Hispanic-American Voters In Texas

The Texas Tribune Reports: Donald Trump made inroads in South Texas this year. Voters in the historically Democratic stronghold of South Texas are left wondering whether this was simply a strange election during moi an unusual year or a sign of a profound political realignment in the region.

Texas Monthly reports in its article, "Why Did Joe Biden Lose Ground With Latinos in South Texas? ," 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. But for months ahead of the 2020 election, local organizers in the Valley and throughout South Texas had been warning Joe Biden’s campaign about anecdotal evidence of a shift away from the party.

The Texas Observer says in its article, "Local Organizers Explain the Republican Surge in South Texas:"

Even as local turnout surged, border counties largely shifted right, shrinking Democrats’ margins of victory in the presidential race and in key Congressional and state races. Starr County, one of the poorest in the U.S. and with the highest share of Hispanic residents, had the biggest shift. Barack Obama won by 73 points in 2012. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won by 60. This year, Joe Biden led by just five points. Local Democratic Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, who handily won re-election last cycle, hung onto his seat by less than three points.

Next to Starr County in neighboring Zapata County, which Clinton won by 33 percentage points in 2016, voters didn’t just swing more to the right — the county flipped all the way red.

And that trend continued all the way up and down the Texas-Mexico border, where Trump won 14 of the 28 counties that Clinton had nearly swept in 2016 while winning by an average of 33 percentage points. This year those same counties went for Biden by an average of just 17 points.

Did voters in Hispanic majority counties who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton in 2016 really flip to vote for Donald Trump in 2020? Most of the news reporting and discussion among Democratic and Republican activists alike is in the context of “one time Democratic voters flipped to vote Republican in 2020.” Comparing just the percentage numbers for this year to percent numbers for past years certainly suggests a lot of individual voters may have flipped from voting Democratic to voting Republican this year.

But no, that’s not what happened. 

While some individuals who voted for Obama and Clinton undoubtedly did vote Trump in 2020, that was not why Hispanic majority counties like Starr County had significant shifts in their percentage numbers between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Let’s go back to that paragraph about Starr County in the Texas Observer article and flesh out the percentage and raw number details on what actually happened.

Barack Obama won by 73 points (86% to 13% on 39% turnout) in 2012. Hillary Clinton won by 60 points (79% to 19% on 36% turnout) in 2016. Joe Biden led Trump by just 5 points (52% to 47% on 51% turnout) this year.

Note the differences in turnout between the 2012 and 2016 elections and the 2020 election. Turnout jumped 14.7 points from the 2016 election to 2020 election, plus, Starr county added almost 1,986 registered voters from 2016 to 2020. While Biden received nearly the same vote tally Clinton won in 2016, Trump polled 6,000 more votes in 2020 than he won in 2016. Republicans simply expanded their voting base, they didn’t flip heretofore Democratic voters.

In Zapata County, Trump earned 1,000 more votes in 2020 than he won in 2016, while Biden received 240 fewer votes than Clinton did in 2016. Zapata Co. has 8,252 registered voters.

And that story is repeated up and down the Hispanic majority counties where Trump’s percentage share of the vote increased from 2016 to 2020. 

How could Trump, one of the most virulently anti-immigrant leaders, make inroads with so many Latinos, and along the Mexican border no less? Although the vast majority of people in these counties mark “Hispanic or Latino” on paper, very few residents who are 4th, 5th, and 6th generation Americans commonly use the words “Latino” or Hispanic to describe themselves. They are at once Texans and Americans of Hispanic heritage — proud Tejanos. 

These Hispanic heritage Americans have assimilated, just as the descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants of the 1800s and early 1900s have assimilated, into the great melting pot of American culture. 

Ascribing Trump’s success in South Texas to his campaign winning more of “the Hispanic / Latino vote” makes the same mistake as Democrats have in this election: Treating Hispanics and Latinos as a monolithic voting block focused on new immigrant and dreamer issues rather than common “kitchen table“ concerns like jobs, mortgage payments, and keeping their small business operations running. It was Republican messaging on kitchen table issues that enticed heretofore non-voting Tejanos to register and vote for Donald Trump this year. 

• Trump Didn’t Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote - Understanding the difference will be key to Democrats moving past their faltering, one-size-fits-all approach to Hispanics.

In the end, Trump’s success in motivating Tejano voters in South Texas to had everything to do with not talking to them as Latinos. His campaign spoke to them as assimilated Americans, who have a set of specific concerns—among them, the oil and gas industry jobs, Main Street business support, gun rights and even abortion—amenable to the Republican Party’s positions, and it resonated. To be sure, it didn’t work with all of Texas’ Hispanic heritage Americans; Trump still lost that vote by more than double digits statewide, and Joe Biden won more of the nationwide Hispanic/Latino vote than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

A key fact to bear in mind while talking about Texas' Hispanic / Latino heritage voters is most don't live in South Texas' Rio Grande Valley counties - they largely live in the state's left-leaning urban / suburban counties.

But Trump proved that seeing specific communities as persuadable voters and offering targeted messaging that resonates with residents of these communities can be more effective than a blanket campaign that treats people as census categories. And in the end, it was enough to keep Florida and Texas in his column. If the Democratic Party’s 2020 postmortem for Texas—indeed, for the whole nation—goes only as far as to try to increase their appeal to “Latinos” as an undifferentiated bloc, they’re going to experience even harsher losses in the next election.

Even so, as Texas Republicans spent precious resources and treasure to run get out the vote operations - they hadn’t felt the need to run in 20 years - Donald Trump still lost the 53 Hispanic majority counties In South Texas by 12 points - 43.3 percent to 55.4 percent. 

While Trump mined 222.6K additional votes over his 2016 vote tally across the 53 Hispanic majority counties, Biden earned 164.9K more votes than Clinton won in 2016. The table below shows the relative aggregate vote shares across these counties for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates has been relatively stable from 2008 through 2020. The exception is 2016 when Trump underperformed McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012. Note the 3rd party candidate vote share increased in 2016 while Trump underperformed and Clinton slightly over performed Obama’s 2008 and 2012 performances in slightly higher turnout. Trump’s 2020 performance returned to the level of McCain’s 2008 and Romney’s 2012 performances.

Hisp COs	2008		2012		2016		2020
Rep	566.6K	43.6%	544.3K	42.8%	566.0K	38.5%	788.5K	43.3%
Dem	724.9K	55.7%	712.9K	56.0%	842.4K	57.2%	1.01M	55.4%
Other	9.4K	0.7%	15.7K	1.2%	63.5K	4.3%	24.0K	1.3%
Votes	1.30M	50.0%	1.27M	49.5%	1.47M	52.0%	1.82M	57.7%
% TX Vote		16.1%		15.9%		16.4%		16.2%
Reg Voter	2.60M	19.2%	2.57M	18.9%	2.83M	18.7%	3.16M	18.6%

Presidential Results For Texas' 53 Hispanic Majority Counties

The real story here is that Texas Republicans geared up a targeted in-person door to door canvassing voter registration and get out the vote operation across those counties - they hadn’t bothered to run in 20 years - to increase their share of the vote. While Texas Republicans expanded their raw vote turnout and relative vote share, they did not, for the most part, flip Democratic voters. 

Keep in mind, most of Texas’ Hispanic majority counties still have populations of Anglos as well as very conservative Hispanic-Americans that Republicans could target for registration and GOTV door to door canvassing. 

Keep in mind also, while turnout across those counties increased by 10 to 15 percent From county to county, from 30-something percent to just over 50 percent, those counties still lagged other counties where turnout topped 60 percent and even 70 percent in most other regions. 

With turnout barely topping 50 percent across most of those counties, there are still votes to mine for future elections. The question for Democrats to answer is:

• Have Republicans mined all last remaining right-leaning voters there are to mine across those counties;
• Will the “extra” voters they found to turnout for this election vote in future elections when Trump’s name isn’t on the ballot; and
• Can Democrats re-balance those counties by activating left-leaning non-voters in future elections?

While Republicans heavily engage in in-person campaign activities known to spread the life threatening Covid-19 virus, Democrats decided to not run their usual in-person voter registration and get out the vote events and canvassing operations out of concern those activities would further spread the Covid-19 virus across Texas counties already hard hit by the virus.

In a post election interview, Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa told The Texas Signal:

"Finally, I think the other thing that I truly believe — I don’t know that it would have made a difference for all the elections for the Statehouse and Congress, but I think it would have made a difference in some of the elections — which was, we were not able to do in-person canvassing.”

"That put us in a huge disadvantage with the Republican campaigns. They were doing door-knocking for three months.

We didn’t finally break down and just violate the agreements [to not door-knock] that we had with the national party until probably a week to 10 days prior to the election.

I personally felt that hurt us a lot in terms of the margins either that we experienced, or whether or not we would have been able to pick up some more seats. Maybe not the full amount to flip the Texas House, but more than we actually got. I mean, we picked up one seat and lost one statehouse seat.

That was something I had never done before. I’ve been in politics for two-thirds of my life and I had always been involved in campaigns where we did canvassing. This is the first time that we hadn’t.

I just think that really made it very difficult. It’s like we were fighting a boxing match where we’re being pounded, and we could only defend ourselves with one hand because we had the other one tied behind us."

...

Part of our campaign was to make sure that we got into competitive races, that based upon our 2018 experience for the statehouse and for Congress, were races that we thought we could win and ultimately flip the Texas House.

We did what we were supposed to do, but two things happened. We did not flip those statehouse seats for various reasons. But had we not done what we did, we probably would have lost all twelve statehouse seats that we picked up in 2018 and probably would have lost the two congressional seats that we picked up, plus maybe one or two more after that — we certainly would have lost Vicente González in the Valley, we would have lost Colin Allred in Dallas, we would have lost Lizzie Fletcher in Houston. And probably an additional one.

Based upon the way the dynamics of this actual election occurred, we got ourselves into a position where, unlike a lot of other states, we came out even or maybe a little bit ahead of 2018, even in the sense that we held onto everything we had and improved our margins in the presidential election.

The margins that we improved in Texas exceeded the margins of any of the swing states that were out there, other than Georgia and Arizona.

There was just an enormous upsurge of Trump voters that came out, that had not come out in 2016 and 2018, that came out to save Trump’s presidency.

That’s really what happened here. Even though we came within five and a half points in 2020 (which was more than we had in 2016 percentage-wise) Trump had more votes in 2020 than in 2016 in Texas.

So what happened was that there was just a lot more Trump voters out there than we imagined there was. And they came out in some areas, particularly in areas where we were fighting for those statehouse seats. We encountered this huge increase in Trump voters that substantially helped the Republican’s down-ballot.

The other thing that happened that we thought would be different because of what happened in 2018, is that all these races that we did not win were gerrymandered Republican districts. They were designed to elect Republicans based upon the way they had been drawn.

The 2018 seats that we won, we were able to pick them up because we did not have the Trump factor then, but I think they were tighter districts in terms of margins for Republicans than what you saw for the districts we targeted in 2020.

Without this Trump upsurge factor that came into place, we might have been able to win them. This huge increase in Trump voters made it to where we couldn’t. We did well, just to survive with what we had before.

We thought that because Trump had alienated so many people that was really the reason why you had this huge increase in turnout in Texas. With the early vote, for example, we had more early voters than we had in the entire 2016 cycle — we thought that those voters weren’t going to vote for him and vote for Biden instead because they were sick of Trump’s misbehavior in office. If we organized and we made our contacts and did everything we needed to do, we thought that it was going to help us pull more voters out to win these statehouse seats and congressional races."

Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha talks to Jon Favreau about how the party can improve its performance among Latino voters.

The table below shows the increase or decrease in registration and vote counts from the 2016 election to the 2020 election for each Hispanic majority county. 

The counties highlighted in blue are counties carried by Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. The Purple highlighted counties are counties won by Clinton in 2016 and Trump in 2020. Trump won the red Hispanic majority counties in 2016 and 2020 - McCain, Romney, and Bush also won these counties.  

Table: Delta change between 2016 and 2018

Hispanic Counties	% Hisp	2016 2020 Reg Voter Delta	2016 2020 Rep Vote Delta	2016 2020 Dem Vote Delta	2016 2020 3rd Vote Delta	2016 2020 Net Vote  Delta	2016 2020 Turnout  Delta
Aggregate		324,572	222,550	164,867	-39,502	347,915	5.7%
Bexar	59%	144,016	63,538	121,273	-18,417	166,394	7.2%
El Paso	82%	60,151	25,723	20,958	-6,660	40,021	2.1%
Hidalgo	91%	52,747	41,283	8,582	-3,869	45,996	4.9%
Cameron	88%	21,184	19,362	4,330	-2,136	21,556	5.3%
Webb	96%	14,549	12,951	-487	-972	11,492	3.5%
Starr	96%	1,986	6,000	-190	-72	5,738	14.7%
Maverick	96%	2,361	4,065	-2,073	-242	1,750	2.1%
Willacy	87%	498	890	-325	-85	480	2.1%
Zavala	94%	-549	796	228	-41	983	14.9%
Jim Hogg	93%	-142	401	-438	-48	-85	-0.2%
Dimmit	86%	-99	410	91	-60	441	6.6%
Duval	89%	-11	1,126	-210	-34	882	10.6%
Brooks	91%	-907	385	-467	-30	-112	4.6%
Presidio	83%	-17	69	5	-65	9	0.4%
Culberson	76%	-53	135	-16	-22	97	7.0%
Val Verde	80%	1,237	1,949	-563	-586	800	0.7%
Jim Wells	79%	128	1,969	-669	-172	1,128	4.0%
Kleberg	70%	751	1,190	643	-304	1,529	6.0%
Frio	78%	-146	956	-23	-69	864	10.4%
Zapata	93%	612	1,003	-243	-35	725	5.7%
Reeves	74%	455	832	-265	-68	499	3.9%
Lasalle	86%	253	463	-77	-39	347	5.0%
Kenedy	77%	-22	43	-34	-1	8	7.0%
Nueces	61%	12,185	13,701	11,551	-2,673	22,579	7.7%
Uvalde	69%	577	1,325	199	-165	1,359	6.0%
Bee	56%	324	1,255	-164	-171	920	4.7%
Hudspeth	80%	245	268	47	-29	286	8.2%
Pecos	67%	153	745	-176	-91	478	4.8%
San Patricio	54%	1,894	3,465	1,100	-371	4,194	7.4%
Atascosa	62%	2,921	3,402	1,214	-204	4,412	9.9%
Kinney	56%	27	208	-12	-23	173	6.9%
Edwards	51%	-15	147	-137	-19	-9	0.1%
Deaf Smith	67%	231	382	78	-68	392	3.2%
Ector	53%	7,730	7,566	1,061	-740	7,887	5.0%
Crosby	52%	25	215	59	-49	225	5.9%
Crockett	63%	-80	239	-28	-33	178	9.0%
Castro	60%	-106	187	-60	-42	85	3.6%
Hale	56%	-476	796	170	-264	702	4.8%
Dawson	53%	-239	315	-27	-62	226	4.8%
Winkler	54%	196	350	-62	-38	250	3.8%
Floyd	53%	-218	107	2	-33	76	4.7%
Bailey	60%	-175	86	10	-35	61	4.1%
Sutton	60%	-87	147	9	-15	141	7.7%
Crane	55%	-16	198	-58	-21	119	4.8%
Cochran	53%	-6	127	-14	-18	95	5.5%
Moore	53%	328	379	-39	-122	218	0.4%
Parmer	60%	74	218	3	-39	182	3.1%
Lamb	52%	-220	402	64	-67	399	6.3%
Yoakum	59%	237	375	-7	-43	325	4.4%
Reagan	61%	-14	233	5	-18	220	12.1%
Concho	53%	95	173	49	-22	200	7.9%