Starr County is the most Hispanic county in the U.S—97% of its 66,000 residents are Hispanic, primarily of Mexican descent. On Nov. 5, voters in Starr County backed Mr. Trump over Kamala Harris by 57.7% to 41.8%, an emphatic reversal of the result in 2020, when Joe Biden won with 52%. In 2016 Hillary Clinton romped home with 79% of the county’s vote to Mr. Trump’s 19%.
For 132 years, the county had been an impregnable Democratic bastion. The last time it voted for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1892, when Benjamin Harrison unsuccessfully sought re-election. “The result this year was a shock for some, but not for me,” says Toni Treviño, chairwoman of the Starr County GOP. “We had all the conditions in place for a Republican win. I’ve been telling people for the last six months that I believe that Donald Trump was going to win in our county.”
Why did the long-blue Rio Grande Valley turn red? I put the question to Rep. Monica De La Cruz, the Republican representing Texas’ 15th Congressional District. Last week she retained the seat she first won in 2022. She offers three reasons why Republicans flipped the valley. The first is the border. Hispanics, she says, want “national security” and “safe neighborhoods,” and they believe Mr. Trump will give them that.
The second reason is the economy. The inflation since 2020 has had “devastating effects” on her community. The third reason is cultural. While the Republican Party was “speaking about prosperity,” she says, “Democrats were talking about pronouns.” The GOP, in her view, has become the home of the “hardworking blue-collar American, and that’s why we saw such a significant shift, especially in the Rio Grande Valley.”
I tested Ms. De La Cruz’s hypotheses in Rio Grande City, the Starr County seat. I found that voters’ paychecks, without doubt, were the main explanation for Mr. Trump’s sweep of this impoverished region. “The reason why Starr County and the Rio Grande Valley more broadly voted for Trump is the economy, and President Trump himself,” says Ms. Treviño, the county GOP head. “It’s just been real hard in a place where so many people live on fixed incomes.” Mr. Garza, the schoolteacher, says there’s more to that. He speaks of a “Trump effect. Once you start messing with people’s pocketbooks, the people won’t forget.” But Mr. Trump also “took a bullet for us. That is not something to be taken lightly. Anybody else would’ve backed out.”
The loss of oil-sector jobs, the result of the Biden administration’s curbs on drilling and exploration, has also hit Starr County hard. Maria Yvette Hernandez, 47, a Republican accountant who nearly upset a 24-year incumbent in the 2022 local election for Starr County judge (an executive position in Texas), says that the loss of oil-sector jobs “is killing Starr County.” The sector has been a boon to the region’s blue-collar man, who “migrates to Pecos, Midland, Odessa and New Mexico” for work: “You’re either transporting, digging up the wells, or testing blowback wells. And you’re making more than teachers with degrees.” A teacher makes “about $50,000 to $60,000 on average. An oilfield worker, a laborer, is going to be making $80,000.” And that’s with “no education, straight out of high school.” Those jobs have been “hit by the Biden administration energy curbs.” Ms. Hernandez reports that oil workers were told by their managers that the jobs would “bounce back” if Mr. Trump won.
The border is a big deal to Starr County. Any sympathy the valley may have had toward migrants has dissipated because “most of them are not from Mexico now, but from 150 other countries in the world,” as Ms. Treviño puts it. Her husband, Benito, 77—who was Starr County Republican chairman from 1986-2004—says it “really bothers” him that “people outside Texas, up north, expect that Hispanics along the border will turn a blind eye to all these illegals because they’re ‘the same people’ as we are. It really bothers me that they’re insinuating that we’re complicit in lawbreaking.”