Jorge Bazan's family has lived on the US-Mexico border for generations and voted for Democrats as long as he can remember. He broke the family tradition this year and voted for Donald Trump because he doesn't trust the Democratic Party's economic policies. "I think they forgot about the middle class," says Bazan, who works for the utility company in Rio Grande City, seat of the most Hispanic county in the nation. "People are suffering right now. Everything's very expensive." Tuesday's vote made clear that Bazan is not alone in his views.
The South Texas region—stretching from San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley—has long been a Democratic stronghold. A slide toward Trump in 2020 rattled Democrats in the predominately Hispanic area, where for decades Republicans seldom bothered to field candidates in local races. However, few Democrats expected the dramatic realignment that happened Tuesday, when Trump flipped several counties along the border including Hidalgo and Cameron, the two most populous counties in the Rio Grande Valley. In Starr County, where Bazan lives, voters backed a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in a century.
The predominantly Hispanic and working-class rural county, with a median household income of $36,000 that's one of the lowest in the nation, gave Trump a 16 percentage-point victory margin over Vice President Kamala Harris. Roughly 2 million residents live at Texas' southernmost point, among vast tracts of farmland and many state and federal agents patrolling the border. Trump's victories in the Rio Grande Valley starkly showed how working-class voters nationwide are shifting toward Republicans. That includes voters on the Texas border, where many Democrats long argued that Trump's promised crackdowns on immigration would turn off voters.
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- "I was always a lifelong Democrat, but I decided to change to Republican with the political landscape that it is now," said Luis Meza, a 32-year-old Starr County voter. "I felt that going Republican was the better choice, especially with the issues of immigration and everything like that that's going on."
- In McAllen, Texas, Jose Luis Borrego, 37, said that inflation and the promise of tougher border restrictions made him vote for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time. "I wanted to see change and that's why I did vote for Trump," he said, adding, "I would not call myself a Republican."
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