In areas such as South Texas, Republicans have made inroads, but the party has yet to convert declining enthusiasm for Democrats into reliable support.
In areas such as South Texas, Republicans have made inroads, but the party has yet to convert declining enthusiasm for Democrats into reliable support.
W ith a handful of notable exceptions, Tuesday was an enormously disappointing night for Republicans. As of this writing, NBC’s Decision Desk is projecting that Republicans will have a House majority of 221 seats to Democrats’ 214. That’s a 15-seat net gain for the GOP, but nowhere near the wave election that many predicted. (Some races, though, have yet to be called, and NBC’s provisional projection has a +/−7-seat margin of error.) Republicans and conservatives have embarked on the internal soul-searching — and finger-pointing — process that usually follows a disappointing showing in an election. Democrats, on the other hand, are giddy. Biden is even reportedly taking his party’s surprisingly strong performance as a sign that he should indeed launch a reelection bid in 2024: “He’s running,” an unnamed senior White House aide told Politico.
One of the important demographic questions going into the midterms was the partisan preferences of Latino voters. Republicans made significant inroads with Latinos in 2020, particularly in regions such as South Texas and Florida. This emergent “multiracial working-class GOP” narrative saw mixed results this Tuesday, leaving us with more questions than answers. It was not a devastating defeat, by any means, but far from the resounding realignment that many Republicans were hoping for.
In South Texas, the heavily Latino Rio Grande Valley was the site of three of the most closely watched congressional races in the nation. The RGV, long a Democratic stronghold, has shown signs of becoming more fertile territory for Republicans in recent years: From 2016 to 2020, five of the six largest county-level swings toward Donald Trump occurred in South Texas. In 2021, the 86 percent Latino border city of McAllen elected its first Republican mayor in decades, and in June 2022, the Mexican-born Republican Mayra Flores staged an upset victory in the Lone Star State’s primary contest for the 34th congressional district, becoming the first Republican to represent the 85 percent Latino electorate in more than 150 years. In the primary, Flores carried that district by more than seven and a half points, despite the fact that its previous Democratic representative had won it by 13.6 points less than two years earlier.
Buoyed by that momentum, Republicans tapped two more Latina candidates to run alongside Flores in the region this cycle: Cassy Garcia in the 28th congressional district and Monica De La Cruz in the 15th. Two of those districts — TX-28 and TX-34 — were still rated as Democratic leans going into Tuesday night, and Flores actually faced the steepest uphill battle of the three, having been redistricted into a much bluer electorate after her victory in July. The Cook Political Report put Flores’s TX-34 at a nine-point Democratic advantage, Garcia’s TX-28 at a three-point Democratic advantage, and De La Cruz’s TX-15 at a one-point Republican advantage.
Still, Republicans were hopeful that red-wave momentum and widespread dissatisfaction with inflation and the state of the border would put the three over the top. The Republican National Committee (RNC) poured money into South Texas, opened four new Hispanic community centers in the region, and hit the ground running with aggressive voter outreach: As of early October, the GOP had made 4 million voter contacts in Texas — projected to best its 2018 midterm numbers by a factor of seven. Early GOP primary returns in the RGV seemed to show more reasons for optimism. As I reported at the time:
In the 90 percent Hispanic Cameron County, Republican turnout has increased by 137 percent since 2018. The 95.4 percent Hispanic Webb County saw an 87 percent increase and the 91.87 percent Hispanic Hidalgo County saw an 84 percent increase over the same period.
But in the end, Democrats were largely able to fend off the long-foretold Republican realignment. In TX-28, entrenched Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar bested Garcia with ease: With 99 percent of votes reporting, Cuellar is leading his Republican challenger by 13.2 points, 56.6 percent to 43.4 percent, far exceeding the Cook Political Report’s predicted three-point Democratic advantage. (It’s notable that Garcia, while ethnically Hispanic, does not speak Spanish — a major liability in a 72.9 percent Latino district, situated in a region where almost 78 percent of residents speak Spanish in the home.) In TX-34, Democrat Vicente Gonzalez breezed past Flores by eight and a half points: With 99 percent of votes reporting, Gonzalez was leading Flores by 52.7 to 44.3 percent. The one bright spot for Republicans was in the 74 percent Latino TX-15, where De La Cruz beat her progressive opponent Michelle Valejo by a comfortable eight and a half points, 53.3 to 44.8 percent — also a marked overperformance vis-à-vis the Cook Political Report’s projected one-point Republican advantage. Donald Trump carried the same electorate by 2.8 points in 2020.
Notably, while the overwhelming shift toward the GOP among Tejanos did not materialize, the trend lines continue to move in a rightward direction — albeit at a slower pace than many Republicans wished. At the gubernatorial level, Greg Abbott’s deficit in the RGV “matched that of Trump, who also lost by 15 points in the Rio Grande Valley in 2020,” the Texas Tribune reported, adding: “Four years ago, Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried the counties by more than double that — 35 points — in an unsuccessful U.S. Senate run. And in 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the Valley by 39 points.” Trump’s 2020 performance in the region marked a significant improvement on his showing in 2016 — the 96 percent Latino Starr County, for example, shifted toward the president by a resounding 55 points during that four-year period. So Abbott’s similar performance means that recent GOP gains are sticking, even if they have yet to expand.
Statewide, NBC exit polls show Abbott carrying 40 percent of the Texas Latino vote, trailing O’Rourke’s showing with the demographic by 17 points. That’s more or less the upper end of the standard Republican showing: In 1998, then-governor George W. Bush carried 39 percent of Texas Latinos in his reelection bid. During his 2000 run for president, Bush carried 42 percent, trailing his Democratic challenger, Al Gore, by 12 points. Ted Cruz carried 40 percent to his Democratic opponent’s 60 percent in his 2012 senatorial run, while Romney carried 33 percent to Barack Obama’s 59 percent.
The story of the GOP’s quest for the Latino vote, both in Texas and nationwide, is often a cycle of spurts of optimistic triumphalism followed by bitter disappointment. In areas such as South Texas, significant inroads have been made — the RGV is no longer the deep-blue firewall that it once was. But Republicans have yet to convert declining enthusiasm for Democrats into reliable support for the GOP.