WISEMAN’S AMERICA
How Hispanic voters across the country returned historic swings to Trump
Oliver Wiseman in Texas finds Hispanic Republicans in good heart
''The road to the White House runs through Texas,” enthused Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez on a get-out-the-vote zip through the southeast corner of the state two days before last month’s election. Like many predictions of a thumping Democratic triumph, Perez’s stump-speech claim that Texas would turn blue and hand Joe Biden the White House was quickly disproved on election night.
In a closer election than most expected, Biden may have won, but Texas voted for Donald Trump. As the results filtered through, a notable demographic exception to the swing towards the Democrats soon emerged. The candidate we had been told was the embodiment of white identity politics lost support among white voters while gaining ground among members of America’s largest minority. The president of immigration restriction and parent-child border separation won more votes from Hispanic Americans in 2020 than he did in 2016.
And it wasn’t just Miami’s Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans, perhaps the most vocal cheerleaders for Hispanic Republicanism. Heavily Hispanic counties across the country moved away from the Democratic Party. According to a Financial Times average of exit poll data, Trump gained by eight percentage points among Hispanic voters. Other estimates put the shift in the double digits.
In America’s polarised politics, that is a seismic change. It doesn’t just alter the electoral calculus; it strikes at the heart of both major parties’ sense of themselves, undercutting assumptions about the coalition of voters both parties should be looking to assemble. It also points to something important about the divides that really count in the US, the competing stories the country tells itself, and even what it means to be an American.
Nowhere was the Republicans’ Latino surge more pronounced than in the poor, heavily Hispanic, traditionally Democratic corner of South Texas where Perez had predicted that Biden would carry the state. In a string of economically, socially and politically neglected towns along the Mexican border, Republican support surged. These counties saw bigger swings towards the GOP than swings in either direction anywhere else in the United States.
The most dramatic shift of all was in Starr County, in the Rio Grande Valley, the most Hispanic county in the country, and one of the poorest. More than 95 per cent of the county is Latino. In 2012, Barack Obama won 86 per cent of the vote there. Four years later, Hillary Clinton won with a comfortable 79.1 per cent share of the vote. This year, Joe Biden managed just 52 per cent. Shifts of that scale are almost unheard of, and so, a few weeks after a closer-than-expected election, an unlikely question has national significance: what the hell just happened in Starr County?
As you drive into Rio Grande City, the biggest town in Starr County, unpromising-looking farmland gives way to run-down single-storey homes, banners for the high-school football team, cheap fast-food joints and advertisements for ambulance-chasing lawyers.
In other words, driving into Rio Grande City feels a lot like driving into a town in pro-Trump parts of Appalachia. Ignore the background of Rio Grande City’s residents and the proximity to the border, and the town’s economic and social circumstances are similar to those of overwhelmingly white working-class parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania or Kentucky. The town’s major employers are the school district and the local hospital. Some of the town’s residents work in oil and gas, making the ten-hour drive for well-paid stints in West Texas’s Permian Basin.
Proximity to the border means a lot of residents work for border patrol, customs and the police. Energy and law enforcement: it’s not hard to see why a party that spent the summer debating defunding the police and phasing out fossil fuels might haemorrhage support in Rio Grande City.
As chairman of the Starr County Republican Party, Ross Barrera admits to being something of an unwitting revolutionary. “It was a surprise to me too,” the military retiree tells me when we meet at his home to discuss the result. His family has been here since the 1800s and he describes the area as “very conservative, very Catholic, very family orientated” — and, until 2020, unwaveringly Democratic.
Trump gained by eight percentage points among Hispanic voters — a seismic change
the last 120 years the whole Rio Grande Valley has been Democratic,” says Barrera. “People who are Republicans in the Valley don’t talk about it because they are looked down upon. You know when a black Republican gets called an Uncle Tom? It’s the same with us.” But when Barrera opened a Facebook page in the spring, he was pleasantly surprised by the response. “People started defending Donald Trump,” he says.
Modest mobilisation efforts stepped up a gear in June, when a neighbouring town starting holding “Trump trains” — raucous parades of cars decked out in Trump banners and flags that took off across the country this year. Barrera’s fellow Starr County Republicans asked why they weren’t doing the same thing. “I was worried,” he says. “Would we get ten cars? We might be embarrassed. But we decided to do one anyway. We put a post on Facebook and, low and behold, 50 or 60 cars showed up. There were people from the ranches, young kids, older people, people who couldn’t speak any English, first-generation Mexican immigrants.”
Barrera recalls his conversations with voters during the campaign: “I expected somebody to tell me about kids in the cages, the border wall, or ‘Mexicans are rapists’ [a reference to the divisive speech with which Trump announced his 2016 presidential bid]. Nobody mentioned that.”
Instead, Barrera says the issues that dominated were Democratic calls to defund the police, threats to the energy industry and, more surprisingly, the unlikely rapport between Trump and Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Until 2016, Pat Saenz, a 57-year-old handyman and former high-school athletics coach, had always voted Democrat. When he voted for Trump four years ago, he split his ticket, opting for the Democratic candidates down the ballot. This time he voted Republican across the board and helped Barrera with the campaign, distributing Trump yard signs to other freshly emboldened Rio Grande Republicans. “I gave five boxes to state troopers, highway patrol, border patrol, customs,” he says. “They don’t want to be defunded and we don’t want them to be defunded. They take care of us.”
Saenz tells me he was brought up to “respect this great country and respect its great history”. When Saenz goes on holiday to American cities, he says, he always takes pictures of the statues there. “When Black Lives Matter were knocking down those statues, that infuriated people like me who love our country. I’m Mexican-American, but I’m American, you know what I mean?”
Support from people like Saenz has senior Republicans excited, not just because of the electoral upside, but also because of the story it allows them to tell voters about their party. On election night, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley — a prominent spokesman for the GOP’s populist wing and widely seen as a 2024 presidential contender — declared: “We are a working-class party now. That is where the future is.” Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American Florida senator who lost to Trump in the 2016 primary, has said the election results point to a future for the party that is “based on a multiethnic, multiracial working-class coalition”.
This Republican enthusiasm isn’t hard to understand. Those who feared that Trump’s racially inflammatory rhetoric meant a shrinking pool of voters who would consider voting Republican feel a lot better after the election than they did before. As well as the Hispanic surge, Trump seems to have improved his support among black Americans, albeit only slightly and from a low base.
Of course, there’s a risk that Repub“For
licans get carried away with their performance among Hispanic voters. Ronald Reagan once said, “Latinos are Republican, they just don’t know it yet.” And yet a majority of Hispanics still vote Democrat, and before Trump the Republican Hispanic vote has fluctuated. In 2004, George W. Bush won around 40 per cent; eight years later, Mitt Romney netted just 27 per cent.
Will Hurd understands the challenges that face Republicans eager to further diversify their voting coalition. A 43-year-old congressman who is stepping down at the end of the year, he is the only black Republican in the House, where he represents a 70 per cent Hispanic Texan district not far from the Rio Grande Valley. Hurd calls the results an opportunity. “It shows that we can make inroads,” he tells me. “But we have a long way to go.”
He argues that the question Republicans need to answer to make further progress is, “What are you going to do to help me move up the economic ladder?”
often miserably so. Now they have caught up. Unsurprisingly, in a poll conducted two years ago, 70 per cent of parents reported that charter schools had improved education. Most on the left of the Democrat party are ideologically opposed to charter schools: Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders campaigned to cut off their federal funding amid a feeling that Democrats need the support of the teaching unions. What of Biden? As usual, he has zig-zagged.
The president-elect let slip while campaigning that he was no “fan” of charter schools, a nod to his base, yet he declined to throw any more red meat their way with, for example, promises to defund. This gives him plenty of wriggle room.
He should make charter schools a signature policy of his presidency; children will be better educated, Republicans buttered up, divisions reduced and voters gained. Wake up Joe, you can do this.
Biden might also remember that this is good centrist Democrat policymaking. The Clinton administration pioneered charter schools and Barack Obama supported them too, arguing in 2012 that they “give educators the freedom to cultivate new teaching models and develop creative methods to meet students’ needs. This unique flexibility is matched by strong accountability and high standards, so underperforming charter schools can be closed.” It is also true that after almost a year of enforced home schooling and “distance learning” parents and educators are probably open to rather more
flexibility and experimentation than usual once the pandemic come to an end.
How else might Biden woo Republicans? He should ensure that all the encroachments on personal freedoms and civil liberties necessitated by Covid-19 are rolled back as soon as the immediate health crisis has passed. Many economic liberals strongly suspect a Democratic presidency might retain, and even enjoy, the sort of government over-reach we have witnessed over the past year. Some mutter darkly that America is on a latter-day Road to Serfdom, with the current lockdowns sliding seamlessly into a wider collectivist takeover.
Everyone will be happy to throw off the present restrictions; there is no earthly reason to keep them more than a minute longer than is absolutely necessary. But in doing so quickly and decisively Biden would belie some of the more gloomy Republican expectations and win some grudging admirers.
Finally, Biden has to find a way of prising Republicans out of the ideological echo-chamber that is Fox News and back into the mainstream of political debate. This is more complicated, but vital. Emily Ekins of the right-of-centre Cato Institute conducted some very revealing polling a few months before the election around the question of why so many American are “scared stiff” to talk about politics.
Despite all the political clamour and rancour this year, she still found that a full 62 per cent were afraid to express their political opinions, rising to 77 per cent among Republicans (as against just 52 per cent of Democrats). Tellingly, her polling showed that only “staunch progressives”, aka left-leaning Democrats, feel free to speak their minds. Among the more highly-educated, those with postgraduate degrees, 60 per cent of Republicans are fearful of expressing their political views, as opposed to just 25 per cent of Democrats.
This is an appalling indictment of the shrinking public square. Many, and one side in particular, feel intimidated into silence. No wonder that these people flocked to the loudmouth Trump in such numbers and hunker down on the sofa with Fox’s Tucker Carlson. They feel safe there.
John McCain had the courage to push back against those supporters who vilified his presidential opponent Barack Obama. Will Biden show similar courage in facing down some of his own supporters, thus encouraging Republicans back into the public square? Or will he take the easy route and simply indulge those who dismiss all those 70 million Trump supporters as witless “deplorables”?
On that question hangs his presidency.