Why Democratic Gains In Texas's Big Metro Areas Could Outweigh Republican Success In South Texas
In his first public appearance after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, then-President Donald Trump sought respite in South Texas. His visit was billed as a way to promote the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico, but it also gave him a welcome escape from the turmoil in Washington. That’s because, just months prior, voters in Texas’s border region shifted sharply toward Trump.
And Trump isn’t the only Republican to see success in South Texas. In June, Javier Villalobos, a former Hidalgo County GOP chair, narrowly bested Veronica Vela Whitacre in a McAllen municipal election. Though the race was technically nonpartisan, local GOP officials insisted Villalobos was the first registered Republican elected mayor of the city this century. “The macro realignment accelerates in South Texas, and elsewhere, as Hispanics rally to America First,” former Trump campaign adviser Steve Cortes tweeted at the time.
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The state as a whole has long voted reliably Republican, but about two-thirds of Texas’s population lives in one of the state’s four huge metropolitan areas — Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. If you combine all the votes there, Democrats improved their margin by more than 5 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, carrying these areas 52 percent to 47 percent in November. This shift is significant because even though Texas’s border counties moved sharply to the right in 2020 — Starr County, for instance, swung a staggering 55 points toward Republicans — Democrats’ gains in those four big cities and their suburbs added almost five times as many votes as Republicans’ gains in 28 counties along or near Texas’s border with Mexico.
This is not to downplay Republicans’ gains along the border and in South Texas. Trump ultimately won 14 of these 28 counties — eight of which he flipped from 2016 — with many more counties than Starr lurching to the right: Maverick County moved 46 points to the right, Zapata County moved 38 points, Webb County moved 28 points and Hidalgo County moved 23 points. Hidalgo, with around 871,000 people, is the most populous county in the border area (edging out El Paso County’s 866,000), which made its shift toward Trump especially impactful in terms of raw vote totals. To be clear, President Biden still won the overall vote across the border and South Texas counties by 17 points, but this was about half the margin Hillary Clinton had in 2016, when she won the region by 33 points.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-democratic-gains-in-texass-big-metro-areas-could-outweigh-republican-success-in-south-texas/
