How Border Counties in Texas Flipped from Blue to Red for Trump

By Arelis R. Hernández / The Washington Post

16:48 JST, November 10, 2024

SAN ANTONIO – The signs of a political shift in the reliably blue counties that line Texas’s southern border with Mexico had been coming.

Local GOP offices were emerging in places like Starr County that had not voted for a Republican for president in a century. Party workers were actively reaching out to residents who felt forgotten as illegal border crossings rose and their communities struggled to handle the influx. And Donald Trump’s message was clear: He’d bring order and prosperity back into their lives.

The result on Tuesday was a resounding red wave in a part of the country that has come to symbolize the nation’s division on immigration. Yet Democratic and Republican party leaders said the Biden administration’s border failings are only part of what explains it.

“You can tell me things are better, but if my food stamps don’t last the month, I’m not going to believe you,” said Toni Treviño, the chair of the Republican Party in Starr County, relating what she had heard from neighbors. Nearly 58 percent of voters in the county supported Trump.

Trump soundly defeated Harris in 12 of 14 Texas counties touching the border – from the sparsely populated ranchlands in the west to more urban communities in the east where most residents identify as Hispanic, Tejano or Latino. The margins were tighter in the three most populated counties, but everywhere else on the Texas border saw double-digit margins in favor of the Republican candidate.

Those wins were particularly striking in the Rio Grande Valley, where majority-Hispanic counties have been shifting starkly rightward. In Starr County – where 97 percent of people identify as Latino – just 19 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016.

Political scientist Alvaro Corral of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley said Trump’s stunning victory points at something deeper than just the allure of one candidate to a large group of people.

“Latino voters are showing their complexity,” he said. “I expected a swing but not at this magnitude.”

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‘Party of the American Dream’

There is no one reason so many Texas borderland fronterizos chose Trump. Each community faced a nuanced set of concerns about tighter wallets, experiences with migration, political messaging and local campaign dynamics that shaped their choices. But the emerging picture is a patchwork of broad discontent and continuing defection from the Democratic Party.

Many Latinos living on the border have resided there for generations, and the Republican Party’s message is increasingly resonating with them, said Democratic political strategist Abel Prado. Some have had very different experiences in America than their immigrant parents or ancestors and are drawn to the narrative Texas conservatives have crafted about belonging and prosperity.

“The Republican Party makes Hispanics feel they are the party of the American Dream,” Prado said. “People equate a good economy with Republicans, regardless of the truth.”

Nationally, he added, Democrats continue to play defense on cultural issues like rights for transgender people that simply do not speak to border voters, who are generally more religious, have lower levels of higher education and are socially conservative, and who often take cues from their spiritual leaders inside the voting booth.

Republican congressional candidate Mayra Flores’s campaign plastered the region with advertisements serving a simple message. On one side was a picture of Trump and a paper bag of groceries that came out to $97. On the other was an image of Kamala Harris and the same bag of groceries – but with a $297 price tag. (Flores lost her bid to unseat Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, though the region she was vying to represent went for Trump.)

“Keep the same, or make a change!” the sign read.

The state Republican Party has also invested in supporting new candidates and putting out ads that speak directly to the concerns of those living in the Rio Grande Valley, said former Hidalgo County party chair Adrienne Peña-Garza. She helped secure a Republican win two years ago for a congressional seat in a district that had traditionally voted Democratic but that was redrawn to favor the GOP. She said the movement has since only grown.

The number of local Republican Party leaders has grown, she said, adding that “a lot of them are women.”

They include Dionne Cancino, who chairs the Hidalgo Republican Party’s U.S. Border Patrol appreciation committee. The group delivers goody bags with snacks and invites agents to enjoy a free plate of food during food drives. Trump, she said, visited agents frequently and helped them feel appreciated.

“Morale has been so low and agents felt so unsupported,” under President Joe Biden, said Cancino, who is married to an agent. “We want them to know we are backing them.”

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Few fears of a ‘mass deportation’

Many people in urban areas along the border don’t necessarily see migrants on a daily basis or have a front seat to border crossings. Migration is masked by a federal system that quickly moves people into processing centers, then deports, detains or releases them into the interior of the country.

But Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s border crackdown, known as Operation Lone Star, has made it impossible to look away, several residents said. The billion-dollar initiative has poured millions into border law enforcement agencies, deployed thousands of state troopers and National Guard soldiers, and bused thousands of migrants to Northern cities.

The state response has been welcome in Maverick County, said Freddy Arellano, the area’s Republican Party chair.

“What we’ve read from all of this is that the Democratic Party has abandoned the community,” he said. “For example, the Eagle Pass mayor, a Democrat, was asking for assistance from the federal government, and they gave us bubkes. Voters proceeded then to defect.”

Social media has helped amplify concerns over immigration. Local law enforcement agencies regularly post dash-cam videos of high-speed chases and mug shots of alleged smugglers on Facebook. Neighborhood pages are filled with reports of alleged terrorists being arrested at the border and sensational videos in English and Spanish showing crossings and handcuffed migrants.

Claudia Alcazar lives near the border and said she and her neighbors have had to clean up after migrants who left behind clothes and dirty diapers and destroyed fences and other property. It has built resentment among some border families, especially those who have migrated legally or are trying to migrate legally to the country.

Like many border residents, she draws a distinction between her family, which has been in Texas for generations, and those who have been crossing in recent years without permission.

“We are too nice under the Democrats. People, whether it’s true or not, have this perception that migrants get free stuff,” said Alcazar, who ran as a Republican for a local office but lost. “People want the toughness of Trump, whether its real or not.”

Texas is home to one of the largest undocumented populations in the country, but both Democrats and Republicans said many families along the border do not believe Trump is likely to make good on his threat to carry out a mass deportation.

“Do I want people ripped from their homes? Of course not,” Cancino said. “We’ll just have to wait and see what his process will be.”

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‘It was a bloodbath’

The red wave, however, did not extend down the ballot. Along the border, Democrats continued to dominate many races for local offices, and some Republicans who did win had narrower victories than in years before. Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, did not win the same majorities that Trump enjoyed.

In some places, on-the-ground canvassing paid off. The Hidalgo County Democrats recruited 1,500 volunteers to knock on 100,000 doors. They also sent more than a million text messages. The party focused on the top issues on voters’ minds: affordable health care and the economy, said Richard Gonzales, who heads the local Democratic Party.

Several Democratic candidate won local offices, but 51 percent of voters still cast their ballots for Trump, election results show.

“We worked hard,” he said. “But it was a bloodbath. There’s just something about the guy [Trump] that people gravitate toward.”

Gonzales and other Democrats said their messaging around Harris was off and that it should trigger reflection, contending that “the message of hope and unity is not resonating.”

In Eagle Pass, Anilu Morales Gonzalez said there is no forgetting what life has been like on the border under the Biden administration. The federal government shut down the international bridges because too many migrants were crossing. The impact on local business owners was enormous and bred resentment, she said.

Morales Gonzalez, a real estate agent, was leasing a property to an import-export business that suffered so much that they asked her to reduce the rent by half to be able to stay in the space. She saw home sales dry up when interest rates swelled. Home builders couldn’t turn the same profits and weren’t willing to invest their money, so they stopped building, she said.

She said her husband retired from the Border Patrol six years early in 2022 because he was so frustrated with how the job had changed. At the time, his sector of the border was leading the country in migrant encounters – largely asylum-seeking families from around the world.

Trump is “the choice for me and 90 percent of the Border Patrol families and Realtor community I know,” said Morales Gonzalez.

Her brother, state Rep. Eddie Morales, a Democrat, was reelected to office but by 10 fewer points than he had won in the last election. He is hopeful there is a way for his party to win the presidency again by fashioning a platform that reflects the values and concerns of constituents.

Morales is a moderate who considers himself pro-oil and gas, and also pro-renewable energy. He tries to take nuanced positions, such as voting for two $5 billion appropriation bills for the governor’s border operation. He did that while also denouncing the political theater around the border.

“We cannot maintain the status quo,” he said. “Texans and Americans are telling us that they want us to focus on them first.”