president's resistance to calling off the violence on the day of the Capitol riot.

Still, it remains unclear whether GOP voters will buy what Hurd is selling.

Though Hurd was long able to win a swing district on the US-Mexico border through governing as a moderate, the Republican Party remains dominated by not just Trump, but by an array of culture war issues that Hurd is so far unwilling to lean into.

His idea for solving that quandary, so far, seems to be encouraging less ideologically-driven voters like himself to get more involved in politics, betting that they make up a majority of voters.

In an 800-word blog post posted the day after the 2022 midterm elections, Hurd encouraged Americans who were repelled by both parties to become more involved in primary elections, which are typically dominated by a small group of highly-engaged, ideologically-driven voters.

"Whether you're in a ruby-red town, or a deep-blue city, people care about the same issues," he said to polite applause during his address.