What a Texas border county flipping red after a century means for American politics

“I feel pretty good about it,” Garcia says.

In the overwhelming Republican state of Texas, the southern counties along the border used to be an anomaly — a blue wall that voted consistently Democrat for generations.

This year’s flip to Trump was not completely unforeseen — a shift to the Republicans began in 2016 — but experts say it can serve as a warning signal to Democrats who are losing support among Hispanic voters across the country.

Garcia lives in the most Hispanic county in America. The working-class rural community is also among the poorest, with a median household income of $36,000.

Starr County is also one of the frontline areas for the crisis at the border. Border patrol blimps and drones fly overhead, and people can look across the Rio Grande directly into Mexico. Pieces of Trump’s unfinished border wall are scattered along its outskirts behind bars and businesses.

Immigration and border security proved to be a weak spot in Vice-President Kamala Harris’ campaign and a boon for Trump. Some early exit polls show, particularly among older Hispanic voters, it was a main reason why people cast a ballot.

Garcia’s daughter-in-law, Arlene Meeks Garcia, says people are struggling to get by and afraid when people who crossed the border hide in their yards.

“Democrats were not on our side,” she says. “We’re not big politician supporters, but when it affects us and everything that’s going on around us here, we have to.”

The Texas General Land Office earlier this week offered Trump a Starr County ranch to build detention centres for the president-elect’s promised mass deportations.

Garcia supports Trump’s plan, although he recognizes that most people who cross the border do not stay in his border county.

There are historical reasons Starr County, and other border blue wall counties, supported Democrats for a century, says Mark Kaswan, a political science professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

A sense of loyalty to former president Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from Texas who signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, played a part in the heavily Hispanic areas, as did community and cultural connections to local candidates.

At some point, Republicans stopped seeing the value in backing efforts in Rio Grande Valley, Kaswan says.

That changed with Trump’s initial presidential win. It brought Republicans a growth in support.

“They decided to actually put some energy into here,” Kaswan says.

Republican Party County Chair Toni Treviño drives around Starr County, with a population around 66,000, reflecting on what the party has accomplished.

After working for 21 years as a federal prosecutor, she decided to dive into election law. Treviño explains how Republicans had to push to ensure election administrators gave the party what it was legally entitled to, including representation at voting stations during primaries.

While there weren’t a lot of funds to work with, they found ways to put up signs, connect with voters and ensure that people in the county knew they could vote for Trump.

Trump signs and flags are visible on homes and vehicles throughout the county. Many signs say “Tejanos for Trump.” Treviño noted many were purchased by the homeowner themselves.

There’s a lot more work to do, she says. The county has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in all of Texas.

Treviño takes a pragmatic approach to the election outcome. She recognizes that Texas removing the option of straight-ticket voting helped Republicans in the area. But, she says, people also voted based on their pocketbooks.

“Many of them live on fixed incomes, many of them live below or at the poverty level,” she says. “And they’ve already lived under one Donald Trump administration. And under that administration their lives were better, they had more money to spend on their family, they could buy more groceries, they could live more comfortably and securely.”

Starr County is “like a microcosm for the Democrats’ struggles with working class voters of colour and Latino Hispanics nationwide,” says Álvaro Corral, a political science professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

When Republicans started making inroads in the valley, many Democrats thought it was just a unique area in a red state, Corral says, instead of taking a deeper look at the root causes.

“These were areas that were early warning signs that the party should have heeded a bit more seriously,” Corral says.

Corral says it “throws a wrench in the story” that as the country becomes more diverse, it will lean more Democrat. It means the party will have take a long hard look at how it will connect with Hispanic voters in the future, he says.

Early exit polls show that Trump not only flipped the Rio Grande Valley in Texas red. He also made inroads in heavily Puerto Rican areas of Pennsylvania and improved his standing with Hispanic voters along Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor — home to people of Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Colombian and Puerto Rican origin.

Trump was the first Republican since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County, where there is a large Cuban population.

Some experts say if the realignment of Hispanic voters sticks, it could reshape American politics. But not everyone is sold on Trump in southern Texas.

Maria Guerra lives in Roma, a city in Starr County across the border from the Mexican city Ciudad Miguel Alemán. The 77-year-old has been a Democrat all her life. But this year, she just didn’t vote.

“I just didn’t like neither of them. They are always fighting about this and that,” Guerra said.

“I’m Mexican-American and I don’t like what Trump talks about the Spanish-speaking people. And the other one, well I didn’t know much about her.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 23, 2024.

— With files from The Associated Press