Four long years ago, much ado was made about the inroads made by then-President Donald Trump in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the four-county region of 1.4 million mostly Hispanic residents at the state’s southern tip. Then-candidate Joe Biden carried the traditionally deep-blue area by about 15 points total, winning both the state’s urban counties, Hidalgo and Cameron, and the rural, Starr and Willacy. But that was less than half the margin by which Hillary Clinton had carried the Valley in 2016. (Much national attention was paid to sparsely populated Zapata County, neighboring the Valley, which Trump flipped.)
In the subsequent midterm, Republicans were bullish about a red wave that would build on Trump’s gains by appealing to conservative social attitudes and material economic interests of Valley Latinos. This didn’t really happen: The GOP flipped a congressional seat and a state House seat, which had both just been redrawn through redistricting to hang within GOP reach, but the party fell short in other races. And Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke held the line, winning the four counties by margins mostly close to Biden’s.
On Tuesday night, however, the red wave—or at least a Trump wave—finally breached the Democratic dam in deep South Texas. Across the board, the top-ballot results were a bloodbath for Democrats, who once counted on the region, and Texas Latinos more broadly, to not just be blue but to turn bluer in reaction to the racist nativism of Trump and co.
In a historically drastic political shift, Trump won all the Valley counties, each of which had gone for O’Rourke by low-to-mid double digits two years prior (in a generally bad year for Texas Dems) and for Clinton by between 33 and 60 points in 2016.
