How Republicans managed to flip the Rio Grande Valley

From The Texas Newsroom:

Few people were shocked Tuesday night when Texas was called for former President Donald Trump. But just how handily the now president-elect carried the Lone Star state showed massive Republican gains compared to just four years ago.

Trump won more than 56% of the vote in Texas, some 14 points higher than Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. In 2020, Trump beat out President Joe Biden by only 6 percentage points.

Such a seismic shift didn’t happen overnight – and, according to experts and Texas Republicans, it wasn’t a fluke either. Texas GOP Chairman Abraham George told The Texas Newsroom it took years of work.

“We did go work really hard on the South Texas area. We did that over the next to the last few years, probably in the last 4 or 5 months, ever since I became chairman, one of my campaign promises were that we will be flipping South Texas,” he said.

That work paid off as Republicans have managed to flip 16 counties since the 2016 presidential election.

Political Scientist Kevin Kearns of Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi said he noticed the increased attention on the region from Republicans.

“Even here in Corpus Christi, we’ve periodically seen Gov. Abbott come down and campaign,” said Kearns, who also highlighted Sen. Cruz’s activity in the area. “Even if you just looked at political candidates coming to South Texas – I mean, in 2022, in the midterm elections – President Trump was here.”

It wasn’t just Republicans’ frequent South Texas campaign stops. GOP gains in Texas can also be attributed to the makeup of the region and the party’s messaging to voters there, according to Joshua Blank of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It’s important to note, especially in South Texas, that we’re not necessarily talking about, you know, college educated or even urban Hispanic voters,” Blank said. “We’re talking, in most cases, about non-college educated suburban and often rural Hispanic voters who, for all intents and purposes, likely leaned Republican regardless of their racial or ethnic identity.”

Non-college educated voters, often referred to as the working class, had long been seen as a key voting block for the Democratic party. But Blank said, more often than not, the party is now seen as “reflecting the tastes and policy preferences of a core group of college educated voters.”

Blank pointed to Harris’ plan to give first-time homebuyers $25,000.

“Well, that sounds pretty cool. As long as you can find a house that’s under $250,000. And that represents 10% of a down payment that you can then hopefully go get a bank loan at a really high interest rate,” he said.

But given home prices in 2024, Blank said that program probably didn’t resonate with working class voters who wouldn’t have been able to save up enough money to take advantage of such a program in the first place.

That ties into a larger issue voters were concerned about this election: the economy.

“A lot of the rural parts of Texas are shifting red because the economy is less good,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist. “And the threats to the oil and gas industry that people perceive are coming from Democrats are driving the communities to vote Republican.”

The change hasn’t been subtle. In Starr County, Biden beat Trump by 5 points in 2020. Four short years later, voters there chose Trump over Harris by 16 points.

Rottinghaus said the biggest takeaway from that is how “the economy crosses over issues of racial attachment to the Democratic Party.”

Craig Goldman, former Texas House GOP caucus chair, and now congressman-elect, told The Texas Newsroom that people in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley are, “realizing that [Democrats’] policies don’t favor them and the policies of Republicans, they’re more in line with and more in tune with.”

Not too long ago, Democrats appeared to be making gains in Texas. But after this election, Goldman said, “Texas is not getting more blue. Texas is getting more red, and that is proven by what happened in the Rio Grande Valley.”

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