It’s not just South Texas. Republicans are making gains with Latino voters in big cities, too.

The Texas Tribune

For years, Carmen Cavazos’ neighborhood in southeast Houston has voted reliably for Democrats up and down the ballot. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 68% of the vote in Cavazos’ voting precinct, a mostly residential enclave of about 3,000 people near Hobby Airport.

But something is changing in the precinct, where about nine out of 10 residents are Hispanic. President Joe Biden carried it by 20 points in his 2020 race against Donald Trump — a solid showing for Democrats, but half of Clinton’s 40-point advantage from just four years earlier against the same Republican.

Cavazos, a 44-year-old flight attendant and Republican precinct chair, said she expects the trend to continue in November. She has been trying to accelerate the political shift, helping organize regular meetings of the Saturday Menudo Club, a group that meets monthly at local Mexican restaurants to hear from conservative candidates and other speakers.

“The messaging and voter engagement in our community is critically important,” Cavazos said. “When presented with data, facts, and statistics, the false narrative of identity politics and ideology propaganda encouraged by Democrats crumbles.”

Republicans have logged historic gains in South Texas the last couple of elections, making political battlegrounds out of border communities that voted solidly Democratic for years. That sea change has largely overshadowed the more subtle rightward shift of Latino voters in cities and suburbs away from the border.

The threat of eroding Latino support in urban areas could spell even bigger trouble for Democrats’ abiding hopes of turning Texas blue, because far more Latino voters live in these areas than in South Texas. While Democrats may not lose precincts like Cavazos’ anytime soon, they will continue to be locked out of statewide elections if Republicans are able to continue peeling off nearly 40% of the vote there.

Latino voters have long been a steady Democratic voting bloc in Texas. In 2016, exit polls measured Clinton winning Latino voters by a 27-point margin statewide — virtually unchanged from Barack Obama’s 28-point edge in 2008.

But in 2020, Biden won the statewide Latino vote by only 17 points, as about four in 10 Latinos pulled the lever for Trump. Across Texas, including in Houston, San Antonio and other big cities, the Democratic margin fell an average of 17 percentage points from 2016 in precincts that were at least 80% Latino, according to The New York Times.

And heading into November, polls in Texas and elsewhere have shown Democrats atop the ticket still underperforming with Latino voters, with Biden even trailing Trump among Latinos in Texas before he dropped out of the race.

“Latinos are still a growing Democratic majority,” said Houston Democratic strategist Jaime Mercado. “Latinos are voting Democratic holistically, across the county and across the state. But we should be very aware of these precincts where we’re starting to see something go in the other direction. That should concern us, and we should engage in it.”

Republicans bullish

Texas Republicans are bullish about continuing their momentum with Latino voters this fall, betting a message focused on inflation and the economy, immigration, and crime — issues they are talking about with voters across the board — will resonate with Latinos.

In his reelection bid, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, is pouring $4.4 million into an ad campaign targeting Latino voters, a majority of which is going toward Spanish-language advertising. Cruz’s first spot aimed at Latinos — titled “El Valiente Senador,” or “The Brave Senator” in English — portrays him as a fighter battling high taxes and working to keep Texas “free and safe.”

“We see a massive opportunity to win a bigger share of the Hispanic vote,” said Cruz campaign spokesperson Macarena Martinez. “It has long been said that Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.”

This election is the first since the U.S. Census Bureau reported Hispanic Texans now outnumber the state’s non-Hispanic white residents. Hispanics make up nearly one-third of Texas’ eligible voting population, more than all but two other states, according to the Pew Research Center. A quarter of Latinos in Texas will be voting in their first presidential election this fall, according to the nonprofit UnidosUS.

“That means that there’s no traditional legacy of them wanting to vote Democrat or Republican,” said Jorge Martinez, the Texas strategic director for the LIBRE Initiative, a conservative Latino voter outreach group. “They are going to be voters that any side can reach out to to earn that vote.”

Robert Cardenas, outreach director for the Harris County Republican Party, said he has found a receptive audience among Hispanic voters at party-sponsored town hall events focused on crime and in settings like a recent gun show in Pasadena, where the party operated a booth where attendees could register to vote.

Most of all, Cardenas said, concerns about the inflated cost of basic goods are driving Latinos, and working-class voters of all races and ethnicities, toward the Republican Party. The issue has dogged Biden for much of his term, though Democrats are optimistic that the problem has finally begun to ease.

“Whether that’s going out, or being able to pay their bills, that is what is affecting them,” Cardenas said. “It’s the economy, and that’s why I think we’re seeing a big shift.”

In a statewide poll by Univision earlier this year, about two-thirds of undecided Latino voters put inflation, the cost of living and jobs among their top issues, more than all other topics.

Mercado said he worries that overall Democratic messaging has suffered in recent years from the influence of party elites who have spent too much time online and not enough time door-knocking. They have helped craft a message overly focused on identity politics and less on talking about jobs and opportunity, he said.

“Some of the elements of, frankly, the MAGA message, some of it has endeared itself to blue-collar, hard-working, non-college educated people,” Mercado said. “And guess who fits those demographics really well? Latino populations.”

For all the GOP gains among Latinos in urban areas, though, some Republicans think their party can do better. In urban counties across Texas, most predominantly Latino areas still lean solidly Democratic. And many of the voting precincts in these areas lack GOP precinct chairs — an issue that rankles Orlando Sanchez, founder of ​​Texas Latino Conservatives.

Sanchez, whose group works to get Latinos more involved in politics, said that if he had to grade Texas Republicans’ recent Latino outreach efforts in urban counties, “I’d say it went from a D to a C-minus.”

“In major urban areas, we’re doing a very poor job of delivering a conservative message,” said Sanchez, a former Houston City Council member and mayoral candidate. “(Republicans) are good at criticizing communities that want to defund the police … but they’re not very good at delivering a positive message of economic opportunity to Hispanics.”

Sanchez believes Republicans should more aggressively pitch their free-market economic vision to working-class Latinos, and he said they have missed the boat on criticizing specific policies pushed by the Biden administration such as debt relief for student loans.

“Republicans are missing the opportunity to explain to Hispanics that their hard-earned paycheck is now going to pay the debt for some kid in Massachusetts who went and got a liberal arts degree at Boston University,” Sanchez said. “Explain that to the Hispanic family, and I’ll tell you, they’re not going to vote for the Democrats anymore.”

The Univision poll found that 60% of Hispanic voters in Texas “support the Biden Administration’s efforts to forgive student loans,” compared to 21% who voiced opposition.

“The Latino vote”

In 2020, some of the most astonishing political shifts anywhere in the country came along the border in Starr County, which Trump lost by 5 points after losing it by 60 points four years earlier. Neighboring Zapata County flipped red after going to Clinton by 33 points in 2016.

But while a flood of national media attention captured the changing voter sentiments there, the two predominantly Latino counties tallied only about 21,000 combined votes in 2020; in Harris County, by contrast, more than 337,000 Spanish-surname voters turned out, according to estimates from Hector de Léon, a Harris County elections official who tracks Houston-area voting patterns.

Public polling has revealed key differences between the values and attitudes of Latino voters in urban counties compared to those in South Texas — a reminder of the wide array of backgrounds, nationalities, and religious and cultural beliefs within what is often lumped together as “the Latino vote.”

An April statewide poll by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation found that Hispanic voters in major urban areas were much less likely to support GOP Gov. Greg Abbott ’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border than those in the suburbs and South Texas. The poll measured a similar regional split over the multibillion-dollar cost of Abbott’s border crackdown: 70% of Hispanic voters in border counties and South Texas supported the use of billions in state tax dollars for border security, compared to 48% in large urban counties.

Latinos in major cities are also more likely to support abortion rights than those in South Texas, the poll found. The regional disparities suggest that each party’s generic messaging on those issues will be received much differently by Latino voters depending on where they live, said Mark Jones, the Hispanic Policy Foundation’s chief information and analytics officer.

“A lot of the national Democratic policies that criticize Gov. Abbott, and sort of criticize the Republican approach to the border, are going to go over very poorly in South Texas and the (Rio Grande Valley) and, most importantly, in the two congressional races that are actually in play this cycle,” said Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, referring to the battleground races for Texas’ 15th and 34th Congressional Districts.

But there are also parallels between the regions.

Daniel Vasquez, a 35-year-old San Juan resident, regularly makes the three-hour commute to his job as a safety coordinator at a Port Lavaca refinery. He said he started paying attention to politics during Obama’s 2008 campaign and voted for him twice, along with Clinton in 2016. But he found himself aligning more with the Republican Party midway through Trump’s term, driven by a humming economy and the GOP’s petrochemical-friendly policies.

Energy politics may also be driving some of the Latino shift around Houston. Dozens of predominantly Latino precincts in east Harris County, where many residents work in petrochemical jobs around the Ship Channel, drifted to the right between 2016 and 2020.

Vasquez’s views were only solidified, he said, by some of the Biden administration’s policies aimed at combating climate change, such as an attempted pause on natural gas export permits. Vasquez said he believes environmental concerns are important, but that Biden should be striking a better balance.

“The economy, to me, it was thriving,” Vasquez said. “My paycheck had more purchasing power. And I mean, there was work all across the state. The oil and gas sector was booming.”

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This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.