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REPUBLICANS HAVE WON SOUTH TEXAS LATINOS. DOES THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
HAVE A PATH BACK?  
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Jack Herrera
November 8, 2024
Texas Monthly
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_ The shift toward Donald Trump in the Rio Grande Valley in 2020 grew
into a sweep for the GOP in many border counties on Tuesday. Could the
path back be making voters here feel welcome again—not just as
Latinos but as working people? _

,

 

The oldest woman in Texas, Elizabeth Francis, died at age 115 in
Houston on October 24. She was one of the final people in the state
who was alive the last time Webb County, home to Laredo, voted for a
Republican for president—that is, until the country voted for Donald
Trump, nearly two weeks after Francis died.

On Tuesday, Trump became the first GOP presidential candidate since
William Howard Taft in 1912 to win Webb. It’s perhaps the most
impressive jewel Trump has collected in his stunning crusade through
what was once deep blue South Texas. Webb’s population is more than
95 percent Latino, and, like other Mexican American counties across
the region, it shifted hard right in the 2020 election. Trump almost
quadrupled his turnout that year relative to 2016, but the
Democrats’ advantage was strong enough that the party still managed
to beat him handily, sending Biden 61 percent of the vote. 

This year Trump won with 51 percent, flipping Webb and almost every
other heavily Latino border county in Texas. Hidalgo County, home of
McAllen, which Hillary Clinton once carried with 69 percent of the
vote, went to Trump with 51 percent; Cameron County, home to
Brownsville, gave Clinton 65 percent of the votes in 2016 and Trump
52.5 percent this year. 

Maybe it should be less shocking this time around, given how far right
South Texas moved four years ago. But it’s still hard to look at all
the red on the Texas map and not feel disoriented. Democrats once
described the Rio Grande Valley as their blue wall in the state.
Despite three decades of losses in statewide elections, party leaders
kept saying they didn’t need to change their policy positions or
messaging or candidate recruitment; all they needed to do was wait for
the growing Latino population to deliver them a majority that would
finally flip the state. That dream is dead. All five counties in the
RGV went for Trump. In 2020, Trump’s gains here stunned the entire
country, including local Democrats; this time, the party knew it was
coming but failed to stop it.  

A couple of days after election night in 2020, I went to Laredo to
find out what was happening. I ended up driving down the length of the
Rio Grande, following a route my grandfather used to take during his
childhood when it stormed and the river jumped its banks, and he and
his mother would go try to salvage chickens and goats from the
floodwater. Between big cities such as Laredo and McAllen, a rural
expanse of thornbush spreads out, dotted with agricultural towns. The
landscape looks and feels much like the most Republican parts of the
state. In November 2020 I saw dozens of MAGA flags and Trump signs. 

Sixty miles south in Zapata County, which Trump had managed to flip
red, I knocked on each door I saw decked out in Trump
paraphernalia—there were plenty of them. At one house, Yvonne
Trappe, a willowy grandmother with a warm smile, invited me to sit on
her porch, and we talked about how she and other Mexican Americans in
South Texas see themselves and what the Democrats had missed. 

Trappe said Zapata felt as culturally conservative as any other rural
Texas county. The Democrats had assumed their multicultural
message—2020 was the peak year for identity politics in the
party—would turn out Latinos, especially with the bigotry-spewing
Trump on the other side. The Democrats had blasted a slogan in South
Texas communities that year: “_Todos con Biden_”
​​(“Everyone With Biden”). Trappe didn’t feel addressed by
that sort of messaging focused on immigrants and people of
color. “I see myself just as an American,” she told me
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She had lived in Zapata her whole life. “Growing up, I never knew
that Hispanics were another race, that we were brown. Everybody just
put white [on the census forms]—not that it matters. Our culture is
one thing, but we were just Americans.”

When I talked to Zapata Democrats after the 2020 election, they were
mortified by the results. They spoke about all they planned to do to
reassert their dominance, including renewing door-knocking and voter
education efforts. The 2020 election, they assured me, would look like
a fluke. Ediel Bernál, a teacher in the county, was already
reorganizing the Zapata Democratic Party, and he gave me his
postmortem: Many of the men in Zapata work in the oil fields, and he
thought they’d been afraid that Biden’s embrace of renewable
energy might cost them their jobs. But the main point he made was
this: “Ultimately, I do not credit the Zapata Republicans or fault
the Zapata Democratic Party for what happened,” he said. “Biden,
Harris, and other state Democrats [outside of the RGV] did not do
enough to get the Latino vote in our area.”  

This year, the Harris campaign looked at the map, saw Republicans
outflanking them in South Texas, and made a fateful decision to
retreat. Harris and her advisers saw they had little chance of winning
electoral votes in Texas and sent troops and treasure to the seven
swing states. From the early precinct-level data we have so far, it
seems that Latinos in those places—namely Arizona, Nevada, and
Pennsylvania—shifted only a few points toward Trump. Meanwhile,
Latinos in Florida and Texas, where Harris did not put up a fight,
shifted massively toward the GOP.

Indeed, in Texas, we have some evidence that when Democrats fight for
Latino votes, they can still win them—but barely and with nothing
close to the margins they once enjoyed. Democratic Congressman Colin
Allred challenged Senator Ted Cruz this year, and, unlike Harris, he
spent hundreds of millions in Texas. That investment helped him earn
wins in the largest border counties, including Webb, which he carried
with 53 percent of the vote. Those results still should discourage
Democrats. Beto O’Rourke won Webb with 71 percent of the vote when
he challenged Cruz in 2018. 

The Democratic advantage slipped elsewhere too. Webb County’s
congressman, Henry Cuellar—who awaits trial on federal charges of
bribery and corruption—managed to retain his seat. But his margin of
victory dropped from nineteen percentage points in 2020 to five points
this year in a race that drew little attention or money from national
Republicans. 

Along the Gulf Coast, where Texas’s Thirty-Fourth Congressional
District stretches up from the border, incumbent Democratic
Congressman Vicente Gonzalez saw his margins dwindle too. He managed
to hold off a ferocious and well-funded challenge from Mayra Flores, a
local respiratory nurse, former congresswoman, and ever-more-famous
right-wing influencer. But he won only 51 percent of the vote. During
the latest round of redistricting, in 2021, Republicans packed
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voters into the Thirty-Fourth to give Republicans the upper hand in a
district next door. If Gonzalez’s seat had existed under its current
lines in 2020, Biden would’ve carried the district with a sixteen
percentage point lead. Normally, districts like that don’t receive
attention from the national parties. Instead, Democrats had to spend
more than $2.8 million defending Gonzalez; Flores raised more than
$5.9 million from national Republicans who correctly assessed him as
vulnerable. 

Democrats’ failure in South Texas was so profound that it finally
forced the retirement of state Democratic chairman Gilberto Hinojosa.
Once the top elected official in Cameron County, Hinojosa kept his job
as Texas’s top Democrat through twelve years of ever-multiplying
losses in part because of the hope that he could deliver Latino
voters. Instead, he retired days after Cameron County went red. It was
an admission that Democratic messaging that failed over the past
decade will not work in the next one either. 

POLITICIANS, PROFESSORS, AND REPORTERS—myself among them—tried to
understand why South Texas shifted so far toward Trump in 2020. A host
of explanations are particular to the scrublands of the border. Many
Latinos there work in the oil industry and fear the Democrats’
embrace of wind and solar energy. Many are employed by the Border
Patrol and other law-enforcement agencies and remember that not long
ago, many Democrats were calling to defund the police. Many own
firearms for hunting or self-defense and oppose gun control. Local
Democrats, in power for so long, have gotten sclerotic and, at their
worst, corrupt. 

Residents here are also quite socially conservative. South Texas is a
place where churches—Catholic and increasingly evangelical—swell
and overflow on Sundays. Many bedrooms have a Bible on the nightstand
and a pistol under the pillow. On paper, the only thing that made the
region look like a Democratic turf was all the Mexican Americans; some
older South Texans will never vote for Republicans because of that
party’s long association with xenophobia and racism. But identity is
a fluid, complex matter. Many Mexicans here associate with a
conservative version of Tejano identity, one that rejects the labels
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immigrant or person of color. Instead, they identify with the early
Spaniards who settled farms in the eighteenth century along what we
now know as the Rio Grande.

All those factors play a role in Republicans’ stunning victory here
in 2024. But as it’s become clear that Latinos nationwide have also
moved toward Trump, one theory has risen above the others. It’s one
I heard confidently offered by Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz this
week. In 2020, De La Cruz, a McAllen-based insurance agent, ran a
long-shot campaign for Congress as a Republican and came close enough
to winning that the national party threw money behind her in 2022.
That year she narrowly won the Valley seat adjacent to Gonzalez’s
that Republicans had redistricted to make more favorable to them. And
on Tuesday she won her reelection with a dominant fourteen percentage
point margin. 

De La Cruz has run three successful campaigns. She clearly knows how
to win votes in her district. When I interviewed her in 2022, however,
I had the feeling that she wasn’t entirely sure why, precisely, she
and other Republicans had suddenly started doing so well with Latinos
in South Texas. In the course of our conversations, she’d try on
different theories: it was because they supported the Border Patrol.
It was oil and gas. It was faith and anti-abortion sentiments. This
year, when I spoke to her the day after election night, De La Cruz had
one clear answer. “I think last night what was seen was that the
Republican Party has now become the working man’s party,” she told
me. “It’s the party for those who want a strong economy, the
opportunity for prosperity. The cost to live, the cost of groceries,
the cost of gas has gotten out of control, so most people are really
worried about these everyday, kitchen-table issues.” 

Trump performed well in South Texas for the same reason he performed
well in white factory towns in the Midwest: He can channel
working-class anxiety and grievance about being left behind in the
modern U.S. This year, the GOP also enjoyed a profound structural
advantage that it won’t have in 2026 or 2028: inflation. Deep South
Texas is home to some of the poorest counties in the nation, and when
the cost of groceries soared in 2021, residents felt it not just in
their wallets but in their bodies—they went hungry. The attitude,
then, of many who voted for Trump was not: I’m with him. Instead, it
was: _Biden, Kamala—you’re fired._

Carlos Odio, the cofounder of Equis, one of the most reliable national
pollsters of Latinos, thinks we should not overestimate the influence
of how exactly Trump or Harris campaigned. For millions of Latino
voters, this election was fundamentally a referendum on the economy.
“We saw some voters soured in 2021 [during the height of
inflation],” said Odio. “And they just never came back—not for
Biden, not for Harris, or anybody.”

The fear for Democrats moving forward is that as they increasingly
become the party of college-educated voters, they will continue to
hemorrhage votes from the 60 percent of Americans who do not go to
college and who see themselves being left behind in an economy where
blue-collar paychecks aren’t keeping pace with inflation. In 2020
the party pursued a new strategy: It went after college-educated
voters in tony Dallas and Houston suburbs, the kinds of places whose
residents had traditionally voted Republican. Pitching Trump as a
vulgarian and a threat to democracy, Democrats won over thousands of
well-educated Texans. It seems, however, to have come at the cost of
losing far more blue-collar Texans. 

The day after the election, I met Chuck Rocha for lunch at a Greek
diner. Born in Tyler, in the heart of East Texas, Rocha began his
political career in the union of the local Kelly-Springfield tire
plant. He worked his way up into national politics, and, as a campaign
consultant in 2016, he was instrumental in helping Bernie Sanders win
the Latino vote in Texas (as well as in California and Nevada) during
the Democratic primaries. When he greeted me, his cowboy hat rested on
the table next to him. “Hey, College,” he said as he shook my
hand. (We’re both Mexican American, so the nickname he used for me
is fittingly both a term of endearment and an insult.) 

As we ate, Rocha said the party’s path back to winning with Latinos
was at once obvious and difficult to achieve. “I think the
Democratic brand has taken lots of damage, and we’re looking for a
short-term strategy for a long-term problem,” he said. He thinks the
party needs to re-embed with its base in the working class. The first,
most actionable strategy: running candidates with strong, blue-collar
backgrounds. This year, for instance, Rocha advised the campaign of
Congressman Ruben Gallego, a former Marine who grew up in a
single-parent family and who’s pacing to win Arizona’s Senate
race. (Votes are still being counted, but he’s running far ahead of
Harris.) Rocha told me that Gallego bucked the focus-tested campaign
strategy and instead went by instinct: Knowing that the party is
struggling with Latino men, Gallego hosted a fight night to watch a
bout between Canelo Álvarez and Jaime Munguía, and his campaign
sponsored a rodeo the month before the election.  

“The good news for Democrats is that in every focus group and every
poll I do, [the participants] align with the values of the old
Democratic Party, the one I joined in 1990—fighting for working men
and women, standing up to corporate greed,” Rocha told me. The path
back for Democrats in South Texas will be making voters here feel
welcome again—not just as Latinos but as working people.

_The Herrera family first arrived in Texas over two hundred years ago,
when it was the Mexican state of Tejas. Jack Herrera, however, was
born and raised in California, and he hopes you won’t hold that
against him. Before starting as a senior editor at Texas Monthly in
January 2022, he covered immigration and human rights as a
contributing editor for Politico Magazine. At Texas Monthly, he
covers Latino issues, immigration, elections, and assorted bad news.
Herrera was a 2020 Ida B. Wells fellow with Type Investigations, and
his work has appeared in the Guardian, the New
Republic, the Nation, and elsewhere._

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