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Eva Arechiga, a McAllen retiree, started small on the Fourth of July weekend with a red-white-and-blue car rally for the incumbent President Donald Trump. Then the cruising caravan of Trump supporters, known as the RGV Trump Train, mushroomed through the Rio Grande Valley with trucks, Corvettes and big rigs.
The simple goal: Pump up Trump votes with a grassroots approach.
“I remember the Saturday we were praying for 45 cars for president 45 and it went to 60,” Arechiga said. “Once we got to 1,500 cars, we stopped counting.”
Momentum built from there.
With record turnout, former Vice President Joe Biden overwhelmingly won the Latino vote in Texas’ urban areas, polls show, but he underperformed in heavily Latino counties along the border.
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While Biden carried the vote in the Rio Grande Valley, he did so with a much tighter margin than Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. That erosion — in an area considered a Democratic stronghold — is a warning sign to the party as it tries to flip the state.
It also serves as a stark reminder that the Latino vote is diverse, especially in a state the size of Texas. And that Democrats cannot take it for granted.
“When we say there are no shortcuts, we mean it,” said Lorella Praeli, the head of D.C.-based Community Change Action, in a post-election assessment of voter turnout around the nation. “If you want Latino voters to turn out, you have to do the work.”
Message resonates
On election night, Latino voters proved decisive for both candidates around the country. In Florida, conservative Cuban-Americans worried about the specter of socialism propelled Trump to a narrow victory. In Arizona, Hispanics furious about anti-immigrant measures helped flip the once-red state to blue.
Latinos, far from being a monolithic group, mirror political divisions across the country with divergent views based on everything from the handling of COVID-19, guns, income, education, gender, faith to even President Trump’s border wall.
In South Texas, anti-abortion stances strike a chord with some Catholics and the right to bear arms plays well with many Latinos eager for a sense of security.
Several voters who chose Trump cited his economic message and their fears that a Biden administration could threaten jobs in the oil and gas industry.
On Election Day, Daniel Sanchez, 43, voted in El Paso by traveling 285 miles from the Permian Basin where he works in the oil fields. Born across the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Sanchez is a first-time voter who cast his ballot for Trump, even though the president has referred to Mexicans as rapists and drug traffickers.
He concedes his decision was difficult, but ultimately he decided “President Trump is the best choice for this country and for my future, my job.”
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Bob Peña of the Republican Alliance in El Paso put it more bluntly.
“As we say here, and in other Mexican American communities, he may be a cabrón, but he’s our cabrón (roughly, he’s a jerk, but he’s our jerk),” Peña said. “He may not look or sound presidential, but his economic policies make the difference.”
While Biden handily won El Paso County with over 66% of the vote, Trump improved his performance there by roughly six percentage points over 2016.
The president’s fear-inspiring rhetoric about unauthorized immigrants, as well as his hard-line policies about border security, may have helped crack Hispanic solidarity, said Richard Pineda, political analyst at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Stoking a fear of new immigrants “actually played strongly to Mexican Americans,” Pineda said.
“This wasn’t just some kind of xenophobic impulse …the rhetoric has worked very well for Mexican American voters especially in Texas,” Pineda said.
Trump effectively gave such voters permission to look at new arrivals from Mexico and Central America and conclude, “We don’t like those people, and we don’t want those people here,” he said. “Trump has been able to cultivate a sense of us versus them — with a portion of Mexican Americans, obviously not all.”
In a nation of immigrants, bashing the latest arrivals has played out for past generations among descendants of Germany, Ireland, Italy and other countries. It’s the story of America, analysts, including Pineda, have said.
Trump’s law and order message also resonated in El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley, where thousands of residents are employed in the federal sector, especially jobs in homeland security, including Border Patrol agents.
Former state Rep. Domingo Garcia, a Dallas Democrat who serves as national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the country’s first groups to promote Hispanic empowerment, said Republicans this year “did a very good job” of appealing to more conservative Latino voters.
Nationally, some progressive Democrats called for eliminating the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, he noted.
“That’s their paycheck,” Garcia said. “When you talk about abolishing ICE, that hits home.”
Antonio Arellano, the interim executive director of the progressive Latino group Jolt Action, agreed that different geographic groups of Texas Hispanics have different priorities.
“There is a divide between an RGV Latino voter and a Dallas County or Harris County Latino voter,” Arellano said. “We need to recognize that Texas is the size of three Georgias — it’s a massive state. Latinos in the North, in the East, in the West and in the South of Texas all have different motivators that are driving them out to vote.”
Matt Barreto, a Biden pollster, notes that in all five of Texas’ biggest cities, including Dallas, the Democrat matched or exceeded the share of Latino votes Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
“That is an important counterpoint to the Rio Grande Valley,” he said.
‘Scared to death’
Still, even Democrats conceded — with regret — that Trump made inroads among Latino males in South Texas and along the border.
U.S. Rep. Vicente González, D-McAllen, said that without a stronger counter message from Democrats, too many Hispanic men began “to believe in Trump’s lies,” whether on the economy or the coronavirus pandemic. His brusque manner taps into the machismo of those of Mexican ancestry, he said.
“Hispanic men are specifically attracted to the hoopla, the bravado, machismo, Donald Trump lucha libre culture, if you will,” González said, referring to stylized wrestling matches popular among Latinos.
For others, that’s a major turnoff.
“A president should unite his people not divide us. I am shocked that other fellow Latinos would want such a racist person,” said Mitsy Maris-Garza, a Harlingen accountant.
“I am scared to death that if Trump wins there will be nothing stopping him from being more of a dictator than a leader,” said Maris-Garza, a Central-American immigrant married to a Mexican-American who voted for Biden.
Jacob Monty, a longtime Republican born in El Paso who voted for Biden, pivoted because of Trump’s disparaging remarks about Latinos.
The last straw came after the Aug. 3, 2019 shooting at a Walmart that killed 23 people and injured 22. The alleged gunman, Patrick Crusius from Allen, posted a diatribe online minutes before the shooting, saying he was doing his part to prevent the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using language familiar with that of Trump.
“I’m a real Republican, but I had enough of Trump’s disrespect of my community,” he said. “For me, seeing how Trump rhetoric motivated the white nationalist terrorist in El Paso was the absolute last straw for me.”
Getting out the vote
Just as national Republicans, after Barack Obama won a second term as president in 2012, conducted an “autopsy” report on how they could broaden the GOP’s appeal to minorities, women and the LGBTQ community, Texas Democrats may study what went wrong with Hispanic voters in 2020.
Colin Strother, a Democratic consultant who’s worked many races in South Texas, noted that three of his party’s U.S. House incumbents in South Texas — González, Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Filemon Vela of Brownsville — won by smaller than usual margins. That’s even though each faced poorly funded GOP challengers, Strother stressed.
“We weren’t far from utter disaster,” he added. “We could’ve lost some seats.”
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, and others noted that in less populous, Western states that in recent cycles have moved from solidly Republican to purple, such as Arizona, Democratic-leaning groups spent many years building get-out-the-vote efforts among state residents who are Hispanic.
That work in Texas has only recently begun in earnest, Escobar said.
“You can’t just parachute in, and expect you know people to feel connected to the party,” Escobar said. “It takes long term sustained effort.”
This year, Democrats also weren’t helped by the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted many of their campaigns to forgo traditional door-knocking and rallies in favor of virtual events.
Building personal connections with voters in the Rio Grande Valley is critical, local politicians from both parties said.
“In our area, it’s about relationships that you build,” said Ruben Villareal, a Republican and the former mayor of Rio Grande City in Starr County. “You start building them before you even need them.”
Look no further than Hillary Clinton, who has deep ties to South Texas where she cut her teeth as a political organizer. When the Democrat ran for president in 2016, she won a blowout in Starr County with nearly 80% of the vote. This year, Biden eked out a win with 52%.
His running mate, Kamala Harris, campaigned in the Rio Grande Valley, but her visit came the Friday before Election Day. By then, more than 75% of the ballots in the four-county area had already been cast in early voting, according to state data.
“She did a great job, but it was a dollar short and an hour late,” said state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen.
While Trump didn’t pay the region a personal visit, people saw his name on federal stimulus checks they received this spring amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“To people in a community that struggle day in and day out and they get a check with the president’s name on it, it helps build his identity,” Villareal said. “When it’s time to make a choice are you going to vote for a guy you never heard of before or a guy who signed a check that helped buy groceries for that week?”
This year, Trump and the GOP also had a bigger on the ground presence. With Trump trains, and newly formed Facebook groups for Trump supporters, and the encrypted messenger services of WhatsApp and Telegram, Arechiga, the McAllen voter, said she was able to grow support in the community.
The caravans of Trump supporters, which have organized across Texas, have drawn backlash in some places because of the noise and taunting of others who don’t agree with them. The FBI is even investigating an incident where Trump supporters driving trucks swarmed a Biden campaign bus on I-35 south of Austin.
With Biden in the lead in the electoral vote count, Trump is making unsubstantiated claims that some of the tally is “illegal votes.” It is clear that the change of power in the U.S. may be chaotic — a prediction made weeks ago in the political fracas of the Rio Grande Valley by an influential Catholic bishop.
“I have a bad feeling in my stomach about the coming election campaign,”
Bishop Daniel Flores wrote in a tweet chain. “Like the dread you feel when a Category 5 hurricane is in the Gulf, promising remorseless wind, relentless waves, and flying debris… Be prepared.”