Over the years, Republicans have shown that they know how to do token diversity outreach efforts. The only thing they have persistently failed to do is field credible candidates in heavily nonwhite districts and make serious efforts to persuade and court the votes of minority constituents. One often gets the sense that some Republican politicians would rather just pack these voters into gerrymandered districts designed to elect Democrats, shrug, and ignore them.
This needs to change now because Republicans are starting to find more and more of these constituents banging on their party’s door as the Democratic Party loses its mind. It’s time to answer in good faith and show some manners.
A few sharp political reporters at major publications have noticed how South Texas Hispanic voters shifted strongly toward the Republican Party during Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump dramatically improved his party’s margins in South Texas, where a conservative Latina Republican came within 3 points of defeating a sitting Democratic member of Congress in 2020 in a seat that is 82% Hispanic.
In the time since, President Joe Biden’s border crisis has won Democrats very little love in the communities of the Rio Grande Valley. South Texas Republicans have just lately started winning noteworthy elections for a change. They are especially excited about a coming special U.S. House election in which they might even have the upper hand.
South Texas Democratic congressman Filemon Vela resigned to become a lobbyist just before midnight Friday. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has the power to call a special election. If he does, the Republican nominee will be favored to win and represent this 84% Hispanic district. She will then have the opportunity to run for re-election as an incumbent in the fall.
The hope is that this seat and perhaps two others in South Texas are at a historic inflection point. Texas Hispanic voters may be about to turn away from electing Democrats and toward electing Republicans. If this happens, it could spread. The potential is explosive.
There hasn’t been anything quite like this since Southerners abruptly changed their voting habits in the 1990s, abandoning their ancestral Democratic Party and setting off a cascade of party-switching among elected officials. Since 1990, Democrats have lost 35 House seats and 13 Senate seats in Southern states (the 11 former Confederate states plus Kentucky and Oklahoma).
It has been something of a puzzle to many liberal pundits why Trump’s presidency could have been the catalyst to move Hispanics toward the GOP. After all, Trump is a racist, right? Some liberals bemoan the fact that Trump’s peculiar form of bravado appeals to a number of macho Hispanic men. But the more plausible explanation is that most Hispanics are and always have been close to working-class white people. This is not just because the census treats them as white but also because, in the real world, they are demographically almost identical to the non-Hispanic white working-class voters who made Trump what he was in the first place.
Sure, Latino voters may be a bit more religious than their Anglo cousins, and the country music they listen to while driving their pickup trucks around South Texas may be more likely to feature accordions than steel guitars, but the day-to-day political concerns and the economic circumstances of these two groups have been strikingly similar for decades — it’s just that they were both always ignored and considered unimportant by Republicans … until Trump.
Perhaps the most important commonality right now between Hispanic voters and white working-class voters is their intense disgust for wokeness. That applies whether the wokeness comes in the form of critical race theory, anti-police bigotry, or Democrats’ inexplicable insistence that it’s OK to mutilate small children in the name of their fringe ideas about gender ideology.
The potential for this political realignment is massive, and there is no reason to believe it will stop in Texas.
If Republicans don’t take full advantage of this trend and push it forward with every possible tool and every dollar available, then they simply deserve to lose forever.
