“All politics is local,” Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker from Massachusetts once said.
But can local politics also signal a national trend? Time will tell, of course, but if McAllen, Texas, is a sign, Democrats may want to worry.
On Saturday, Javier Villalobos, a city commissioner and the chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, was elected the new mayor of McAllen, the largest city in a county that abuts the Mexican border.
Villalobos’s victory is significant because Democrat Joe Biden carried Hidalgo County by 17 points over former President Donald Trump last year.
Yet his win is even more impressive when considering that Democrat Hillary Clinton beat Trump in Hidalgo County by 41 points in 2016.
As The Washington Examiner noted on Sunday, Villalobos’s “results point to a wider pattern of incremental successes for Republicans in South Texas, a heavily Hispanic region that has been politically dominated by Democrats for decades.”
After the election last November, Texas Monthly magazine gave readers an idea of how dominant Democrats have been throughout the Rio Grande Valley.
“Before this year, the Rio Grande Valley had been a Democratic stronghold, supporting the party’s presidential candidate in every election since 1972, often by nearly forty-point margins.”
Trump, however, for all his alleged “racism” and “xenophobia,” offered a message that the heavily Latino region could gravitate toward.
Texas Monthly asked a bipartisan handful of political operatives from the region why Republicans, led by Trump, are making in-roads.
Generally speaking, the operatives said, moderate and conservative Democrats in South Texas support law enforcement, which is one of the region’s largest employers, and abhorred the riots. Moreover, they are concerned about throwing open the border since many of them, as one source put it, “say they came to the U.S. the right way or that they’ve been here for a long time. They’re American.”
The Examiner noted that last year Trump flipped five Hispanic-majority counties in the region, including one a Republican candidate had not won in 100 years. In one example, he came up just five points short of Biden after losing by 60 points to Hillary. In another, he won a county by 32 points after dropping by eight-four years ago.
Asked by Texas Monthly how this could happen, a former adviser to self-proclaimed democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders observed, “At the Republican National Convention, the party had one Latino speaker after another telling their immigration story and how they lived the American dream. And if you just sit back and watch that or read the coverage, you might think, “Hey, these Republicans are all right. They like immigrants. They want to build entrepreneurship. They want us to all be rich like Donald Trump.”
Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar recently told the Texas Tribune, “Aside from Hispanic heritage, most of the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas have similar demographics to Trump’s strongholds in rural communities across the country. It’s homogenous, deeply religious, pensively patriotic, socially conservative, and it’s hurting economically.”
Maybe Hispanics here got the message Trump sent to black voters in 2016: What the hell have you got to lose?
If so, Democrats should be nervous about their racially divisive agenda.
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