Texas Red
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- Oct 31, 2022
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The new swing vote: Why more Latino voters are joining the GOP
The new swing vote: Why more Latino voters are joining the GOP
For decades, Latino voters in the United States have been overwhelmingly Democratic. A growing conservative shift could change that.
www.csmonitor.com
But between 2016 and 2020, Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville, the region’s three biggest cities, all moved toward Mr. Trump by an eye-popping 20 to 30 percentage points – the largest shifts of any metro areas in the country. Similarly, Starr had the biggest shift of any county in the country, going from a 60-point Hillary Clinton victory in 2016 to a mere 5-point win for President Biden four years later.
In June, Ms. Flores shocked the political establishment when she won a special election to replace a retiring Democrat, becoming the first Republican in 151 years to win a House seat from the Rio Grande Valley – and the first Mexican-born woman in Congress. A former respiratory therapist who moved to the U.S. when she was 6 years old and became a citizen in her teens, Ms. Flores ran on the simple motto “God, Family, Country.”
Now, she and two other Republican Latinas, Cassy Garcia and Monica De La Cruz, are making strong plays for all three of the area’s congressional seats in November.
“Trump just opened up our eyes,” says Ms. David, back in Ms. Flores’ campaign office. “We saw all this change in our culture, against our values, and now we – Latinas – are standing up.”
While polling shows that Hispanic men are more likely to support the Republican Party than Hispanic women, Equis Research found that Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Latinas had increased 12 points by the end of his term – a shift much greater than that among Latino men. When weighted by subgroup size, Equis said Latino women likely made the “greatest impact” electorally.
Every Latina I know is voting Republican. That's all I can say.
