Considering South Texas as a whole, Democrats had great hopes of winning the 21st congressional district which connects San Antonio and Austin, as well as the 78 per cent Latino 23rd, which is anchored in the western suburbs of San Antonio but encompasses a vast swathe of southwestern Texas. Even in El Paso, a hotbed of Democratic activism, Trump made a 6 per cent gain. Vincente Gonzalez (D-McAllen) had to fight down to the wire to save the seat he won by 21 per cent in 2018. In addition he increased his vote in Maverick County (Eagle Pass) by 24 per cent and Webb County (Laredo) by 15 per cent. Further up river he actually flipped 82 per cent Latino Val Verde County (Del Rio) as well as Zapata County, which no Republican has won since the end of Reconstruction. More than half of the population of Starr County, an ancient battlefield of the Texas farmworkers movement, lives in poverty yet Trump won 47 per cent of the vote, an incredible gain of 28 per cent since 2016. In the three Rio Grande Valley counties (the agricultural corridor from Brownsville to Rio Grande City) which Clinton had carried by 40 per cent, Biden harvested a margin of only 15 per cent. However when the fog of battle dissipated, Democrats were stunned to discover that a high turnout had instead propelled a Trump surge along the border. A blue wave along the Rio Grande from El Paso to Brownsville was taken for granted. The Biden campaign seems to have believed that anti-Trump sentiment alone would add another 100,000 votes along the border without having to divert resources from the suburban battlefields. If we take Latino turnout from 40 per cent to 50 per cent, that’s enough to flip Texas.’ The strongly Democratic border is one of the poorest regions in the country, heavily dependent upon agriculture and nafta trade with Mexico, with a population routinely vilified by Republican propaganda as aliens and rapists. We can make up these votes alone in the Valley. Remember, Beto lost by about 200,000 votes in 2018. ‘The road to the White House’, he declared, ‘goes through South Texas. ![]() This was acknowledged two days before the election when Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez made a last-minute visit to the McAllen area. ![]() The one-size-fits-all suburban template that was used by the Biden campaign in Texas and almost everywhere else ignored the consensus view of veteran campaign strategists from both parties that the real key to swinging the state is the mobilization of the ‘sleeping’ Latino majority in South Texas, especially in the seven major border counties where 90 per cent of the population is of Mexican origin.
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