Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who due to redistricting will face GOP candidate Mayra Flores this fall in a redrawn 34th district in Texas, was astonished at the inaction by national Democrats as Flores won a district that had gone to the Democrats since the 19th century.
“I hope the DCCC learns their lesson with this before it happens across the country,” Gonzalez told Politico.
“They have just forgotten about the brown people on the border,” Gonzalez continued. “And that’s basically what it is. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat it anymore. They are taking Latinos in South Texas for granted.”
You can hardly blame Democrats for “forgetting about the brown people on the border.” In truth, they’d like to forget about the border entirely. Democrats will want to be somewhere else when an estimated 18,000 illegal aliens try to cross the border every day — a large percentage of those trying to enter the U.S. at one of the Rio Grande Valley crossings.
The expected border crush will happen once the Biden administration gets the go-ahead to restart the asylum program from a federal judge. The Title 42 immigration restrictions have severely limited border crossings, and once they’re lifted, the deluge will begin.
But the Democrats’ troubles in South Texas go far beyond immigration. Like any American, the residents of the Rio Grande Valley want jobs and opportunities, good schools, and decent health care. And Democrats have failed in that mission.
Related: Republican Mayra Flores Flips Another Deep-Blue House Seat Red
But the Democratic leadership is in denial. They believe the Latino vote is rock solid and there’s nothing to worry about.
“Look, I think the Republicans spent millions of dollars to win a seat that’s going away. We’re going to win this seat when it matters,” Maloney said in a brief interview. “You never like to lose, and I understand why people were upset by that. I think Republicans burned a lot of money, and we’re going to end up with that seat.”
But while the loss of this soon-to-disappear version of Texas’ 34th district is temporary, the trend it represents is growing more and more concerning for Democrats. The resounding win by Flores — a health practitioner and wife of a border patrol agent — marks the first flip of the midterm cycle for Republicans, and it also hands them a unique messenger as the GOP looks to capture more border and majority-Latino districts in November.
As chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) is about to preside over one of the greatest electoral disasters in the history of his party. He’s paid to talk confidently and dismiss disasters like the one that happened on Tuesday night in the 34th district.
But the writing is on the wall.
Republicans seized on the victory, declaring it a preview of Democratic losses to come in November — particularly in their one-time stronghold in South Texas. Not only did Flores handily defeat the Democrats’ candidate, Dan Sanchez, but she also showed how far the GOP has encroached on formerly blue territory in just a few years. In a handful of counties, Flores ran dozens of points ahead of Trump’s marks in his first bid for office in 2016. She even narrowly carried Cameron County, a longtime base of Democratic support.
Republicans across the state were jubilant: “South Texas has been a Democrat stronghold for over a century. To see South Texas move Republican is a seismic shift,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in a brief interview after Flores, whom he endorsed, won.
Unmooring Hispanics from the Democratic Party is perhaps the most significant movement of a political group in the last 50 years. But will it be a temporary displacement or a more permanent political arrangement?
Democrats celebrated the suburbanites supposedly abandoning Republican Party in 2016 and 2020. But look who suburbanites in New Jersey and Virginia voted for in 2021. Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory was attributed to suburban voters “coming home” and voting Republican.
So the GOP gains in Hispanic districts are not set in stone. But the more Hispanic votes Republicans can take away from Democrats, the larger their majority will grow.
