McALLEN, Texas — It’s the evening of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and a couple of hundred Republicans have gathered on the large patio of the University Draft House for a rally featuring a trio of speakers: Monica De La Cruz, the G.O.P. nominee here in the 15th Congressional District; Representative Mayra Flores, from the 34th District next door; and Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and a former ambassador to the United Nations.
The crowd — awash in boots and red-white-and-blue accessories — is in high spirits, fueled by sliders, guac and chips and margaritas. A mariachi band waits in the wings for the grand finale. Onstage, Ms. Flores, whose surprise victory in a special election in June made her the first Republican to represent the Rio Grande Valley in the U.S. House since 1871, gives a shout-out to the local candidates working the crowd. “Elections at the local level matter just as much,” she tells those assembled. “I need you to vote Republican from top to bottom. Every election matters,” she stresses. “Their election matters just as much as mine.”
She is not wrong. And Democrats would be wise to start freaking out a little more about the Republican Party’s growing focus on local races in its quest to transform the political landscape of South Texas.
For decades, Texas has been a red state. But not uniformly red. Its urban hubs are trending blue. More notably, many of the counties in South Texas and along the border — an economically distressed, largely Hispanic region — have been dominated by the Democratic Party for as long as anyone can remember. This is especially vivid at the local level, where few Republicans even bother running for office. Voting blue in these parts isn’t so much a political decision as a way of life.
Texas Republicans are fired up to change that. The party was thrilled when Donald Trump made a strong showing across South Texas in 2020. This prompted hand-wringing among Democrats about the appeal of Trumpism in this population. It also sent Republicans scrambling to try to bring these new Trump voters, and more like them, into the broader G.O.P. fold. It’s not all on the up-and-up; some of their efforts to grapple with the ongoing demographic shift in their state are sketchier than others: gerrymandering, voter suppression tactics and the peddling of election-fraud nonsense.
Ms. Flores’s win in Congress grabbed attention, but Republicans are also hard at work much farther down the political ladder, developing party infrastructure and backing candidates in places where that would have once been unthinkable. Rather than dismissing local races as an afterthought, they treat them as a crucial piece of the effort to turn the region red. Down-ballot candidates are often new to politics but are familiar faces — voters’ friends, neighbors and family members — who Republicans hope will help boost engagement and potentially change the way people view the party.
To make this happen, Republicans are working to exploit a couple of key weaknesses in the opposition. One is Democrats’ complacency about the electorate in South Texas, born of the assumption that it has always been and will always be blue — a dangerous corollary of the equally dangerous conventional wisdom that Hispanic voters will always vote blue.
The other is the enduring complaint that Democrats don’t pay enough attention to state and local elections — that Republicans tend to have a better ground game. This complaint is not specific to Texas, but it fits neatly with the G.O.P.’s message that Democrats have for too long taken the border communities for granted.
Many Democrats, in the region and beyond, fear their party is not taking the growing Republican threat seriously enough. They should.
When Andrew Infante decided to run for justice of the peace in Cameron County as a Republican, he was unsure where to turn for help. Mr. Infante, a 29-year-old former gym owner, grew up in the area — as a Democrat, of course — but says he was later drawn to the G.O.P.’s values of “self-reliance, hard work, God, family and a love for our country.” Plus, after returning home from college (he studied kinesiology at Texas A&M) he felt the long-entrenched (Democratic) leadership needed shaking up. “It was the same people or same group of people in the same offices,” he says.
The first couple of Republican groups Mr. Infante reached out to blew him off. They were focused on “the bigger races,” he recalls. But then he got introduced to Wayne Hamilton, the head of Project Red TX.
Organized in the run-up to the 2018 midterms, Project Red TX focuses on getting Republicans elected at the lowest rungs of the political ladder — justices of the peace, county judges, constables and so on. A veteran party operative, Mr. Hamilton was drafted for duty by Gov. Greg Abbott (he was Mr. Abbott’s campaign manager in 2014) and promptly set his sights on the border. Priority 1, he recalls, was to “go forth and try to help out folks from El Paso down to Brownsville,” recruiting and backing candidates in places where the G.O.P. had little or no presence.
Whatever his Republican contenders need — from help getting on the ballot to yard signs or even legal assistance — Mr. Hamilton tries to lend a hand. When Mr. Infante heads out to knock on voters’ doors (which he does “most days except Sundays”), he goes supplied with glossy brochures and other campaign goodies compliments of Project Red TX. “Wayne likes to say that we are building a farm team,” he says.
This is no small task. When Project Red TX started looking around for candidates to help in South Texas, recalls Mr. Hamilton, “the first thing I found out was we didn’t have any.” The importance of local races had been paid the usual “lip service,” he says, but there wasn’t a real organizational effort in place.
So he brought in one of his buddies — a party operative from the East Coast, no less — to start identifying potential candidates. In 2018, Project Red TX wound up with 54 Republican general election contenders in 28 counties across the targeted region, 17 of whom won. It was modest progress, but enough to convince Mr. Hamilton and others that the project should be expanded.
This cycle, Mr. Hamilton’s group is backing 114 general election candidates — some running unopposed — in 24 counties across South Texas and the border region. In areas so deeply and historically blue, this is a notable achievement.
Project Red TX has high-level support for its mission. The governor has made clear that local races should be a priority for the state party. He grasps the “symbiotic relationship” between candidates up and down the ballot, says David Carney, Mr. Abbott’s chief political strategist. The speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, “talks to his donors” and “beats his members up” to support the cause, jokes Mr. Hamilton. Prominent Republican players frequently appear at fund-raisers and other events with South Texas candidates. “We help them get a couple or 300 people in the room,” says Mr. Carney.
The Republicans’ ground game is “astronomical,” especially in the border communities, says Sylvia Gonzalez-Gorman, a political scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “They understand that if they can turn some of these seats Republican at the local level, that kind of trickles up.”
This support system can make the difference in a campaign’s survival, especially for first-time candidates running in deep-blue areas where there is little local G.O.P. infrastructure. Maria Yvette Hernandez is the Republican nominee for county judge in Starr County. Aside from a few thousand dollars, most of her support has come from nonlocal sources, including in-kind contributions from Project Red TX. This proved crucial when her opponent filed a court claim that she didn’t meet residency requirements. Legal fees quickly drained her campaign coffers, she says. Without the group, which helped find and fund her legal counsel, her candidacy would have collapsed.
Instead, with just a couple of weeks until early voting begins, Ms. Hernandez has campaign signs up all over the county and a handful of paid outreach workers who go block walking for her every day. Her candidacy remains a long shot, but she has gotten enough traction to unsettle the local Democratic Party — whose chair is the daughter of the judge Ms. Hernandez is challenging.
Until the past couple of years, Starr County had “never had a two-party system — not in my lifetime,” says the Democratic chair, Jessica Vera-Rios. (This dynamic perhaps helps explain why accusations might resonate that Democrats take the voters here for granted.)
The Republican push has sparked anxiety among many border-county Democrats that the state party isn’t taking the threat seriously enough — or investing enough to counter it. Ms. Vera-Rios says that multiple county chairs have told her they have inadequate funding to deal with the new dynamic. This is a common refrain.
Money isn’t the only problem. “We have not seen state candidates come down very much for a number of years,” says Ms. Vera-Rios. “We feel that’s hurt us. We haven’t had those candidates visible in the area to where people feel sense of pride.” (An exception to this complaint is Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic nominee for governor, who earns rave reviews from South Texas Democrats for his engagement with their communities.)
There is further concern that local Democratic candidates have not yet grasped their newly precarious situation. “We have never had Republicans challenging our Democrats during the general. We have eight of them now,” says Juanita Martinez, the head of the Maverick County Democratic Party. “We’re not used to that, and the hardest time we’re having is convincing these candidates that they better get off their asses and work.”
The chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, Gilberto Hinojosa, acknowledges that Republicans are making a “huge effort” at all levels. “We’re seeing Republicans field candidates in almost every single office in South Texas,” he says, lamenting that there is no way to compete with the G.O.P.’s dark-money machine. But while worried about the congressional contests, he professes no anxiety about the lower-level ones: “I don’t see them having an impact on the local candidates.”
Democrats have already lost some of their voters here, and “they’re not going to be able to get them back,” says Ms. Gonzalez-Gorman. Among other problems, “there is no face to the party,” she warns, noting that Democrats risk having more and more voters decide — if not in this election, then down the road — “I’ll go to the other party that’s talking to me.”
To be clear: At this point, Republican candidates remain the underdogs in these areas. Many, even most, are expected to lose in November. “We’re not going to win all these races. They know that,” says Mr. Carney. Even so, just having Republican candidates in the fight serves their party. “We’re forcing Democrats to spend more time there and spend money they don’t want to spend,” he says.
More significant, Republicans are playing the long game. “We need these candidates to keep running, to stay engaged in the community and run next time,” says Mr. Carney, stressing the importance of building the infrastructure so future candidates aren’t “starting from scratch.”
And every local Republican who gets elected helps create a different dynamic among Hispanic voters here, chipping away at the longstanding taboo against voting for the G.O.P.
“This is a team sport,” says Mr. Carney, “and anybody who thinks it’s not is mistaken.”
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October 21, 2022 at 04:00PM
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