Carmen Cavazos’s southeast Houston district has been consistently Democratic for years: In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 68% of the vote in her district, a sprawling residential neighborhood of about 3,000 people near Hobby Airport.
But something is shifting in this district, where roughly 9 in 10 residents are Hispanic: President Joe Biden won the district by 20 points in his 2020 race against Donald Trump — a solid showing for a Democrat, but half the 40-point margin Clinton won against the same Republican just four years ago.
Ms. Cavazos, 44, a flight attendant and Republican precinct chair, expects the trend to continue in November. She is trying to accelerate political change by helping organize regular meetings of the Saturday Menudo Club, a group that meets monthly at a local Mexican restaurant to hear conservative candidates and other speakers.
“Messaging and voter engagement in our communities is crucial,” Cavazos said. “The false narratives of identity politics and ideological propaganda encouraged by Democrats fall apart when presented with data, facts and statistics.”
Republicans have made historic gains in South Texas over the past few elections, turning a border region that has long voted solidly Democratic into a political battleground, a sea change that has largely masked a more subtle rightward shift among Latino voters in cities and suburbs far from the border.
The threat of declining Latino support in urban areas could pose an even bigger problem for Democrats’ enduring hopes of leading Texas to a Democratic victory, because those areas are home to far more Latino voters than South Texas. Democrats may not lose districts like Cavazos’ anytime soon, but if Republicans can continue to win nearly 40% of the vote there, they will continue to be shut out of statewide elections.
Latino voters have long been a stable Democratic voter base in Texas, and exit polls in 2016 showed Clinton winning among Latinos statewide by a 27-point margin, barely matching Barack Obama’s 28-point lead in 2008.
But in 2020, Biden won the statewide Hispanic vote by just 17 points. About 4 in 10 Hispanics voted for Trump. Across Texas, including major cities like Houston and San Antonio, precincts that are at least 80% Hispanic, Democrats’ vote share was an average of 17 percentage points lower than in 2016, according to The New York Times.
And heading into November, polls in Texas and elsewhere show that leading Democrats continue to struggle with support among Hispanic voters, and Biden was lagging behind Trump among Hispanic voters in Texas before dropping out of the race.
“Latinos are still a majority Democratic voter,” said Jaime Mercado, a Houston-based Democratic strategist. “Latinos are voting Democratic overall, countywide, statewide. But we need to be very careful about those districts where we’re seeing something starting to go the other way. That should concern us and we should address it.”
Republicans are bullish
Texas Republicans are bullish on continuing to gain support from Latino voters this fall, and are hoping that a message focused on broader issues like inflation and the economy, immigration and crime will resonate with Latino voters.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is spending $4.4 million on an ad campaign targeting Latino voters during his reelection bid, with the bulk of the money going to Spanish-language ads. Cruz’s first ad targeted at Latino voters is called “El Valiente Senador,” or “The Brave Senator,” and portrays him as a warrior fighting high taxes and striving to keep Texas “free and safe.”
“We think there’s a great opportunity to get more of the Hispanic vote,” Cruz campaign spokeswoman Macarena Martinez said. “We’ve been told for a long time that Hispanics are Republicans, they just haven’t realized it yet.”
This election marks the first since the U.S. Census Bureau reported that Hispanics in Texas now outnumber non-Hispanic white residents in the state. According to the Pew Research Center, Hispanics make up nearly one-third of the voting-eligible population in Texas, higher than all but two other states. According to the nonprofit organization UnidosUS, one-quarter of Hispanics in Texas will be voting in their first presidential election this fall.
“That means they don’t have a traditional tradition of wanting to vote Democrat or Republican,” said Jorge Martinez, Texas strategy director for the LIBRE Initiative, a conservative Latino voter advocacy group. “They’re going to be voters that either side can lobby to get out the vote.”
Harris County Republican Party spokesman Robert Cardenas said the party has seen positive audiences among Hispanic voters at town hall events focused on crime and at venues like a recent gun show in Pasadena, where the party ran a booth where attendees could register to vote.
Cardenas said concerns about the rising cost of basic goods, more than anything, are driving Latinos and working-class voters of all races and ethnicities to the Republican Party — an issue that has dogged Biden for much of his term but that Democrats are optimistic is finally starting to ease.
“It’s affecting them, whether they can go out, whether they can pay their bills,” Cardenas said. “It’s about the economy, and I think that’s why we’re seeing such big changes.”
A statewide poll conducted by Univision earlier this year found that roughly two-thirds of undecided Latino voters cited inflation, cost of living and jobs as their top priorities above all other issues.
Mercado worries that Democrats’ overall message in recent years has been tainted by the influence of party elites, who spend too much time online and not enough time canvassing, and who have helped craft a message that’s too focused on identity politics and not enough about jobs and opportunity, he said.
“Frankly, some of the MAGA messaging is being embraced by blue-collar, hard-working, non-college-educated people,” Mercado said, “and you know who fits those demographics really well? Latinos.”
But despite Republican gains among Hispanics in urban areas, some Republicans think the GOP can do better. Majority-Hispanic areas in Texas cities remain Democratic, and many of the precincts in those areas don’t have Republican precinct chairs, an issue that has frustrated Orlando Sanchez, founder of the Texas Hispanic Conservative Party.
Sanchez, of the group that promotes Latino political participation, said that if one were to evaluate the Texas Republican Party’s recent efforts to reach Latinos in urban areas, “I would say they’ve gone from a D to a C-.”
“In major metropolitan areas, they’ve been really bad at getting the conservative message across,” said Sanchez, a former Houston city council member and mayoral candidate. “They’re really good at criticizing communities that want to cut police budgets, but they’re not so good at getting the positive message across about economic opportunity for Hispanics.”
Sanchez said he believes Republicans should be more proactive in promoting their free-market economic vision to working-class Latinos and are missing an opportunity to criticize specific policies pursued by the Biden administration, such as student loan debt relief.
“Republicans are missing an opportunity to explain to Hispanics that their hard-earned paychecks are going to pay off the debt of a young man in Massachusetts who got a liberal arts degree from Boston University,” Sanchez said. “If you explain that to Hispanic families, they won’t vote Democrat anymore.”
According to a Univision poll, 60% of Hispanic voters in Texas “support the Biden administration’s efforts to forgive student loans,” while 21% express opposition.
“The Latino Vote”
Some of the most surprising political shifts in the country in 2020 occurred along the border in Starr County, where Trump lost by 5 points after losing by 60 points four years ago, and neighboring Zapata County, which flipped Republican after Clinton won by 33 points in 2016.
But while national media coverage captured shifts in voter sentiment, the two predominantly Latino counties tallied just about 21,000 votes combined in 2020. In Harris County, by contrast, more than 337,000 voters with Spanish surnames cast ballots, according to an estimate by Harris County Election Supervisor Hector de Leon, who tracks voting patterns in the Houston area.
The poll revealed stark differences between the values and attitudes of Latino voters in urban counties and those in South Texas — a reminder of the diverse backgrounds, nationalities, religious and cultural beliefs that are often lumped together as the “Latino vote.”
A statewide poll conducted in April by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation found that Hispanic voters in metropolitan areas are much less supportive of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s efforts to control the U.S.-Mexico border than are Hispanic voters in suburban and South Texas. The poll found a similar regional split on the billions of dollars in spending on Abbott’s border enforcement: 70% of Hispanic voters in border counties and South Texas support spending billions of state taxpayer dollars on border security, compared with 48% in metropolitan counties.
The poll also found that Latinos living in big cities are more likely to support abortion rights than those living in South Texas. The regional disparities suggest that the parties’ general messaging on these issues is received very differently by Latino voters depending on where they live, said Mark Jones, chief information and analysis officer at the Hispanic Policy Foundation.
“Many of the national Democratic policies that criticize Governor Abbott and criticize the Republican approach to the border are going to be extremely unpopular in South Texas and the (Rio Grande Valley) and, most importantly, in the two congressional races that are actually at stake this term,” said Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, referring to the battleground districts of Texas’ 15th and 34th congressional districts.
But there are also similarities between the regions.
Daniel Vazquez, 35, a San Juan resident who regularly commutes three hours to work as a safety coordinator at the Port Lavaca refinery, said he started paying attention to politics during Obama’s 2008 campaign and voted for him twice, along with Clinton, in 2016. But he leaned Republican midway through the Trump administration, buoyed by the strong economy and the GOP’s pro-petrochemical policies.
Energy policy may also be driving the shift among Latinos around Houston: Dozens of majority-Latino neighborhoods in eastern Harris County, including the Ship Channel area, where many residents work in petrochemical jobs, moved rightward between 2016 and 2020.
Vázquez said Biden administration policies aimed at combating climate change, such as an attempt to suspend natural gas export permits, have further solidified his views. While he believes environmental issues are important, Vázquez said Biden should be more balanced.
“The economy was good for me,” Vasquez said. “My salary had more purchasing power. Jobs were available all over the state. The oil and gas sector was booming.”
Disclosure: Rice University and The New York Times are financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is supported in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters have no role in Tribune journalism. A complete list of financial supporters can be found here.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a nonpartisan, member-supported newsroom dedicated to informing and engaging Texans on Texas politics and policy.
