Immigrants built this country.
Republicans looked at the 2024 election returns from South Texas and thought they had discovered something permanent: Latino voters were becoming Republicans. Trump had made enormous gains along the border, Republicans were winning districts Democrats once considered safe, and Austin promptly drew a congressional map that assumed those gains would last. The problem with that theory is that South Texas voters have never behaved quite as neatly as national political consultants would like.
Most people in the Rio Grande Valley are not waking up every morning wondering whether they should be Republicans or Democrats. Some are deeply conservative Catholics for whom abortion matters enormously. There are evangelical families for whom religion plays a major role in politics. Others are committed Democrats. But there is also a very large group whose politics are much less complicated: Can I work? Can I feed my family? Can I afford my house, my medicine, my groceries and my electricity? Are my children going to have a better life than I did?
The polling increasingly looks like that kind of electorate. A March survey of registered Hispanic voters in Texas found 75% naming inflation and the cost of living as their most important issue, while 80% said politicians take Hispanic voters for granted. A May UnidosUS survey found two-thirds of Texas Latino voters disapproved of Trump’s performance, and nearly half said cost of living and inflation were among the issues shaping their opinion of him. The same survey found economic concerns—food, wages, housing and health care—dominating their priorities. (Axios)
That is why I have never been convinced by declarations that South Texas had suddenly become permanently Republican. A voter who supported Trump because eggs, gasoline and rent were expensive under Biden does not sign a lifetime contract with the Republican Party. If those same things remain expensive two years later, he can change his mind again. A national Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week found voters now preferring Democrats over Republicans on the cost of living by 36% to 28%, an eight-point advantage and the Democrats’ strongest showing on that issue since 2025. (Reuters)
The new South Texas congressional polling should therefore frighten Republicans more than the individual numbers suggest. Texas Southern University found Bobby Pulido leading Monica De La Cruz 50% to 45% in the 15th District, Henry Cuellar leading Tano Tijerina 45% to 34% in the 28th, and Vicente Gonzalez leading Eric Flores 45% to 42% in the 34th. These are districts Republicans expected to be much friendlier after redistricting, yet Democrats currently lead in all three. One poll does not decide an election, but House Speaker Mike Johnson did not travel to South Texas this past week because Republicans believe everything is going beautifully. (Texas Southern News)
Immigration may be the biggest Republican miscalculation. There is nothing contradictory about a South Texas voter wanting a secure border while also believing that a man who has worked beside him for twenty years should not suddenly disappear. National politicians tend to reduce immigration to “for” or “against.” Border communities cannot do that because immigration is not television there. It is relatives, employees, customers, construction crews, restaurants, ranches, hospitals, and people encountered every day.
The consequences are beginning to show up in ordinary life. The Texas Tribune found undocumented residents delaying medical treatment because they fear immigration enforcement. At South Texas Health System in Edinburg, reported visits by undocumented patients fell 52% over the period examined; Doctors Hospital of Laredo reported a decline of nearly 48%. Whatever one’s position on immigration policy, people becoming afraid to enter a hospital is not an abstract Washington argument anymore. (The Texas Tribune)
There is an economic side to the border crackdown that is discussed even less. Mexican shoppers have historically been enormously important to Texas border cities. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimates that about 230,000 people cross the Texas-Mexico border on an average day in passenger vehicles or on foot, and Mexican customers once accounted for extraordinarily large shares of retail activity in some Texas border communities. That share has declined over time as Mexico developed better shopping alternatives, but the Dallas Fed also identifies longer bridge waits, tighter security, and immigration enforcement as additional deterrents to people crossing north to shop. (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)
People in Houston or Washington may think a Mexican family deciding not to cross the bridge for Saturday shopping is insignificant. Ask the owner of a store, restaurant or small business in McAllen, Brownsville or Laredo. Enough families make that decision and somebody’s cash register notices.
Republicans also have a problem with health care and food. Monica De La Cruz is now being attacked over her vote for legislation that reduced SNAP spending and imposed additional requirements on recipients. Democrats are already putting money into South Texas advertising portraying that vote as protecting benefits for wealthy Americans while making food assistance harder for working families. Whether the attack succeeds remains to be seen, but Republicans have handed Democrats an argument that is almost perfectly designed for a working-class district: Who got helped, and who got the bill? (Axios)
My own family helps explain why I think political analysts misunderstand this part of Texas. My Tía Juanita‘s formal education ended after the third grade because her family needed the money. She did not spend her life accepting that limit; she eventually earned her GED and received additional professional training. Her husband, Reynaldo de la Cruz, left school in the eleventh grade, worked for Military Water Supply, played music on weekends, operated a nursery from home, helped start a backhoe business, and became involved with César Chávez and the United Farm Workers. During the Starr County melon strike of 1966–67, when workers were demanding $1.25 an hour and union recognition, Reynaldo was arrested.
That family was religious. It was also working-class. Those things were not opposites, and neither automatically dictated a political party. What mattered every morning was getting up, earning money, raising children, and somehow moving the next generation a little farther down the road.
That is not unique to my family. It is one of the oldest stories in South Texas, and for that matter one of the oldest stories in America. The people who crossed mountains, deserts, and oceans to build this country were not waiting for somebody to guarantee them an easy life. They were go-getters. Work, risk, family and the possibility that your children might do better than you did were part of the bargain.
South Texas still understands that bargain remarkably well. A man may oppose abortion and still be furious about his grocery bill. A woman may favor strong border enforcement and still object when immigration agents frighten her neighbors. A Catholic may pray to Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe without consulting either party’s platform. An evangelical may vote Republican because of faith and then decide that rent, wages, or health insurance matter more in the next election. Human beings have always been considerably more complicated than political demographics.
That is why Republicans may have made a fundamental mistake when they redrew South Texas around Trump’s 2024 performance. They treated a vote as an identity. They assumed that because a working-class Latino voted Republican once, Republicans now owned him.
They don’t.
When things are going reasonably well, a South Texas voter may vote Republican, vote Democratic, or decide that Saturday is better spent with the family and a barbecue pit than standing in a voting line. But raise his grocery bill, frighten his family, threaten his health care, hurt the business where he works, and then tell him everything is wonderful, and politics suddenly becomes personal.
Republicans thought they had discovered the Republican Latino.
What they may have discovered was simply a voter who was unhappy in 2024.
Now they have to hope he isn’t even unhappier in 2026.