Alongside the banks of the Rio Grande River lies Starr County, Texas, a key to understanding the political realignment that despatched Donald Trump again to the White Home. Each probably the most Hispanic county within the nation and one of many poorest, Starr was additionally as soon as some of the resoundingly Democratic; Barack Obama received it by 73 factors in 2012. In 2020, the county swung more durable rightward than some other county within the U.S., by 55 factors. And in 2024, it voted Republican for the primary time in 132 years: Trump was on prime by 16 factors.
Two years earlier than, on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, I made a decision to pay Starr County a go to. As somebody who’s labored in skilled politics for greater than twenty years, most just lately as a pollster finding out realignment, I anticipated to see a pitched two-party battle on this newly minted political battleground.
In Rio Grande Metropolis, the county seat, I as an alternative discovered a politics extra parochial than wherever else I’ve visited in America: Elections for the varsity board seize the general public’s consideration excess of elections for governor or Congress. And this parochialism is an enormous a part of the rationale Starr County’s politics shifted thus far so quick.
Politics all through a lot of the nation was like Starr County’s, a patchwork of localized traditions solely tangentially related to voters’ ideological leanings. In lots of instances outlined by ethnicity and faith, these “ancestral” native social gathering attachments produced quirky and random outcomes—a Democratic West Virginia, a Republican Vermont. And though Hispanics had been a solidly Democratic group till just lately, the one-party nature of Democratic rule alongside the Rio Grande Valley was an outlier—particularly in relation to different Texas areas with massive concentrations of Hispanic residents, who have been at all times a aggressive voting bloc.
The realignments of current years—the midwestern white working class towards Trump’s GOP and the suburbs towards the Democrats—may be understood as the method of ideological and training sorting coming for teams that have been probably the most misplaced within the new political realm: wealthy suburban Republicans and culturally conservative working-class Democrats. In 2020 and 2024, this realignment got here for the nonwhite voters as soon as on the middle of Barack Obama’s coalition, particularly working-class Hispanics, and most particularly these within the rural outskirts of the Rio Grande Valley.
Starr County’s custom of machine politics, manifest in an unusually robust preoccupation with native elections, marked a spot ripe for a sudden political shift. Not in contrast to the Democratic majorities within the large cities of mid-century, which proceed at some degree into the current day, political dominance within the area was constructed not by allegiance to liberal beliefs however by political machines that delivered tangible advantages and formed the political identification of recent immigrant teams. That is evident in polling right now displaying that nonwhite Democrats are far more average and conservative than their white counterparts. For a time, ideological variations have been subsumed to the work of advancing group pursuits by machine politics. However in an period of declining social gathering group and an emptying out of majority-minority cities in favor of extra built-in suburbs, the tide of ideological voting might be held at bay for under so lengthy. As soon as it poured in, America shifted into a brand new period of politics, from one solid by social connections on the neighborhood degree to right now’s cultural and ideological polarization, the place you vote Republican you probably have conservative cultural beliefs, no matter race.
For Black voters, voting for Democrats as an act of group solidarity didn’t require city machines like Tammany Corridor. A Republican Occasion that was seen as main the backlash to civil rights was summarily dismissed—and those that strayed have been topic to social sanction. In South Texas, the rationale revolved round class; the Democrats have been seen merely because the social gathering that might do proper by the poor.
As these previous partisan ties start to weaken, it’s value remembering that one thing comparable has occurred earlier than, when the white working class’s standing because the bulwark of the previous Democratic Occasion started to unravel within the Nineteen Sixties. That was additionally a time of speedy social change, when a politics as soon as centered on assembly the fabric wants of the working class as an alternative began to revolve round questions extra summary: of battle and peace, of race and intercourse. And on key factors, the working class—which means the white working class early on and a extra numerous group right now—was not on board with the Democrats’ rising cultural liberalism.
The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, wouldn’t cease with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment got here for nonwhite voters. A primary tenet of the Democratic Occasion—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was deserted because the social gathering’s ideologically average and conservative nonwhite adherents started to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the voters. The Democratic analyst David Shor estimates that Democrats went from profitable 81 % of Hispanic moderates in 2016 to simply 58 % in 2024. And these voters have been now voting precisely how you’d anticipate them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the social gathering on the appropriate, moderates cut up nearer to both social gathering.
This clarification for political realignment ought to concern Democrats deeply, as a result of it will possibly’t be fastened by higher messaging or extra concerted outreach. The voters shifting away from the Democrats are ideologically average to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Occasion was fashioned in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one regionally dominant political social gathering may assist a once-marginalized group safe political energy. The system labored effectively when native politics was comparatively insulated from ideological divides on the nationwide degree. However this wouldn’t final perpetually—and nationwide polarization now guidelines every little thing round us.
Starr County was one of many final holdouts from ideological sorting, and I may really feel the strain between new and old-school politics once I visited. The early- voting facilities I visited within the Rio Grande Valley’s city areas have been plastered with indicators for congressional races that have been aggressive for the primary time in generations. However the farther I ventured out into rural areas—locations corresponding to Starr County—the much less voters appeared to care about nationwide races. Right here, the main target was near residence, and the smiling faces of school-board and county-office candidates coated almost each accessible public floor.
From his workplace—a clubhouse on the primary drag in Rio Grande Metropolis—Ross Barrera led the nascent county Republican group. Once we met, I requested him why native elections right here appeared to garner such outsize consideration.
His reply helped me resolve a bit of the puzzle of Starr County’s sudden political shift.
Rio Grande Metropolis is run not a lot by events, Barrera defined, however by rival factions with a powerful resemblance to the machines of previous. Faculty-board elections are formally nonpartisan, however the voting is organized round competing candidate slates. The slates are like parallel political events, however in a position to endorse throughout social gathering strains for partisan races. These factional operations are much more refined than the formal social gathering constructions. Candidates for the statehouse in Austin will merely pay these slates to function their get-out-the-vote operation, forgoing conventional marketing campaign exercise.
Why do the slates matter a lot? In most of the poorest counties within the nation, with little personal business, the No. 1 employer is the native faculty district. And whoever wins the school-board elections decides who will get the comparatively well-paying patronage jobs that include these seats. Which means the school-board races are uniquely high-stakes; incumbents will go to excessive lengths to safeguard their energy.
The world exterior the county courthouse the place individuals have been already casting their ballots was abuzz with exercise from the candidate slates. Every had its personal tent the place volunteers have been cooking up rooster dishes for voters passing by. Which tent a voter went to and frolicked at signaled their loyalty. Confrontations between the 2 camps weren’t unusual.
Within the Rio Grande Valley, whom you vote for is a secret, however the record of who voted is scrutinized by political bosses doling out jobs. The identical goes for main elections, when your alternative to drag a Democratic or Republican poll is public. In 2018, all however 13 voters countywide who participated within the main pulled a Democratic poll. One Republican instructed me he was as soon as handed a Democratic poll within the main—and was refused a Republican poll when he requested one. As a result of all the native officers have been Democrats and basic elections have been often uncontested, individuals noticed no level voting within the Republican main.
Elections on this a part of the state had not been free within the fullest sense of the phrase, unfolding in an environment of persistent surveillance. After the 2012 elections within the close by city of Donna, a number of space marketing campaign staff, identified regionally as politiqueras, pleaded responsible for bribing voters with money and dime baggage of cocaine. South Texas has an extended historical past of this sort of exercise, going again to the infamous political boss George Parr, who, in 1948, manufactured the votes that put Lyndon B. Johnson within the Senate.
Though nationwide politics was one thing of an afterthought, the area’s default was enduring loyalty to a Democratic Occasion identified merely as a tribune for the area’s poor. Republicans, in the meantime, have been dismissed because the social gathering of the white particular person and the wealthy, one thing Barrera referred to as “our personal type of racism.” As McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos, a Republican elected in 2021, defined it to me, on the dinner desk rising up, he would hear concerning the necessity of voting for the Democrats because the “social gathering of the poor.” His response: “We don’t should be poor.”
One thing appeared to interrupt in 2020. That pandemic 12 months, candidates needed to improvise new methods to achieve voters. Barrera remembers locals’ reactions when a “Trump prepare”—a caravan of vehicles and vans flying Trump flags—at some point drove down the primary county freeway. Individuals emerged quietly from their properties to witness the spectacle. After which, a lot to Barrera’s shock, they began applauding.
This small show was an early warning of the political sea change that might take Trump from profitable 19 % of the county’s vote in 2016 to 58 % in 2024. Though Trump made positive factors throughout the nation with Hispanic voters, a shift of this magnitude indicators one thing a lot greater than adjustments in coverage or positioning; it’s a desire cascade that comes about when social norms dictating group loyalty to a single social gathering begin to crumble. The Republican Occasion didn’t in some way persuade individuals to change their votes with new coverage positions. In areas the place political machines lengthy reigned supreme, like Starr County and the South Bronx, Republicans wanted to change votes by displaying voters that their neighbors have been switching as effectively. Two earlier cycles of working-class shifts, mixed with Trump campaigning in city areas and in media in style with younger nonwhite males, appeared to do the trick.
Past South Texas, the Democratic Occasion in America’s previous industrial cities was constructed by political machines that delivered tangible advantages to working-class and immigrant voters, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. In the future within the lifetime of George Washington Plunkitt, the famed Tammany Corridor district chief in New York, revealed the work it took to safe votes: At 2 a.m., he woke up to bail out a saloon keeper; at 6 a.m., he woke up to the sound of fireside vans and rose to provide help and organize housing for these affected; at 8:30 a.m., he went to the courthouse and secured the discharge of a number of “drunks”; at 9 a.m., he paid the hire for a poor household about to be evicted; at 11 a.m., he met with 4 males searching for employment and “succeeded in every case”; at 3 p.m., he attended the funerals of constituents; at 7 p.m., he presided over a district assembly; at 8 p.m., he attended a church honest and took the lads out for a drink after; at 9 p.m., he was again on the workplace, attending to numerous constituent issues; at 10:30 p.m., he attended a Jewish marriage ceremony.
At this time, machine politics should not held in excessive esteem. However they did have a method of discovering ignored voting blocs and placing them underneath safety. Different such examples of political group and advocacy are remembered extra fondly, such because the migration of Black voters into the Democratic Occasion following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which cemented a greater than 9-to-1 Democratic benefit in lots of Black neighborhoods. However extra just lately, this political solidarity has been held collectively by social forces—the expectation by different Black Individuals that their mates and neighbors will help Democrats—than by an ideological affinity for the social gathering, as documented within the political scientists Ismail Okay. White and Chryl N. Laird’s guide, Steadfast Democrats.
In an period of nationalized politics and rising polarization, the social foundation for Democratic majorities is wanting an increasing number of tenuous. Sure, the actual enchantment with which Trump was in a position to entice Hispanics and younger Black males might final for under an election cycle or two, however the truth that these communities are realigning to a celebration that matches their views on points, notably on cultural points corresponding to gender, signifies that many are prone to stick round.
A populist shift within the type of Donald Trump’s larger-than-life persona was sufficient to make many nonwhite voters shed decades-long partisan loyalties. Absent an enormous change in how these voters understand the Democratic Occasion, they aren’t going again.
