A troubling sign for one party and an extremely promising sign for another, Tuesday’s election in Texas revealed a preview of what the future elections may look like.
The GOP managed to flip a state House district from blue to red. That district being 75% Hispanic.
John Lujan won the seat in Texas’ 118th House of Representatives district.
The Texas Tribune reported, “The victory by Lujan gives Republicans an early win in their drive to make new inroads in South Texas after President Joe Biden underperformed there last year. With all vote centers reporting Tuesday night, Lujan was leading Democrat Frank Ramirez 51.2% to 48.8%, according to unofficial results. Lujan briefly held the seat in 2016, while Ramirez is a former staffer for the San Antonio City Council and at the Texas Legislature.”
The seat was last represented by Democratic representative Leo Pacheco, who resigned effective August 19, 2021, to teach public administration at San Antonio College.
An American Community Survey, with an analysis by Texas Legislative Council, Research Division, revealed that the 18th district was 73.4% Hispanic.
Democrats have been attempting for quite some time now to turn the state of Texas Blue, which would essentially guarantee them any presidential election and they have been partially succeeding in that up until now.
“The Hispanic vote they seemingly take for granted is far more conservative than they are willing to admit,” according to the Texas Monthly.
The Texas Monthly noted, “Last year, McAllen experienced the biggest shift in party vote share, toward Donald Trump, of any large city in the country save for Laredo, 150 miles to the northwest. In both border towns, Trump improved on his 2016 results by more than 23 points. … no area fled further into the GOP camp than South Texas, where 18 percent of the state’s Hispanic population lives.”
“In Starr County, just upriver from McAllen, Republicans increased their turnout by almost 300 percent between 2016 and 2020,” the Texas Monthly added. “While Hillary Clinton won there by sixty points, Joe Biden barely scraped out a five-point victory. In Webb County, home of Laredo, Trump cut his 2016 margin of defeat by more than half. And in Zapata County, which didn’t even have a local Republican party, Trump became the first GOP presidential candidate to win since Warren G. Harding was on the ballot a century ago.”
“Of the 4 million new residents that Texas gained in the last decade, nearly 2 million were Latino, while only 5 percent were White,” The Washington Post reported in August.
But this doesn’t appear to be a one-off in gained votes for the Republican party. With all eyes on Democrat Joe Biden’s early failures as president, the entire nation appears to have grown more conservative in just 10 months since the 2020 presidential election took place.
Republicans managed to flip Virginia from blue to red, reversing a trend which had shown Democrats gaining ground in the state for more than a decade.
In New Jersey, the governor’s race remains too close to call as of Wednesday morning in what many projected to be a Democrat blowout, with Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli holding a narrow lead over incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
If this trend continues throughout the country, the Democrats could be in for an even more painful midterm election than anyone could have imagined.
Author: Bill Pionst
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