South Texas on the Political Brink

McAllen, Texas — Over the course of the past few years, South Texas has emerged as one of the central battlegrounds of U.S. politics. Here in the Rio Grande Valley, a 91.5 percent Latino region that traditionally backed Democrats by overwhelming margins, the political winds appear to be blowing in the GOP’s favor. While the RGV still backed Joe Biden over Donald Trump in large numbers in the 2020 presidential election, all four counties in the region shifted toward Republicans by double-digit margins relative to 2016. The next year, McAllen, an 85 percent Latino city perched at the southern tip of the state, elected its first Republican mayor in 24 years. And this June, the Mexican-born Mayra Flores delivered Republicans an upset seven-and-a-half-point victory in the 84.5 percent Latino 34th congressional district, which covers the easternmost part of the Texas border. (The district’s sole representative since its creation in 2013, a Democrat, carried the same electorate by more than 13 and a half points in 2020.)

Questions remain, however, about just how far the GOP’s inroads can go with Hispanics — both in South Texas and nationwide. Republicans have been predicting a Latino realignment toward the GOP for decades — Ronald Reagan famously declared that “Latinos are Republicans. They just don’t know it yet.” George W. Bush made concerted overtures to Hispanic voters, campaigning in Spanish and promising a kinder, gentler approach to immigration than the one preferred by his party’s predominantly white base. By the late 1990s, this “Rainbow Republican” approach was being presented as an explicit repudiation of the old so-called “Southern Strategy” that, in the words of Bush strategist Karl Rove, “past GOP candidates had employed in a calculated bid to polarize the electorate and put together a predominantly white majority.” “This is a very different party from the party that sits down on Labor Day and cedes the black vote and cedes the Hispanic vote, and tries to drive its percentage of the white vote over 70 percent to win an election,” Republican consultant Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, told the Washington Post in 2000. That same year, in a speech on the effects of mass immigration and the growing Hispanic share of the population, Bush declared:

America has one national creed, but many accents. We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We’re a major source of Latin music, journalism, and culture.

Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago, or West New York, New Jersey, and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende.

For years our nation has debated this change — some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.

But in spite of these efforts, the GOP’s performance with the voter bloc, at least in presidential elections, has stubbornly hovered at about a third. Thus far, its share of potential Latino Republicans has appeared to max out at around 40 percent: Richard Nixon was estimated to have carried that share of Latinos in 1972, the first presidential election year that the “Latino” designation appeared on the U.S. Census. (Nixon strategists referred to the demographic as “the Spanish Speaking community” in internal memos.) Bush’s performance with Hispanics in 2004 was estimated to be as high as 44 percent, but the exit polls that year are highly contested, and the calculation of Bush’s share of Latino voters ranged from the high of 44 to as low as 33 percent. Donald Trump’s headway with the voter bloc in 2020, reported to be about ten points higher than his 2016 performance of 28 percent, was a headlines-generating improvement on the GOP’s performance since 2004 — John McCain carried 31 percent of the Latino vote in 2008, and Mitt Romney won just 27 percent in 2012 — but still sat below his party’s historic 40-percent-or-so ceiling.

But if you drill down below the level of the national vote, the story becomes more interesting. The most notable thing about Trump’s performance in 2020 is that his gains were heavily concentrated in certain regions of the country. Hispanics — unlike, say, black voters, who almost exclusively back Democrats by margins of 85 to 95 percent — are not anywhere close to a political monolith: The Latino vote in California sits well to the left of the Latino vote in states such as Florida and Texas. Florida’s largest county, the 68 percent Hispanic Miami-Dade, shifted toward Trump by 22 points from 2016 to 2020. (And in 2021, Miami reelected its Republican mayor, Francis Suarez — who first won the office in 2017 — to the tune of a landslide 78 percent.) In South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley’s 96.3 percent Hispanic Starr County shifted toward Trump by a jaw-dropping 55 points.

This shift is often explained by the fact that Latinos, at least in areas such as South Texas, are far more conservative than the national Democratic Party. “Historically, South Texas has been Democrat for 100 years or more,” Senator Ted Cruz told me at a Republican rally in Laredo last weekend. “That being said, if you look at the communities in South Texas — the communities here are overwhelmingly Hispanic, and the Hispanic community in Texas has always been conservative.” The challenge, for Republicans, is to break the traditional partisan loyalty to the Democratic Party in areas like these, which is often far more powerful than the relatively conservative ideological and religious tendencies that one sees in the polling data. “I think there’s a lot of cultural history of families that for generations had been Democrats,” Cruz said. Many of the congressional districts here have “not had a Republican in over 100 years. I do think those cultural connections and family history were strong.”

Osvaldo De Leon, a volunteer at the rally who became a U.S. citizen last month, echoes the fierce patriotism that I hear from Latinos across the region: “I’m no longer Mexican — I’m an American, and I don’t want to be labeled as a Mexican American,” he tells me. “When I was in front of the federal judge, pledging my allegiance to this country, it made me really happy.” He is the first member of his family to become an American. His father is a truck driver and “a big-time Trump supporter — he liked the fact that he was vocal about the issues.” His mother, who “also leans conservative Republican,” is a nurse. “Obviously they cannot vote” yet, he says, but when they become fully naturalized citizens, “obviously, they’re gonna be voting red. . . . We love Laredo; we love this country.”

But De Leon also seems exasperated by his community’s persistent Democratic loyalties. “The Democratic Party here is very, very strong, since the beginning of Webb County,” where Laredo is located. “It’s the same families, it’s the same people. And that’s why we don’t have a change — it’s very difficult.” The average voter doesn’t “pay attention — they don’t know, [or have a] lack of English.” Cindy Vazquez, a Hispanic woman at the rally who’s running for a local school-board seat, cites her conversations with her mother as an example. “She’s never been involved in politics.” On Trump, “she’s like, ‘he’s racist.’ And I’m like, ‘did you know that a girl can have a baby for the nine months, it’s born, and you can kill it?’ She’s like, ‘no, that’s murder.’ No, that’s New York.”

The picture that’s emerged from my time in South Texas is one of a region on the political brink: Latinos in communities like this one could move right, but a lot more Republican legwork is necessary. That, too, is reflected in the most recent polling, which shows that the Democratic Party’s hold on Latinos nationwide is slipping — down 21 points from ten years ago, according to a Monday NBC/Telemundo poll — but the GOP’s numbers remain in the traditional mid-30s. More of these voters may be up for grabs, but Republicans still need to make their case.