South Texas Hispanic Voters: GOP Must Make Case for Support

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:

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Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

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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: