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 . 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 Democratic 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 of 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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