GOP continues to make gains as Texas Hispanic voting bloc matures
By Carlos Sanchez
An hour south of San Antonio, there’s a turnoff from Interstate 37 that leads to the tiny town of Three Rivers, the gateway to the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Three Rivers, a community of about 2,000 residents, is hallowed ground to many Hispanics because of an incident that occurred here at the end of World War II.
That was when native son Felix Longoria, who was killed in action in the closing days of the war, captured the nation’s attention and kicked off a civil rights movement among Mexican Americans.
A white funeral director refused Longoria’s widow the use of the town’s funeral home for her husband’s burial because the whites wouldn’t like that, she said. It set into motion a national outrage and lent prominence to a group called the American G.I. Forum, which was formed to demand equal rights for returning Hispanic war veterans.
A young U.S. senator named Lyndon B. Johnson stepped into the fray and arranged for Longoria to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, delivering a rare political victory to Hispanics that would be repaid more than a decade later when Johnson was tapped to become John F. Kennedy’s running mate in the 1960 presidential campaign.
Three hours south of Three Rivers is the Rio Grande Valley, which straddles the U.S.-Mexican border. It’s here, 67 years later, that Hispanic unity that formed around the Longoria incident has begun to splinter, and Republicans have been the beneficiaries causing campaign observers nationwide to draw up a variety of theories about the shifting loyalties of Texas Hispanics.
Donald Trump, for example, confounded political observers during the 2020 election when he won nearby Zapata County, another border community, which is 95 percent Hispanic, and became the first Republican to win that county in a century. Everything from Trump’s appeal to workers in the oil and gas industry, an economic mainstay in this region, to Trump’s caustic personality being viewed as macho by some Hispanic voters was postulated as reasons for this election anomaly.
A year later, Javier Villalobos, a former Republican County chair, was elected mayor of McAllen, the largest city in Hidalgo County and a longtime Democratic stronghold. Then, during a special election in 2022, in Brownsville, at the southernmost tip of Texas, Republican Mayra Flores became the first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress.
She was quickly unseated by Democrat Vicente Gonzalez five months later, but the mere fact that he was running in her district lent credence to the theory that Republicans were making inroads among Texas Hispanics.
Gonzalez, a three-time incumbent, gave up his seat in Hidalgo County after the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature redrew congressional district lines and turned his district into a Republican majority extending more than four hours away to the suburbs of San Antonio in time for the 2022 election. It resulted in Monica De La Cruz, a 2020 election denier who had lost to Gonzalez that year, becoming the first Republican to win the 15th Congressional District whose lineage included former Vice President John Nance Garner.
Border Hispanics are more conservative than other Hispanics, the leading theory for this string of victories explained. Just look at another border district represented by U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, the only pro-life Democrat in Congress.
While these theories are entertaining, said one local Republican elder statesman who asked not to be identified because he’s a never-Trumper, they fail to account for one fundamental factor: the political maturation of the Hispanic voting bloc.
“When you begin treating us as monolithic, that’s when you begin to lose us,” he said. Not only do Hispanics have different interests that are related to their income, education and even geography, he said, they have become sophisticated enough voters to know when politicians are pandering or, worse, taking them for granted.
One only need harken back to that 1960 presidential election when Jackie Kennedy cut an ad in Spanish. At a time when Texas still had a poll tax, voter participation among Hispanics was extremely low. But for the first time in electoral history, this ad spoke directly to them. Viva Kennedy clubs began sprouting up and Kennedy ended up winning Texas with 50.5 percent of the vote.
Hispanics played such a key role in that victory that history often overlooks that the night before his assassination in Dallas in 1963, Kennedy, Johnson and their wives briefly attended a formal dinner being held in Houston by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) – the first time a sitting U.S. president visited an event by a Hispanic civil rights group.
If that same ad were delivered in today’s political environment – with the same poor syntax used by Jackie Kennedy – the candidate would be laughed out of the race. Yet, Hispanic voter outreach today often involves nothing more than political ads that are cut in Spanish even though more than 84 percent of Hispanics speak English.
A recent survey by the Harris Poll shows that 80 percent of the Hispanic respondents feel “used as political pawns by politicians who don’t care about them,” according to a report by the Latino Donor Collaborative.
Two years ago, Hispanics crept ahead of non-Hispanic whites as the largest demographic group in Texas, by a margin of 40.2 percent to white’s 39.8 percent. The Latino Donor Collaborative estimates Hispanics nationally now account for an annual GDP of $3.2 trillion, making them fifth in the world if they were a standalone economy. That same report concludes that Hispanics are the fastest-growing racial and ethnic voting bloc in the U.S. electorate. Further, only one-third of Hispanic eligible voters are age 50 years or older compared with 48 percent of the U.S. eligible voters overall.
While all these figures point to an ever-growing powerful voting bloc, Hispanics continue to play a minor role in the 2024 campaign. In the absence of Hispanic voter outreach, the de facto proxy issue for Hispanics is often the issue of immigration – an issue that doesn’t even register among the top concerns of Hispanic voters.
A recent report by LULAC concludes that 66 percent of all undocumented immigrants in this country are Hispanic so immigration policy has a direct or collateral impact on Hispanics, particularly in the realm of xenophobia. This same report shows that since 2020, when the pandemic broke out, anti-immigrant legislation nationwide has surged by 357 percent.
The effectiveness of the 1960 Kennedy campaign ad was that it spoke directly to Hispanics. That’s no longer the case, even though Hispanics could play a critical role in swing states like Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
Mirroring the electorate nationwide, Hispanics’ No. 1 concern is the economy. Border communities, once geographically isolated outposts of the country, are now beginning to realize that they are the gateway to significant Latin American markets. Mexico surpassed China as this country’s top trade partner in 2023 yet little mention has been made about cross-border trade. Instead, the border is treated as a war zone.
Such diverse think tanks as Brookings, the Atlantic Council and the Wilson Center have touted significant opportunities for regional, cross-border cooperation this election year. Yet scant mention has been made of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade by any politician.
Voter turnout will be a key factor this year and that’s the Hispanic Achilles heel. President Biden won 59 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2020, non-Hispanic whites had a turnout rate of just over 72 percent; 65 percent of Blacks voted, but only 52 percent of Hispanics cast a ballot.
Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez has said repeatedly that everyone should take note of the Rio Grande Valley’s population because that is how Texas and much of the country will soon look. If we don’t address the problems of this community at the local level -- including poverty, health care, and political participation – that's the real threat to democracy.
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Carlos Sanchez is director of Public Affairs for Hidalgo County in Deep South Texas and lives in McAllen. He is a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.