President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning success with Latino voters has fortified Republican dominance in Texas and reversed any progress Democrats have made in making the Lone Star State a legitimate political battleground.
Without a reliable Latino base, the Democratic dream of turning Texas blue is at least deferred, possibly for another generation.
Latino voters are heavily concentrated in urban areas and South Texas, where Democrats count on a robust turnout. Any slippage in Latino support in those areas undermines the Democratic Party’s ability to win a statewide race, a goal that’s eluded them since 1994.
Unless there’s a dramatic turnaround, it’s unlikely Democrats can make a run at winning the Texas House before the end of the decade. If Republicans maintain control of the legislative process through 2030, they will be able to redraw district boundaries for the following decade and keep Democrats in the political wilderness.
“If this particular partisan split that was evident in the presidential race becomes the new status quo, it is going to buttress Republican dominance in the state and set Democrats back in their star-crossed efforts to make the state more competitive,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.
Nothing is certain in politics, so Democrats have a chance to improve their outreach to Latino voters and make the 2024 results an outlier.
It’s also possible Trump, right now riding high, could be less of a motivator in future elections. And when Trump is done as president, it’s unclear if Republicans will be able to replicate his unique success.
“Every election that Donald Trump has been involved in, either directly or indirectly, has had its own kind of unusual factors,” Henson said. “So we don’t know what the pattern actually is.”
Right now Republicans have cemented their control of Texas, and the pressure is on Democrats to respond or lose more ground.
“If you’re a Democrat, what you have to do is not look at the results as somehow this insurmountable shift to the right,” said Jason Villalba, chairman and CEO of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation.
“You have to look at the results and ask yourself and ask the party, what was it about this candidate?” Villalba said. “What was it about the candidate that we put up, and what was it about the issues that drove so many central Latinos all across the country, and in great numbers in South Texas, to the Republican Party?”
Democrats acknowledge the conundrum.
“There’s certainly a realignment of the Latino community based on gender, with Latino men voting more like Anglo men,” said state Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, adding some Latinas are voting more like white women. “I thought that might have been a temporary phenomenon, but it appears kind of a reset.”
Anchia is taking a wait-and-see approach.
“We need to dig into the data a lot more, and it is not a knowable answer yet,” Anchia said when asked how Democrats could rebound with Latino voters. “It’s certainly doable.”
Trump and Republicans were able to craft a conservative message that resonated with voters across the country, including Hispanics, particularly on the economy. Republicans lamented the increased cost of living, including groceries and gas, and blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president.
South Texas voters were turned off by the soaring number of migrants who crossed the border during Biden’s tenure. Republicans also hammered Democrats on social wedge issues, like transgender athletes playing in women’s sports and federal prisoners getting gender-affirming surgeries with public dollars.
Representing the party in power, Harris and Senate nominee Colin Allred struggled with the albatross of inflation, even as other indicators showed a strong economy. Issues like saving democracy and restoring abortion rights did not move voters in the same way as the economy and border security.
“Latinos are driven and moved by economic, kitchen table issues,” said Villalba, a former Republican state representative from Dallas who is now an independent. “They look for the best candidate to represent them from the standpoint of their pocketbook — from jobs to economic and physical security. They felt that in this cycle, because of inflation and other things, that it was time for a change.”
Villalba said Hispanics in South Texas are just as opposed to illegal immigration as those in the Panhandle or East Texas.
“The idea that we’re going to secure the border and protect these communities from the cartels and drugs and traffickers is appealing in a way that most Democrats might not recognize,” he said.
Many national and Texas Democrats have downplayed security concerns at the border and criticized Republicans for incendiary language about migrants and unauthorized immigrants.
Some Democrats now acknowledge Biden and Harris waited too long to address border security concerns.
It still chafes some Democrats, however, that Trump did so well among Latino voters.
The president-elect won 12 of the 14 counties along the southern border with Mexico. In his 2016 race, he carried five of those counties.
“I live in the Rio Grande Valley. I live in these three counties that voted more than 50% for Donald Trump,” said Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa during a joint interview with The Dallas Morning News and KXAS-TV (NBC5).
Hinojosa, who days after the election announced he was resigning in March, said, “85% of Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley are first-generation Americans.”
“Their parents came over here from Mexico, yet they were able to ignore all these horrible things that this man [Trump] has said about their families and about them, and vote for him,” Hinojosa said. “You have to figure out what went wrong. Something we did, something they believe we stood for, caused them to vote for individuals that have been demonizing them for a long time.”
Hinojosa acknowledged candidates and party leaders needed to figure out how to put a larger majority of Latino voters back in their column.
“If we’re going to get out of this hole that we found ourselves in after this election, we need to figure out how we change that narrative that caused them to go in the direction that we never believed they would go,” Hinojosa said.
Democrats don’t control Texas politics, but their support of policies pushed by national Democrats often put them on the defensive. There’s also the notion that Democrats have taken Latino voters for granted.
“We have depended on the Latino vote, and it probably reached the point where they were asking, ‘What have you given me for the vote that I gave you?’” Hinojosa said. “And we have not been able to give the things that they need for their families, including jobs, a good public education, access to higher education, access to health care. The irony of it is that we haven’t been able to give them that because the Republicans who are in control deny us the ability to do that, because they don’t believe in those things.”
Then there’s Trump.
Villalba said Trump’s popularity with many Hispanic voters helped Republicans.
“Trump is a singular, defining, generational character,” Villalba said. “He has always had a tremendous appeal in South Texas.”
Other Republicans have performed well with Latino voters, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and — this year — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who beat Allred, a Dallas Democrat, to win reelection.
Anchia said history shows Latino support can fluctuate but tends to be a strength for Democrats. What used to be a strong advantage has now become a problem, he said.
“There’s no question that we need to have a broader coalition if we’re going to break through, so that includes improving with Latino voters,” Anchia said.
Villalba said Texas Republicans need to prepare for life after Trump’s historic success.
“If I were the Republicans, I would not take this movement to the right for granted,” Villalba said. “Republicans have to continue to win the hearts and minds of Hispanics all across the country.”